Marilyn Pappano - Killer Smile

He clenched his jaw, though he managed to keep his hands flat and loose at his sides. He hated being outmanipulated, outwitted or outgunned. It wasn’t anything his fathers had drummed into him, though they both had competitive streaks a mile wide. It was just something he expected of himself. And he especially hated being undone by Natasha. Mila, Morwenna, Taryn—they were okay. Cheryl and Lois, the first-ever and still-serving female officer in Cedar Creek—it was a given they could undo him without even trying.

But Natasha? The idea made his stomach turn sour.

He glanced at Mila, whose attention was still on the kids, but a faint smile touched her face. She was his boss Sam’s wife, survivor of several assaults and murder attempts a year ago. In the beginning, he hadn’t cared a thing about her other than her ties to the case, but since then, they’d become...distant friends, maybe, or close acquaintances. He liked her, respected her, and when she gave him a tiny nod, he struggled not to grouse.

If listening to Natasha was the only way to get rid of her, he would listen.

“Fine.” He directed the response to Mila—he didn’t want to see the triumph on Natasha’s face—then pivoted and returned to the lane to change into his boots and get his slicker.

“Jeez, he even gets hit on twelve lanes away by the prettiest woman in the place,” Cullen Simpson muttered, then shot a look at Sam. “No offense, Chief.”

“None taken,” Sam said before pointing his beer at Simpson. “If I thought you were spending your time thinking about how pretty my wife is, I’d have to pound you into the ground.” Before Simpson could stumble over a denial that could only get him in hot water, Sam turned to Daniel. “I’m guessing you won’t be back.”

“Probably not.”

“You’re awful damn close to a perfect game.”

“I’ve had plenty of perfect games.”

Ben clapped him on the shoulder, practically knocking him off balance. “You gotta love the boy’s modesty, don’t you?”

“Just stating a fact. I’ll see you in the morning.” As he stalked back toward the play area, Daniel pulled on his slicker, making sure to cover his pistol and badge, then waited in the broad corridor for Natasha to dump her corn dog and beer in the trash.

She walked toward him with the long, fluid strides that had always seemed more than just a form of locomotion to him. Her jeans clung snugly to her thighs, and her shirt did the same with her upper body. She had gained a few pounds since he’d last seen her. They gave her body a softer, more womanly look.

Not that he cared. He was just appreciating a fine form. Jeffrey had always encouraged him to appreciate beauty.

Archer had taught him that sometimes it could be deadly.

When they reached the vestibule, they both stopped. He supposed it was best to decide their destination before stepping out into the deluge. There were plenty of places open, just none that he wanted to go to with Natasha. Her hotel was out of the question, and so was his house. There was no way he could let her in there.

“There’s a McDonald’s on South Main,” he said shortly. The micro-change in her expression showed that she remembered he wasn’t a McDonald’s fan—all those kids and all their oblivious parents with their cell phones. Better to go someplace other than usual, right?

“I’ll follow you.”

His car was parked in the row nearest the highway. Hers was twenty feet from the door. He jogged to his vehicle, the hood of his slicker down, cold rain running down his neck. By the time he got inside and started the engine, Natasha was waiting near the exit.

There wasn’t any traffic to speak of, nothing to delay the moment they would reach the restaurant. As he crossed the street that would lead to his house, he sent a mournful look that way but continued south.

Daniel waited for her in the parking lot—it was the polite thing to do—and held the door for her. They both ordered black coffees, each paying for their own, and carried them silently to the table farthest from other customers. It was a bench, actually, with stools for chairs. He felt like he was hunkered at the kids’ table, like his knees might bump his chin.

Natasha looked as if she perched on the most elegant chair ever imagined.

She sweetened her coffee, stirred it, then gazed out of the streaky window at a scene so saturated with water that everything overflowed: the street, the gutters, the sky itself. “Is the weather often like this?”

Irritation flared at the pointlessness of her comment. “No. Sometimes it rains really hard.”

Her gaze jerked back to him, her lips turning up in a startled smile before it faded beneath his scowl. “Sometimes I forget you have a sense of humor.”

Her comment gave him the same fleeting startle. Sometimes he forgot, too. He hadn’t laughed at anything lately. There was nothing lighthearted about his job. Usually the grimness of cases rolled off him—he’d learned coping mechanisms when he was a little Harper—but the past few days, they’d seemed a little harder to shake.

Maybe a portent of the shake-up to come.

Man, was he shaken.

“What do you want?” he asked before that admission had time to unsettle him even more.

She opened her mouth, closed it and wrapped her fingers tightly around her coffee. Her nails were polished pale pink with tiny flecks of hot-pink glitter. She’d always been such a girly-girl, no matter what she wore. Even in one of his dress shirts and nothing else, she’d looked like a princess ready for the ball. Now, when he felt like a drained rat, she was beautiful.

After a minute, she eased her grip on the cup and raised her gaze to him. “I’m sorry about the way things went.”

For a moment, he thought that was just a start, that she would go on with some crappy explanation, but when she didn’t, he stared at her. “That’s it? That’s what you came all this way to say?”

“No. I came to tell you...”

He knew how to conduct interviews, how to get a reluctant person to talk, how to sort through everything a talkative person said to get to the important details, how to get his instincts at work on determining truth versus lies versus obfuscation. He knew the best action was to be silent and still; soon enough, she would talk just to fill the void.

He knew all that and ignored it. Instead he stood up, reached into his pocket and slapped a business card down on the table. “There’s my office number and my email address. If you ever decide to actually say what you came to say, you can leave a message. Once that’s taken care of, I assume you’ll be getting the hell out because that’s what you do, isn’t it?”

He hadn’t managed a single step when she spoke. “I think you might be in danger, Daniel.”

Saying the words out loud was hard. Hadn’t she already provided enough upheaval in his life? But she couldn’t have not said them, not if she wanted to live with herself. She felt so bad about what had happened to Kyle, and she’d had no advance warning. Finding out that one of the others had been injured or even killed when she’d made no effort to stop it would have been too much to bear.

The incredulous look he was giving her wasn’t easy to bear, either. It made her face hot, made her want to squirm on the ridiculous stool where she loomed like a giant over a doll’s table. Slowly, he sank back onto his own stool, his hands gripping the table in front of him, his fingers pressing tightly like he was imagining them around her throat. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, then pinched the bridge of his nose. Those were his first outward symptoms of frustration, a habit she’d rarely seen directed her way but was still familiar with. Did he know he’d picked it up from Jeffrey? Except Jeffrey didn’t pinch. He just pressed two knuckles to that spot between his eyes.