Cutting Loose

He started to take a step into the room but must have noticed her stiffening, because he stopped where he was. Bracing a muscular shoulder against the doorjamb, he hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and studied her. “Henry, huh? Was that the business manager guy who was killed when the thief came back to recover the diamonds he’d hidden?”

“You’re the expert, Seattle Boy.”

“Hey, I was a kid when it all went down. I was interested in murder and mayhem but mostly fascinated by the idea of a multimillion-dollar set of jewelry still floating around somewhere.”

“Yes, well, Henry was her man for all matters. He was her butler and secretary and advisor and I think probably her lov-” Jane cut herself off, appalled.

What was she doing? She’d already established she didn’t know Devlin. And while assigning him dependency problems might have been jumping the gun a bit, there was no reason to offer him blanket trust, either. So why had she almost blurted out that she and her friends believed Henry had probably been more to Miss Agnes than a simple employee? It wasn’t as if their mentor had admitted as much to them. But the way Agnes had looked when she’d talked about him and the fact he wasn’t even supposed to have been there the night it was popularly believed that Maperton had broken in to retrieve the diamonds that had gone missing the year before, they had all sort of assumed Henry had probably been her lover as well as the man who kept her home and affairs running smoothly.

But she certainly didn’t plan on cozying up to Devlin Kavanagh with the speculation.

“Well, listen.” She gave him her best businesslike smile. “I have work to do. As I said, I really don’t know where the blueprints may be. I’m not even sure any exist. But I will keep an eye out for them.”

He looked at her for a moment, then stepped back, his hands shoved into his jeans pockets. “Thanks. I’ve got a partial set from the kitchen addition that was put on in 1909. I’ll head downtown to see if King County records has the originals or any of the updates since then.” He gave her a brief head-to-toe once-over, licked his bottom lip and nodded. “See ya around, Legs.”

Legs? She stared from the now-empty doorway to the limbs in question, encased in plain old dark Levi’s that she’d paired with a black blazer and a white shirt. She had fairly long legs, but they were certainly nothing to write home about. She’d always thought they were on the skinny side herself, which hardly qualified them as showgirl material.

Then she gave herself a mental shake and a stern directive to forget about it. But good grief. The man was a walking, talking Hazardous to Women zone. She imagined that with his confidence and those eyes and that body, females had been dropping at his feet since the day he hit puberty. Maybe even before.

Well, not her. As far she was concerned, he was Mr. Invisible from this point on. She was keeping her distance. Putting him out of her mind.

Getting her butt back to work.

Putting Miss Agnes’s collections in order so she could start researching and cataloging them was a huge undertaking, and she was happy as a pig in a puddle at the prospect of getting her hands on them. At the same time she was a little daunted by the scope of the museum bequest, and she needed to get moving on it. She had never headed an undertaking of such scale before, and she was laboring under a deadline.

“So here the clock is ticking and I’ve been spinning like that Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil all day long wasting time just trying to figure out where to start,” she confessed to Ava when her friend dropped by to see how she was doing later that afternoon. “Then, too,” she added wryly, “I keep getting caught up in the nostalgia of so many of the pieces-upshot of which is that I haven’t actually started anywhere.”

“Jane, Jane, Jane.” Ava picked up a first-edition book, ran her fingers over the ancient leather binding, then carefully set the volume back on the shelf where she’d found it and looked up to pin Jane in place with her gaze. “It’s a no-brainer. When in doubt, start with the jewels.”

A startled laugh burst out of Jane and she gave her friend an impulsive hug. “You, Ms. Spencer, are a genius! I’ve been doing a bit of this and bit of that with all the collections, when I should be concentrating on the Met’s stuff. The jewelry is an excellent place to start, since that’s part of their haul.” Grabbing up her slim Apple notebook, she started for the stairs. “Come on. I’ve got the codes for the safe in here. Let’s go see what’s in the vault.”

I T WAS ALMOST 5:00 p.m. by the time Dev let himself back into the mansion. He probably should have called it a day and headed for the apartment his sister Maureen had rented for him in Belltown. But the skies had opened up, the place didn’t feel like home yet and he’d just as soon build a fire in the little study up on the second floor, drink his Starbucks drip and listen to the rain bouncing off the windows while he went over the information he’d gathered from the County Assessor’s office and the Department of Development and Environmental Services.

