Jake didn’t know how he’d overlooked the female who was pushing away from him. She had curly black hair and round brown eyes. Perhaps it was her height, which couldn’t be more than five foot four to his six two. Or maybe it was her build, which was somewhere between skinny and petite.
“Excuse me,” he said, running his fingers down the length of his tie.
She looked a million miles away even as she stared at him. In the bright sunlight her skin was a shade lighter than freshly milled paper, her lips colored a rich burgundy. She wasn’t the type of woman he’d normally find attractive. Aside from the obvious contrasts in their sizes, she was too…tousled, as if she did little more than finger comb her dark curls. Curls that a light breeze tousled even further. And her mouth… His gaze fastened on it. Her mouth was too…distracting. Provocative.
Her gaze finally seemed to focus on him. She murmured something under her breath, then brushed past him in the direction of the parking lot.
Jake stood stock-still. He felt as if he’d just been sucker punched in a way he’d never experienced, and Lord knew he’d weathered his share of punches. He couldn’t seem to draw air into his lungs; his knees felt ready to give out.
Slowly, he continued toward the building, wishing the sensations away. He’d have to make a point to watch where he was going from here on out. He held open the door for a small group exiting the building. First item on his agenda: unload the documentation he promised to bring over from the investigations unit. Second: locate his identification.
Keys jangled. He glanced over his shoulder. In the lot across the street, the woman was unlocking the driver’s side door of a battered old Ford. A once-over told him the tires were bald and he suspected she hadn’t had the oil changed in the past ten thousand miles. His inspection also told him that she had incredibly shapely calves. And that she was probably much shorter than five foot four when she took off the impractical, thick platform heels she had on.
He caught a glimpse of a man walking in her general direction at a brisk pace, likely on his way to his own car.
Jake turned toward the door he held. No one else was exiting. A statute ought to be enacted disallowing women to have legs that looked as good as hers did. He caught the ridiculous thought. Well, at least they shouldn’t be able to wear skirts that complemented those legs as nicely as hers did. It was downright distracting.
He absently patted his empty jacket pocket again, then slid another gaze at the woman’s legs.
The man moving in her direction quickened his pace. Jake dragged his attention away from her long enough to figure out that the guy wasn’t hurrying to get to his car, but was rushing for her.
He let go of the door, watching as the man knocked her over and grabbed her purse. Jake broke into a run, too far away to stop it from happening but close enough to catch up to the figure. The guy slowed to pull something out of the handbag, then dropped it. Jake swept up the purse, then lunged for the envelope the guy had taken, snatching it away. Their gazes locked. Just as Jake reached to grab him, the guy turned tail and ran. He disappeared into the depths of the city, the clap of his shoes quickly blending into the sound of car engines, blowing horns and a nearby siren.
MERDE.
The concrete pavement was cold and hard under Michelle Lambert’s behind. She stared at a scratch on the driver’s door of her car, her legs spread-eagle in front of her, her hair hanging in her face. After everything she’d gone through today, there didn’t seem to be much point in moving lest she stumble into yet another nightmare. Yes. Better she should sit there. Breathe. Pretend what was happening wasn’t. Wait until someone woke her from what had to be some sort of twisted sequence of events from an artsy, senseless independent film, the type that won awards in Cannes, not far from the town she’d grown up in in France.
Someone had snatched away everything that verified her existence: her passport, her plane ticket home, her money.
She forced herself to blink. Was it really just that morning that she’d discovered the manager of the crummy motel she was staying at had forgotten to give her her phone messages? By the time she’d called that swindling private detective she’d hired, he was gone for the day. His gum-smacking secretary had told her he’d need at least five hundred more American dollars to continue on the case. Dollars she hadn’t had before her purse was stolen by some greedy, bloodsucking American.
She clamped her eyes shut. But the simple move wouldn’t let her escape. She groaned, remembering her appointment with the INS mere minutes ago. The immigration officer’s voice had been so clear, she could practically still hear it. “Sorry, Miss Lambert, but we can’t honor your request for an extension on your B2 tourist visa. You’ll have to go back home to France tomorrow.”
Home.
France.
Without Lili.
She’d jump out of the plane window before she let that happen.
She opened her eyes, a foolish, tiny thread of hope winding through her. If she didn’t have her passport, they’d have to let her stay, wouldn’t they? At least until she could get replacement papers—
“Ma’am?”
Her gaze snagged on a shiny pair of men’s shoes, then slowly drifted upward to a man’s chest—a tantalizingly wide chest belonging to someone who towered over her like some sort of silent, handsome sentinel.
She looked into his face. “It’s you.” It was the man she’d bumped into earlier. The man who had large, slender hands and even larger calm gray eyes.
He held out her purse.
Michelle nearly burst into tears on the spot. “Merci.” She choked the word out in French, forgetting for a moment to speak in English. She rifled through the contents of her bag. Her passport. Her return plane ticket. Her compact, hair-brush, a snapshot of Lili she lingered over for a moment, multicolored receipts she’d accumulated over the past six weeks. Where was her money?
Her movements growing jerky and quick, she started looking through the contents again.
“Here.” The man held her slender bill holder toward her. She noticed the way his gaze slid over her compromised position, his pupils huge, his throat working around a swallow. A bolt of unexpected awareness spiked through her as she accepted the money from him.
“That’s all he tried to take,” he said. His voice seemed to come from somewhere very deep within him and vibrated right through her. “Are you…okay?”
Michelle pushed her hair from her face, looked where she clutched her purse in her lap, then stared at the run in her nylons. Her last pair of clean nylons. She felt like crying all over again. “No. I think you should just take me out back and shoot me.”
His quiet chuckle drew her attention from herself and zoomed it in on him. He reached down. Michelle stared at his long, tapered fingers. Nice hands. Strong. Sexy. She placed her right hand in his, his strong grip lifting her to her feet.
“You hear about the crime, tell yourself you’re being safe, you know, looking over your shoulder to make sure no one’s following you. Checking the back seat of your car in case someone is hiding there. Double wrapping the strap of your purse to make it a difficult target. Then—bam! Some degenerate pig gets you anyway.”
She sank her teeth into her lower lip. The more she babbled, the closer she moved to the tears she tried so hard to hold at bay. That’s all she needed on top of everything else that had happened that day. To collapse into an unflattering pile of hysterical female in front of this very virile man.
She shivered at the undiluted heat that traveled from his hand to hers, only then realizing his fingers were still neatly wrapped around hers.
He cleared his throat, then withdrew his hand and patted the front of his jacket as if looking for something that wasn’t there.
“You are an ex-smoker, yes?”
“Excuse