Just One Look. Joanne Rock

on the floor, his hips in tight proximity to hers as his hands molded to the shape of her breasts through the feather-thin fabric of her bra. Her fingers raked through his hair and trailed down his back, scoring his shoulders right through the fabric of his shirt. He used his knee to find leverage between her legs, spreading her open to the touches he’d been holding back.

      He abandoned her breast to reach under her skirt, stroking up one silken leg. If she had a sensitive trigger, how fair was it to make her wait? The justification made perfect sense and gave him permission to do everything he wanted to do with this woman.

      Her taut calf gave way to her knee and the delicate place behind it that made her convulse just a little when he circled the soft skin. Leaving that tender spot for her thigh, he spread his hand wide to cover as much of her skin as possible, savoring the way her flesh felt hotter the nearer he came to the juncture of her legs.

      His cell phone blared into his consciousness, shattering the hottest foreplay of his life with some obnoxious mechanical-sounding ring tone one of the guys at the precinct must have programmed for him.

      “Damn it.” He said worse things in his mind, but he didn’t want to scare off Tabitha, who looked fairly dazed.

      If he could dispatch this call in thirty seconds or less, maybe they could pick right up where they left off.

      He reached into his jacket pocket on the second ring and hit the button to answer the call that he could see emanated from the precinct.

      Not a good sign for handling this in a hurry.

      “Vitalis here.”

      He tried to blink through the raw lust for Tabitha enough to concentrate on the phone call from another detective—a woman new to the detective squad who’d made her first big arrest last month. Donata Casale had raised a lot of eyebrows in the department when she came on board since she’d been a gangster’s girlfriend at one time, but she’d clawed her way through police ranks with hardcore determination to change her life.

      Warren respected the hell out of her, even if he didn’t appreciate this particular interruption.

      “Got a bullet embedded in brick. The guys say they can take it out with little peripheral damage, but I wanted to check with you first to see what you thought. I’ve got a homicide in the VIP room of a club downtown and the embedded bullet is at an odd angle. The victim is apparently a well-known porn star, John de Milo.”

      Warren knew Donata’s partner—a seasoned vet—was out of town this week. Detectives with more experience might be apt to just remove the bullet and let Warren work through the ballistics issues in the office, but he could see the benefit to observing the bullet in play if the angle was a concern. A good extraction could be key in a case that had a lot riding on identifying a weapon. Any schmo could figure out what caliber a bullet was, but Warren’s specialty was for matching particular bullets or shell casings with those at other scenes, or even tying them to evidence in cold cases. Knowing that the same firearm had discharged bullets in separate incidents had been critical evidence in plenty of investigations during his tenure with the NYPD.

      Besides, Warren had personal reasons for making ballistics his life and they applied whether or not he was on the verge of the best sex of his life.

      Not that he didn’t regret it.

      “Would you rather I just have the guys remove the bullet?” Donata asked, tipping him off that he’d been thinking too long.

      And wishing he didn’t have to walk out of Tabitha’s apartment tonight.

      “No. I can be downtown in fifteen minutes. What’s the address?” He wrote the street number on a corner of newspaper on the coffee table and disconnected the call, only to realize Tabitha was already inching her way out from underneath him.

      He regretted the need to leave her when she looked so deliciously disheveled with her bra strap falling off one shoulder and her sweater half undone. His heart still slammed hard, his body not quite getting the message that he wouldn’t be able to have dessert tonight.

      “Sorry.” He straightened, pulling her up to a sitting position on the couch beside him. “I wouldn’t leave if it wasn’t urgent. There’s a homicide scene I need to check out. I don’t know if I told you before, but I spend most of my time at the precinct as a ballistics analyst.”

      Her fingers moved over the buttons on her sweater, closing the gaping fabric. She nodded quickly and he half wondered if she was more relieved than disappointed since things had escalated fast tonight.

      “You’re going to a murder scene. Now?” She rubbed her hands along her arms and he suspected his job creeped her out.

      To his way of thinking there were two kinds of women—cop groupies and the ones who freaked out over the job. There were few and far between who could actually handle the way of life. Why did it bother him that she couldn’t be one of the few? Hell, he hardly knew the woman beyond a few conversations.

      And a peel-the-paint-off-the-walls kiss.

      “There’s ballistics evidence lodged in brick. The lead detective was hoping I could oversee the extraction to minimize any damage.” The news would be in the papers by morning so he wasn’t giving away state secrets.

      “So the victim was shot.” Her eyes flitted over to her newly replaced living room window and Warren realized why the murder scene visit had her spooked.

      Guilt pinched him for wishing she was the kind of woman who wouldn’t freak out over his work. Of course she would be uneasy when she’d had a bullet through her window. No doubt his life had hardened him to normal fears.

      “This sounds like something more personal than what happened here. The victim was a porn star who met his end in a nightclub.”

      Instead of easing her mind, his words made her spine straighten.

      “A porn star?”

      He didn’t know why it mattered, then remembered her ex-husband was a producer who’d gotten his start in low budget film that gave a few porn stars a legitimate vehicle. Would Tabitha have come in contact with anyone in adult film?

      It seemed worth spilling a little more detail to find out if Tabitha knew anything that could be useful to Donata’s case.

      “Yeah. John de Milo.” Warren didn’t admit that he knew who the guy was. Warren hadn’t personally checked out much in the way of X-rated films, but the names of the industry’s stars seemed to come up in men’s magazines.

      Besides, he’d been reading an unsolved case file on an adult “reality” filmmaker allegedly based in Manhattan and de Milo’s name had been mentioned in the report as an easygoing guy with wide-ranging industry connections.

      “John?”

      Her familiarity of the dead guy’s given name disconcerted him.

      “You know him?” He needed to leave, to get down to the crime scene. But this could be important to the investigation.

      And it was damn well important to him.

      “Yes. We moved in the same circles at different points in our careers. He always wanted to be a legitimate actor so we ended up at some of the same casting calls back when I was going that route.” She stood, her long skirt sweeping around her legs with the sudden movement. “And I saw him just a few days ago on the set of a late-night, soft-core movie in the preproduction stages.”

      She bent to scratch Buster’s head, waking the dog from a snooze. Immediately alert, the animal lifted himself to a sitting position, his tail swishing back and forth across the hardwood floor.

      “What were you doing there? This was a film he was making?” He didn’t know if he asked as a cop or as the man who’d just kissed her and wanted more.

      Maybe a little of both.

      “I assumed John was on site for the same reason I was. To scope out the body double work. Then again, he might have just been friends