you decide who might be violent and who isn’t before you withhold information about a recent divorce. Are you sure there’s no one else in your life that might want to make trouble for you?”
“No one that I’m aware of.” She clutched a bright yellow satin throw pillow to her chest, the movement jerky. Uneasy.
“Are you sure you’ll be all right alone tonight?” He hated it that this had happened on his block, the same route he jogged every night and considered his backyard. “You definitely don’t want to stay in your apartment with the window compromised and the lock broken on your door.”
He regretted the need to bust in here, but she could have been hurt…or worse.
Tonight’s incident with Tabitha hadn’t exactly mirrored the hellish night of his sixteenth birthday, but the scream and the gunshot had freaked him out for a few minutes, had him busting into her apartment like a SWAT guy. But the mental trip down memory lane never failed to bring out his inner vigilante—the need to protect that went beyond his badge.
“I’ll be fine. I’m sure the shot wasn’t meant for my window and I’ll call tomorrow to have the glass replaced.”
“But you won’t try to stay here.” He didn’t want her anywhere near the apartment until they’d had the chance to go over everything in detail.
He’d seen the shell casing embedded in the back of her couch earlier and he’d toyed with the idea of removing it but it had been lodged tightly in a hardwood interior and he didn’t want to compromise the scene without the proper tools. Besides, seeing a bullet pried out of their possessions tended to freak some people out and he hadn’t had enough time to accomplish the task while she’d been out of the room. As a longtime ballistics expert, Warren already knew the shell belonged to a .38, a weapon that wasn’t exactly the firearm of choice of today’s bigger-is-better street thugs.
“I can stay at a hotel tonight. I’ll be okay.”
Something about her tone made him think she was trying hard to convince herself more than him. But then, Warren would bet his badge this woman was an expert in talking herself through hardship. Her whole apartment spoke of hard times covered over with brightly decorated facades, optimism in the face of anguish. He had to admire that kind of grit.
“Fine. There’s just one more thing. I’ll run a few tests on the bullet just to see if anything unusual comes up, but is there any chance you know anyone who carries a .38?”
She stilled. Buster nudged his snout back under her hand to restart her attentions.
“Ms. Everhart?”
“Call me Tabitha.” She scratched the dog idly but didn’t meet Warren’s gaze. “I don’t know any sane person who would carry a gun around the streets of New York, Detective.”
That answer begged a follow-up question, but she stood abruptly and strode toward the kitchen, her bare feet falling with the smallest of sounds on the hardwood floors covered with thin throw rugs.
“Can I get you some water? You said you were out running.” She came back with a bottle for him and then hastened to the sink to fill a bowl for Buster. “You both must be thirsty.”
When she had run out of activity and stood awkwardly beside her dining room table some twelve feet away from him, Warren asked the question she so obviously didn’t want to answer. The lights of an approaching squad car reflected blue and red through the window, broadcasting the arrival of his backup.
“Who owns a .38, Tabitha?”
She paused for a long moment, then cocked a hip against a lopsided table propped up by a stack of books on one end, the movement of her body a subtle reminder of the famous curves that hid beneath the big sweater.
“Honestly, Detective? I do.”
2
TABITHA SAT ON the fire escape outside her on-location shoot the next afternoon and tilted her face up toward the sun’s rays. Wrapped in her winter coat over a bathrobe, she waited for her call to the set and tried to swallow down the attack of nerves that always came with her body double work.
“We’ll be ready for you in just a minute, Tabitha,” one of the set assistants called out the door where she sat in a cast-iron patio chair chilled from months of a New York winter.
“Thanks.” She smiled weakly, her game face not quite assembled yet after last night’s stray bullet scare and a sexy cop diving headfirst through the front door.
Oddly, she half wondered which event had rattled her more. The bullet had been scary, no doubt. But the man…wow. After her divorce, warm feelings for men in general had sort of disappeared. And there was a certain comfort in that lack of emotion after life kicked your butt. Last night had been a wake-up call to her snoozing hormones, however. Warren Vitalis ignited some serious heat with just one look.
In the distance she heard a police siren. Would she ever see the hot detective again? Or had he handed over her case to the patrol cops who had shown up later in the evening after she’d admitted the only person she knew with a .38 was her? Detective Vitalis’s suggestion that her ex could have been involved in the shooting last night was ludicrous since her former husband had always been far too concerned with appearances and what other people thought of him to lower himself to gangster tactics.
No, Manny Redding had too many other more subtle weapons to hurt her. The cheating creep.
“We’re ready now, Tabitha,” the set assistant called out, ending any time for psyching herself up for this scene.
Damn it.
Today wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill soap opera shower scene. Tabitha had been a little nervous about this gig—a prime-time movie special for a cable network—from the moment she’d learned she would be standing in for the actress playing a prostitute. Worse, the prostitute was in her late teens and Tabitha’s body was clearly that of a woman on the far side of twenty-five. She’d be thirty next year. Could she still pass off her bod as a nineteen-year-old’s?
Planting one foot in front of the other, she congratulated herself that at least she hadn’t resorted to any of the unhealthy eating tactics she’d struggled with in the past. She’d worked her tail off for the lean muscle tone she had these days. One of the best benefits of her spectacularly messy divorce was the clear head that allowed her to be healthy again. She’d silenced her ex-husband’s voice in her head telling her she wasn’t cut out to be on film. That she shouldn’t share her talents with the world when he needed her working behind the scenes for him.
And finally, that no other man should look at his wife.
The subtle possessiveness that started off as sort of endearing eventually became suffocating and for a few dark months toward the end she’d staved off the anxiety with food. The bulimia she’d struggled with as a teen resurfaced with a vengeance.
She was under control again now. Every day that she bared her body for the camera now soothed a little more of her wounded ego and healed the part of her that knew she’d stayed in a bad marriage for too long. Besides, body double work was just a means to an end to finance her return to filmmaking.
Allowing her coat to slide off her shoulders, she didn’t bother counting the number of people on the closed set the way she used to when she first