Not that it was much. Before 1936 the records that the Assessor’s Office kept for buildings had been compiled in longhand on four-by-six-inch cards with lots of revisions and cross-outs and not a single photograph. Pretty much useless, in other words.

But luckily he’d been able to get a Flexcar from the share-a-ride program he belonged to, and more helpful were the photos taken of the mansion from the late thirties on, which he’d run to ground at the Washington State Archives at Bellevue Community College. They weren’t as helpful as blueprints, but they’d at least help him get a handle on the timeline for the various so-called improvements that had been made to the Wolcott mansion.

He frowned as he took the stairs two at a time. Because whoever was responsible for the additions on this grand ole dame ought to be stuffed and mounted. He’d seen some bad do-it-yourself jobs in his day, but he’d never seen a place butchered quite as badly as this one. Few of the structural changes added over the years had been made with the original architecture in mind. And rooms that once must have been spacious and full of grace had been divided to the point they had conceded all personality.

So deep was he in thought about how to undo the damage that he’d nearly reached the study before he realized that feminine voices drifted out of it. He faltered to a stop.

Well…shit. So much for a little time to nurse his coffee in front of a fire.

He was turning away to head back to his apartment after all when the murmur of voices gave way to a woman’s deep, raucous belly laugh. The sound cut through him like a hot sword and he found himself following it back to the doorway as if he were one of those old-time cartoon characters wafting in the wake of a beckoning scent.

Since it never occurred to him that little Miss Bug Up Her Butt Kaplinski could be the woman laughing like she’d just heard a deliciously dirty joke, his gaze zeroed in on the voluptuous redhead seated in profile to him across the room. Unless Ava was a ventriloquist, however, the sound wasn’t coming from her. A slight smile curved her lips as she sat looking at her friend across the delicate oval coffee table. Dev turned his attention in that direction, as well.

Then he simply stood there feeling as if he’d just taken a roundhouse kick to the head.

Jane sat on a velvet love seat perpendicular to the crackling fire, her high-heeled ankle boots tumbled in a heap on the floor and her argyle-stocking-clad feet crossed at the ankles and propped amidst a tumble of velvet boxes and bags on the little coffee table. More neatly arranged containers surrounded her and her left hand curled over the top of an open notebook computer, preventing it from tumbling off her lap while she laughed with her head thrown back as if she’d just heard the raunchiest, most amusing story ever.

It was the first time he’d seen her with her spine fully unbent since stumbling into her table at the bar the other night. Not that he had seen her more than three times total, but on the other two occasions her posture had been rebar rigid, as if she were some secret princess wondering how the hell she’d gotten cast into this world of commoners.

As he watched her start gaining control of herself, a corner of his mouth ticked up. Because the royalty analogy wasn’t half-bad, considering she was wearing a queen’s ransom in jewels.

She’d removed her blazer and rolled up her shirt sleeves, and ropes of emeralds and pearls adorned her wrists, looped in strand after lustrous, glittering strand from her neck. A diamond tiara perched at the fore of her listing bun, a cascade of some jewel he didn’t recognize swung from her ears and each finger sported a gem-encrusted ring.

Ava was similarly decked out, but he barely spared her a second glance. Adorned with only a couple of select pieces, she had the look of someone who’d been born wearing this stuff. Jane looked like a little girl playing dress-up. And given her sober-puss personality he’d bet a position on the next America’s Cup yacht-which, okay, he didn’t actually have to wager-that she hadn’t played a lot of little-girl games even when she’d been one.

“Your turn,” she said, and Ava bent forward to pick one of the velvet containers from the table between them. The redhead’s hand suddenly halted midreach, however, and she turned her head in his direction. He had a nanosecond, as their gazes connected, to wish he’d stepped out of sight while he’d still had the chance.

Then she inclined her head and said easily, “Hey, Dev.”

