ring, Ethan’s first impulse was to just ignore it. No one he knew had said anything about coming by at a little after six that morning. and it was either someone trying to save his soul—a religious sect had been making the rounds lately, scattering pamphlets about a better life to come in their wake—or the neighbor in the apartment catty-corner to his who had been pestering him with everything from a clogged drain to a key stuck in the ignition of her car, all of which he finally realized were just flimsy pretexts to see him. The woman, a very chatty brunette who wore too much makeup and too little clothing, had invited him over more than a dozen times, and each time he’d politely but firmly turned her down. By the time the woman had turned up on his doorstep a fifth time, his inner radar had screamed, “Run!” Two invitations were hospitable. Five, a bit pushy. More than a dozen was downright creepy.
When he didn’t answer the first two rings, whoever was on his doorstep started knocking.
Pounding was actually a more accurate description of what was happening on the other side of his door.
Okay, he thought, no more Mr. Nice Guy. Whoever was banging on his door was going to get more than just a piece of his mind. He wasn’t in the mood for this.
Swinging the door open, Ethan snapped, “What the hell do you want?” before he saw that it wasn’t someone looking to guide him to the Promised Land, nor was it the pushy neighbor who wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was the woman he’d met at the fire. The one, he’d thought, whose parents had a warped sense of humor and named her after a state best known for a little girl who’d gone traveling with her house and a dog named Toto.
“To give you back your cell phone,” Kansas snapped back in the same tone he’d just used. “Here.” She thrust the near-fried object at him.
As he took it, Kansas turned on her heel and started to walk away. March away was actually more of an accurate description.
It took Ethan a second to come to. “Wait, I’m sorry,” he called out, hurrying after her to stop her from leaving. “I’m not my best in the morning,” he apologized.
Now there was a news flash. “No kidding,” she quipped, whirling around to face him. “I’ve seen friendlier grizzlies terrorizing a campsite on the Discovery Channel.”
With a sigh, he dragged his hand through his unruly hair. “I thought you were someone else.”
She laughed shortly. “My condolences to ‘someone else.’” Obviously, it was true: no good deed really did go unpunished, Kansas thought.
But as she started to leave again, her short mission of reuniting O’Brien with his missing cell phone completed, the detective moved swiftly to get in front of her.
“You want to come in?” he asked, gesturing toward his apartment behind him.
Kansas glanced at it, and then at him. She was bone-weary and in no mood for a verbal sparring match. “Not really. I just wanted to deliver that in person, since, according to you, I was the reason you lost it in the first place.”
Ethan winced slightly. Looking down at the charred device, he asked, “Where did you find it?”
“It was lying on the floor just inside the building.” Because he seemed to want specifics, she took a guess how it had gotten there. “Someone must have accidentally kicked it in.” She looked down at the phone. It did look pretty damaged. “I don’t think it can be saved, but maybe the information that’s stored on it can be transferred to another phone or something.” She punctuated her statement with a shrug.
She’d done all she could on her end. The rest was up to him. In any case, all she wanted to do was get home, not stand here talking to a man wearing pajama bottoms precariously perched on a set of pretty damn terrific-looking hips. Their initial encounter last night had given her no idea that he had abs that would make the average woman weak in the knees.
The average woman, but not her, of course. She wasn’t that shallow. Just very, very observant.
With effort, she raised her eyes to his face.
Ethan frowned at the bit of charred phone in his hand. They had a tech at the precinct who was very close to a magician when it came to electronic devices. If anyone could extract something from his fried phone, it was Albert.
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” he told her.
“That’s me, thoughtful,” Kansas retorted. It was too early for him to process sarcasm, so he just let her response pass. “Well, I’ll see you—”
Ethan suddenly came to life. Shifting again so that he was once more blocking her path, he asked, “Have you had breakfast yet?”
Kansas blinked. “Breakfast?” she echoed. “I haven’t had dinner yet.” She’d been at the site of the women’s shelter fire this entire time. And then she replayed his question in her head—and looked at him, stunned. “Are you offering to cook for me, Detective O’Brien?”
“Me?” he asked incredulously. “Hell, no.” Ethan shook his head with feeling. “That wouldn’t exactly be paying you back for being nice enough to bring this over to me. No, I was just thinking of taking someone up on a standing invitation.”
And just what did that have to do with her? Kansas wondered. The man really wasn’t kidding about mornings not being his best time. His thought process seemed to be leapfrogging all over the place.
“Well, you go ahead and take somebody up on that standing invitation,” she told him, patting his shoulder. “And I’ll—”
He cut her off, realizing he hadn’t been clear. “The invitation isn’t just for me. It applies to anyone I want to bring with me.”
She looked at him. Suspicion crept in and got a toehold. Ethan O’Brien was more than mildly good-looking. Tall, dark, with movie-star-chiseled features and electric-blue eyes, he was the type of man who made otherwise reasonable, intelligent women become monosyllabic, slack-jawed idiots when he entered a room. But she’d had her shots against those kinds of men. She’d been married to one and swiftly divorced from him, as well. The upshot of that experience was that she only made a mistake once, and then she learned enough not to repeat it.
Her eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
“It’s easier to show you. Wait here,” Ethan told her, backing into the apartment. “I’ve just got to get dressed and get my gun.”
“Now there’s a line that any woman would find irresistible,” she murmured to herself, then raised her voice as she called after him, “If it’s all the same to you, Detective—” not that she cared if it was or not “—I’ll just be on my way.”
Ethan turned from his doorway, still very much underdressed. It was getting harder and harder for her to focus only on his face. “The invitation’s for breakfast at my uncle’s house,” he told her. “Dozens of chairs, no waiting.” The quote belonged to Andrew.
She had to admit that O’Brien had made her mildly curious. “What’s he run, a diner?”
He had a feeling Andrew would have gotten a kick out of the question. “Very nearly. I’ve only been a couple of times,” he confessed. “But the man’s legend doesn’t do him justice.”
“I’m
