standing for several more minutes just watching to be certain.
Feeling a bit foolish, she rechecked her door locks and headed for the bedroom. Maybe she and Ginger should get a dog. A large dog, like Spider, the Labrador retriever Bianca Tooley always kept at her side.
Good grief. Hope was more right than she knew. Nicki was turning into Miss Tooley.
Nicki tossed her robe over the nightstand and climbed into bed. Was Ilona safe? Had Alex Coughlin really walked up to a car in the alley and shot a man in cold blood?
Her last thought was that she hoped not.
The dream began with a memory. Alex’s soft kisses slowly awakened her passion. His arms held her, the way only his arms ever had. But now they were a man’s arms. Hard. Protective.
She was dreaming and she knew it, but she clung to the dream, not wanting to wake. She was on the brink of something wonderful. She tried to ignore the sense of wrongness that disturbed the dream and tugged at her half-conscious brain.
The creak of the floorboard next to her bed snapped her eyes open. Too late, she felt the presence inside the room. A hand came out of the darkness to clamp over her mouth.
“Don’t scream.”
Chapter Two
Terror gripped her. Nicki struggled, but she was pinned beneath the weight of her attacker, tangled in her sheet.
“Nicki, stop it!”
The low growl brought an instant halt to her struggles. Though she tried to make out his features in the darkness, she couldn’t. But never in a million years would she forget that voice. She stopped moving. Stopped breathing.
“Alex?”
“I think you broke my nose.”
The adrenaline seeped from her body. Badly shaken, she lay beneath him while a myriad of remembered emotions assaulted her. She selected anger and drew it on like a cloak.
How dare he scare her like this?
“Get off me!”
She shoved as hard as she could. Alex rolled away from her in the darkness. When she would have reached for the light switch, he stopped her, gripping her hand firmly.
“No lights.”
“Why not? What do you mean coming in here scaring me half to death in the middle of the night? Who do you think you are?”
“Your first lover?”
The words charged the silence with an arc of electricity that should have been visible to the naked eye.
“You bastard,” she said quietly.
“Not technically.” He stood up and sighed. “I’m sorry, Nicki. That was uncalled for.”
“Yes. It was.” She braced herself on her hands, halfway to a sitting position. “What are you doing here, Alex?”
In the darkness of the room, she sensed him rocking back on his heels. “Tonight? I need to know why Osher thinks you are an eyewitness to the murder last night.”
Hurt primed her anger, pushing aside all the other emotions. Even though it was too dark to make out more than shapes and shadows in the room, she covered her bare breasts with the sheet and sat up, suddenly all too aware that she was naked beneath the thin bit of linen.
“Why don’t you go ask him? He has my statement.”
The whistle of Alex’s pent-up breath was loud in the silent room.
“I’ve done all the talking with Osher that I plan to do. Talk to me, Nicki,” he coaxed. “Tell me what you saw last night.”
There had been a time when she would have told him anything. Everything. A time when she would have cheerfully lied for him or worse. But she wasn’t sixteen any more and he wasn’t the brash young Alex Coughlin she’d loved so desperately.
No. Now he was the brash mature Alex Coughlin. And that made him twice as dangerous.
“Get out of my house, Alex.”
“I can’t do that, Nicki. You were in your shop last night. You would have had to break speed records to get upstairs to your apartment before those shots were fired. That means you didn’t see the crime. Unless you opened the back door. Is that what you did, Nicki?”
“How do you know what I was doing last night?”
“You know the answer to that,” he said after a moment.
“I want to hear your version.”
He sat down on the bed, much too close to her. She could feel the heat of him against her hip right through the sheet. A heat she would have welcomed with open arms once upon a time.
“No games, Nic. This is too important.”
“I’d say so. A man died last night.”
“Yes. Now exactly what did you see?”
Nervously, she tugged on the sheet, aware that his eyes tracked the movement despite the darkness of the room.
“Why don’t you tell me what you were doing here last night. Tell me why you were watching my shop. Why last night when you’ve been in town for months?”
“You knew that?”
“That you were back?” She hoped he didn’t hear the pain she tried to bury deep in her heart. “Have you been gone so long you’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a small town, Alex? I knew you were back an hour after you breezed in on that motorcycle, acting like the world owed you big time. I can’t believe you’re still thumbing your nose at the police. I would have thought you’d have outgrown that phase years ago. Think your father would be proud?”
The carefully chosen barb struck its target. She heard his indrawn hiss. He reached forward suddenly and grabbed her forearms in a grip she couldn’t break.
The moment his rough palms touched her skin, her body seemed to go wild. The rush of sensual memories mixed with an undercurrent of new fear. Why had she pushed him? Ilona had described the murderer clearly. Alex fit the killer’s description right down to the clothes he’d been wearing.
“You always did have more guts than brains,” he said softly. “Let’s leave my father out of this. I haven’t got a lot of time right now. Tell me what you saw.”
Fear raised the hair on her forearms. Alex could kill her right here and no one would know. There wasn’t a thing she could do to stop him. The implacable hardness she sensed in him went deeper than she would have thought. Where was the young man she had loved so desperately? Didn’t any of him remain?
“I’m not telling you anything.” She refused to be cowed by Alex. Part of her didn’t believe he would harm her no matter how much he’d changed. But there was another