Jane’s head whipped around and she yanked her feet off the table so fast that several boxes and bags tumbled to the floor. Swearing beneath her breath, she bent to pick them up and her tiara tipped over one eye. She snatched the little crown from her head as hot color flowed up her throat. A minuscule comb that still anchored the tiara on one side ripped a hank of slippery hair free and it unfurled down to the corner of her mouth.

Blowing it off her face, she snapped upright to perch with that ramrod posture on the edge of the velvet seat. Raising her chin, she met his gaze. “Devlin.”

He clicked his boot heels together and gave her a clipped bow. “Your highness.” Okay, it was a cheap shot. But when the universe handed you an opportunity on a silver platter it was practically kicking karma in the teeth to ignore it. He swallowed a grin.

“What can we do for you, Devlin?” Ava asked.

“Huh?” He pulled his gaze away from Jane’s flushed face and looked at her friend. “Oh. Nothing. I was going to build a fire and go over some photos of the mansion that I picked up at the state archives today, but I didn’t realize the room was already occupied.”

Straightening, the redhead extended an imperious hand. “Let’s see them.”

He crossed the room and handed her the manila envelope. Taking it, she patted the love seat next to her with her free hand. “Sit.”

“Stay,” Jane said in the same commanding-the-dog tone, and Dev looked at her in surprise. What the hell-did the woman have a sense of humor after all?

She returned his searching look with a bland one of her own and, rolling his shoulders, he sat down next to Ava. Nah. Probably not.

Ava started to pour the envelope’s contents into her lap, but he clamped his fingers over the opening to stay her. “Don’t dump ’em-reach in and pull them out,” he directed when she bent a queenly look of her own on him. “I’d just as soon not go to the trouble of putting them in order twice.”

She did as he bid and a soft sound of pleasure escaped her when she looked at the topmost photograph. “Oh, this is wonderful. Janie, come see what the place looked like before that awful sunroom was added.”

Somewhat to his surprise, Jane complied, setting aside her computer and rising to her feet. He felt Ava shift and once again she patted the cushion next to her. “Scoot over here,” she commanded him. “We’ll put you in the middle so we can all see.”

He felt rather than saw Jane hesitate. But perhaps that was his imagination, because a second later she lowered herself next to him.

On a really small love seat. Now, normally he’d say being sandwiched between a couple of babes on a piece of furniture built for two was a good thing. For some damn reason, however, this was making him edgy as hell. “Uh, I don’t think this love seat was designed with three people in mind.” Aware of Jane’s warmth all along his left side, he added, “Especially when one of us has such impressively curvy hips.”

Okay, that didn’t come out real suave, even though Ava did indeed have killer hips that cut down on the seating space. Still, he wasn’t prepared for both women to freeze on either side of him. And he sure as hell wasn’t prepared for the redhead to turn an expressionless face his way and demand with chill civility, “Am I taking up too much room, Devlin?”

“What? No! That’s not what I meant at all. I just-” What, genius? The truth was, he hadn’t been using his head at all, he’d simply rattled off the first excuse that popped to mind in order to get out from between the two. And now his brain, normally facile and quick around the opposite sex, was drawing a big, fat blank.

Jane’s breast flattened against his biceps as she craned around to see her friend. “He said ’impressively curvy,’ Av. Curvy. Not fat.”

He jerked in shock and stared down at her for the first time since she’d squeezed in next to him. “Of course I didn’t say fat! Jesus. No man in his right mind is going to look at her and think that. Hell, she’s built like a walking wet dream.” The blue eyes he was staring into widened and he felt like smacking himself in the head. What the fuck is the matter with you, Dev? You had more savoir faire when you were nine.

Except it appeared he’d actually said something right, because he felt Ava relax next to him even as Jane smiled slightly and said, “Damn straight she is. And it’s your shoulders, Slick, not Ava’s hips, that are taking up all the space.”

“No, it’s probably my hips.” Ava handed him the photos with a rueful smile. “I apologize, Dev. I didn’t mean to freak on you. I was a fat kid, and I still have a few issues with my weight.”

You think? With three sisters, one might reasonably imagine he had an inkling into the female mind, but he didn’t have a clue. So he merely said, “Well, you shouldn’t. There’s not a man I know who wouldn’t kill to get his hands on a body like yours.”

