soul. You keep washing and searching, boy.”
Nick would have liked to have said more. Oh, he’d have loved to. But it was hard to argue with a seven-foot man holding a meat cleaver. He went back to muttering.
Rio smiled, and noted that Rachel was eyeing the sandwich. “How ’bout I fix you some hot meal? You can eat after you finish your business.”
“Oh, I…” Her mouth was watering. “I really should get home.”
“Zack, he’s going to see you home after you’re done. It’s too late for a woman to go walking the streets by herself.”
“I don’t need—”
“Dish her up some of your chili, Rio,” Zack suggested as he pulled Rachel toward a set of stairs. “This won’t take long.”
Rachel found herself trapped, hip to hip with him in a narrow staircase. He smelled of the sea, she realized, of that salty, slightly electric scent that meant a storm was brewing beyond the horizon. “It’s very kind of you to offer, Muldoon, but I don’t need a meal, or an escort.”
“You’ll get both, need them or not.” He turned, effectively trapping her against the wall. It felt good to have his body brush hers. As good as he’d imagined it would. “I never argue with Rio. I met him in Jamaica about six years ago—in a little bar tussle. I watched him pick up a two-hundred-pound man and toss him through a wall. Now, Rio’s mostly a peaceful sort of man, but if you get him riled, there’s no telling what he might do.” Zack lifted a hand and wound a lock of Rachel’s hair around his finger. “Your hair’s wet.”
She slapped his hand away and tried to pretend her heart wasn’t slamming in her throat. “It’s raining.”
“Yeah. I can smell it on you. You sure are something to look at, Rachel.”
She couldn’t move forward, couldn’t move back, so she did the only thing open to her. She bristled like a cornered cat. “You’re in my way, Muldoon. My advice is to move your butt and save the Irish charm for someone who’ll appreciate it.”
“In a minute. Was that Russian you yelled after your brother today?”
“Ukrainian,” she said between her teeth.
“Ukrainian.” He considered that, and her. “I never made it to the Soviet Union.”
She lifted a brow. “Neither have I. Now can we save this discussion until after I’ve seen the living arrangements?”
“All right.” He started up the steps again, his hand on the small of her back. “It’s not much, but I can guarantee it’s a large step up from the dump Nick was living in. I don’t know why he—” He cut himself off and shrugged. “Well, it’s done.”
Rachel had a feeling it was just beginning.
CHAPTER THREE
Though it brought on all manner of headaches, Rachel took her new charge seriously. She could handle the inconvenience, the extra time sliced out of her personal life, Nick’s surly and continued resentment. What gave her the most trouble was the enforced proximity with Zackary Muldoon.
She couldn’t dismiss him and she couldn’t work around him. Having to deal with him on what was essentially a day-to-day basis was sending her stress level through the roof.
If only she could pigeonhole him, she thought as she walked from the subway to her apartment after a Sunday dinner with her family, it would somehow make things easier. But after nearly a week of trying, she hadn’t even come close.
He was rough, impatient, and, she suspected, potentially violent. Yet he was concerned enough about his stepbrother to shell out money and—much more vital—time and energy to set the boy straight. In his off hours, he dressed in clothes more suited to the rag basket than his tall, muscled frame. Yet when she’d walked through his apartment over the bar, she’d found everything neat as a pin. He was always putting his hands on her—her arm, her hair, her shoulder—but he had yet to make the kind of move she was forever braced to repel.
He flirted with his female customers, but as far as Rachel had been able to glean, it stopped at flirtation. He’d never been married, and though he’d left his family for months, even years, at a time, he’d given up the sea and had landlocked himself when his father became too ill to care for himself.
He irritated her on principle. But on some deeper, darker level, the very things about him that irritated her fanned little flames in her gut that Rachel could only describe as pure lust.
She’d tried to cool them by reminding herself that she wasn’t the lusty type. Passionate, yes. When it came to her work, her family and her ambitions. But men, though she enjoyed their companionship and their basic maleness, had never been at the top of her list of priorities.
Sex was even lower than that. And it was very annoying to find herself itchy.
So who was Zackary Muldoon, and would she be better off not knowing?
When he stepped out of the shadows into the glow of a streetlight, she jolted and choked back a scream.
“Where the hell have you been?”
“I— Damn it, you scared me to death.” She brought a trembling hand back out of her purse, where it had shot automatically toward a bottle of Mace. Oh, she hated to be frightened. Detested having to admit she could be vulnerable. “What are you doing lurking out here in front of my building?”
“Looking for you. Don’t you ever stay home?”
“Muldoon, with me it’s party, party, party.” She stalked up the steps and jammed her key in the outer door. “What do you want?”
“Nick took off.”
She stopped halfway through the door, and he bumped solidly into her. “What do you mean, took off?”
“I mean he slipped out of the kitchen sometime this afternoon, when Rio wasn’t looking. I can’t find him.” He was so furious—with Nick, with Rachel, with himself—that it took all of his control not to punch his fist through the wall. “I’ve been at it almost five hours, and I can’t find him.”
“All right, don’t panic.” Her mind was already clicking ahead as she walked through the tiny lobby to the single gate-fronted elevator. “It’s early, just ten o’clock. He knows his way around.”
“That’s the trouble.” Disgusted with himself, Zack stepped in the car with her. “He knows his way around too well. The rule was, he’d tell me when he was going, and where. I’ve got to figure he’s hanging out with the Cobras.”
“Nick’s not going to break that kind of tie overnight.” Rachel continued to think as the elevator creaked its way up to the fourth floor. “We can drive ourselves crazy running around the city trying to hunt him down, or we can call in the cavalry.”
“The cavalry?”
She shoved the gate open and walked into the hallway. “Alex.”
“No cops,” Zack said quickly, grabbing her arms. “I’m