Yet it wasn’t Ava who commanded his awareness as the three of them pored over the photographs. It didn’t make a lick of sense, but it was Jane who kept capturing his attention.

She might have a chilly personality, but as he’d already noted, the girl pumped out some serious body heat. He felt it radiating along his entire left side and had to peel himself free for a moment to set his coffee on the table. It was hard juggling the cup and the photos in these cramped quarters anyhow, and at this point he didn’t need any additional heat from the inside, as well. He was plenty hot.

Plenty. Hot.

Shit.

He focused on Jane’s unvarnished fingernails. They were bitten to the quick. It wasn’t very big of him, but it gave him a little surge of pleasure all the same. Hah. Maybe she wasn’t as aggressively confident as she appeared.

But she had skin like a baby. Not that he could see a hell of a lot of it-she was buttoned up from stem to stern. Still, he couldn’t help but notice its soft texture when their fingers brushed as they exchanged photographs. Or how her bared forearms shone more luminous than the pearls twined around them.

He shifted uncomfortably. What the fuck was going on here? This was so not like him. He’d had more women over the years than you could shake a stick at, and he was a sailor and a carpenter, for cri’sake-he didn’t think in words like luminous.

“Well, hey.” He pried himself from between the two females and rose to his feet. “My eyes are starting to cross-I think I’m going to take off. I still haven’t caught up with the jet lag. I need to hit the sack.”

More like hit a bar and pick up a woman, he thought as he gathered his pictures, said his goodbyes and dashed through the rain to his car a few moments later after letting himself out of the mansion. Someone with cleavage, smiles and red lips. And nails long enough to drag down his back. Someone who’d look at him like he was the hottest stud to swagger down the pike, instead of a lush who was one drink away from oblivion.

Only…

Instead of heading out to one of Belltown’s night spots when he reached his apartment house, he took a shower and went to bed.

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow night he’d go out and find himself a woman. Because clearly if he was getting all hot under the collar over uptight, disapproving little Jane Kaplinski, it had been way too long since he’d gotten laid.

CHAPTER THREE

Sex is overrated. I for one can live just fine without it.

Really.

J ANE SAT in the Wolcott parlor the next evening typing annotations into her notebook computer for a meeting with the museum director the following morning. Instead of focusing all her attention on the report, however, she found her thoughts constantly drifting to a certain buff redheaded man.

What was it about Devlin Kavanagh, anyway? This inability to concentrate whenever he popped to mind-which was far too often for comfort-was ridiculous, not to mention unprecedented.

Well, there was some precedent, she supposed. It wasn’t as if she’d never been attracted to other men before, because naturally she had.

But not like this. Never had she been drawn to a guy in such an I-gotta-have-him, out-of-control sort of way.

And that was the problem in a nutshell. Because she didn’t do out of control. Having grown up in a household that was always verging on or in the midst of some sort of drama, she’d made a firm decision about that before she was even ten years old.

What had she ever done to deserve parents who were actors? All she’d ever wanted was a nice, normal family, but had she gotten one? Oh, no. God was no doubt up in heaven slapping his knee at the thought of the Dorrie and Mike Show he’d sent her instead. It was unfair, that’s what it was. Her parents didn’t have simple differences of opinion; they had wars, crises of epic proportions. Which she almost could have lived with-had they just once not tried to drag her smack-dab into the middle of them.

So, no. She didn’t do out of control.

Which ought to make matters simpler now, right? Except somehow this didn’t feel simple. And she didn’t understand why she was having so much trouble with this particular guy.

“Crap.” She stared at her computer screen in frustration. “I have got to get a grip.”

“Well, this doesn’t bode well if the job already has you talking to yourself.”

She gave an involuntary start, then scowled at Poppy as her friend strolled into the room. “Jeez, give me a heart attack, why don’t you.” Even if it was her own damn fault for allowing a man to distract her to the point where someone could sneak up on her.

“Sorry,” Poppy said without noticeable contrition. “So is it the job that’s making you carry on conversations with yourself?”

“I wish,” she muttered. “That would be so much easier.” Then she gave herself a mental head slap. Shut up, Kaplinski. Shut up, shut up, shut up. She wasn’t ready to spill her guts, and until she was she knew better than to give Poppy even an inkling that she might have a secret.

But of course it was too late. Because as she’d told Devlin just yesterday, Poppy was a pit bull once she sank her teeth into something. Already her friend, who looked deceptively soft and pliable with her curly blond hair, big brown eyes and today’s floaty hippie-dippy-girl clothing, had Jane firmly in the crosshairs of the dreaded Calloway Evil Eye. “Spill,” she commanded.

And like a leaky old oil tanker in a pristine harbor, she did just that. “I think I’ve gone and fallen face-first in lust.”

“Ooh.” Poppy plopped down on a nearby chair and wiggled her fingers in a gimme gesture. “Tell sister everything. And don’t skimp on the details.”

“Me. In lust. That is everything. There are no details, Pop, because there’s nothing to tell.”

Poppy pursed her lips to blow a skeptical pffffft. “Please. We’re talking sexual attraction. Pounding hearts. Jingly-jangly nerve endings. Am I right?”

Oh, man. Was she ever. Jane nodded.

“Then of course there’s something to tell. When it comes to all things sexy there is always something to tell.”

“Not this time.”

Poppy gave her an indignant look. “Why the hell not?”

“Hey, just because I have certain urges doesn’t mean I have to act on them. So I haven’t-and I don’t intend to.” She saved the file she’d been working on and shut down her computer, gazing at her friend over its closing lid. “It’s a random case of lust. I plan to get over it.”

“Why would you want to?” Poppy blinked, clearly puzzled. “Lust is a good thing, right? I mean, it leads to sex, and sex makes you feel good. Not that I’d know from personal experience,” she added virtuously.

“Of course not. You’ve only been disclaiming personal experience since you first misinformed Ava and me about sex back when we were nine.” She gave her friend a lopsided smile. “The only difference being that you really were a total innocent then.”

“What do you mean, misinformed? I was always first with the true scoop, and you know it.”

“Please. Babies are made when you swap spit with a boy?”

“Oh. Yeah. That. Damn Karen Copelli’s sister. I thought for sure she was a reliable source. After all, she was an older woman.”

“I know. She must have been all of twelve, which made her a helluva lot nearer to being an honest-to-god teenager than the three of us. I gotta tell you, though, after hearing that spit thing I figured I’d probably never, ever have babies. Because, ew. ”

Poppy grinned. “Yeah, it didn’t sound real appealing, did it? Luckily, actual kissing turned out to be so much cooler.”

“Not that you’d know from personal experience.”

“Of course not,” she agreed with a serene smile, then brushed the topic aside with a long-fingered wave of her hand. “But we’re not talking about me, Jane. So don’t go changing the subject.”

“Yes, let’s. Let’s change it to something else entirely.”

“Okay then, how about this? Maybe what you’re feeling isn’t actually lust at all.”

She considered the possibility for, oh, two full seconds before giving a definitive nod. “Trust me. It’s lust.” A big, fat, flaming-hot case of it. “Or, okay, I suppose it could be heartburn.”

Her friend practiced the selective deafness that made her such a formidable meddler-with-a-mission and said with a perfectly straight face, “Maybe it was really a case of love at first sight.”

“Uh-huh. Because everyone knows that’s not a great big fairy tale, or anything.”

“Hey, it worked for my parents. And Ava’s mom and dad might be sort of benignly neglectful in the parental department, but look how long they’ve been married.”

“I always sort of assumed that was because there was too much money involved to go through the hassle of getting a divorce. But maybe not. They do seem to do a lot of stuff together.”

“See? The world is simply lousy with True Love stories. So tell me your guy’s name and maybe I can help you figure out how to handle the situation.”

“I’ve figured it out for myself, thank you very much. It’s pretty simple, really.” She gave Poppy a level look. “I’m handling it by not doing anything at all.”

“That’s a horrible game plan.”

“Yet all mine.”

“Tell me, Jane-Jane.”

“You don’t really want to go there with that name-Pop-Pop.”

“ Tell me.”

“No.”

Poppy treated her to another Calloway Evil Eye. This time, however, Jane wasn’t about to budge and she shot the Kaplinski version right back at her.