An outsider.
Jarek shrugged mentally. Hell, Sweet was right.
“I’d watch my back if I were you,” Tess DeLucca said. “Your lieutenant knows how to hold a grudge.”
Jarek frowned, but her face expressed nothing but intelligent interest and a sort of wry commiseration. He muffled another inconvenient spark of attraction. He appreciated her concern, if that’s what it was. He admired her frankness. But there was no way he was discussing the deficiencies and jealousies of the officers under his command with a civilian. A reporter, for crying out loud.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” he murmured, and ushered her into her car.
Tess watched the new chief of police hand his plastic-sleeved menu back to their waitress.
“Grapefruit,” he ordered. “And coffee.”
“No doughnuts?” Tess drawled.
Denko’s eyes narrowed. His face was dark, full of lines and shadows. His eyes should have been dark, too. But they were unexpectedly pale, clear and cool as the lake in March. Tess resisted the urge to rub her arms briskly.
“You want doughnuts?” he asked.
“No. I’ll have the pancakes,” she told the waitress. She turned back to Denko. “I just thought you might.”
He nodded to the waitress—Noreen, her plastic name tag read—and said, “Thanks. That’ll be all, then. So.” He laced his fingers together; rested them on his paper place mat. All of his gestures were exact and deliberate, Tess noticed. “Do you always draw conclusions about people you’ve just met?”
She shrugged. “I get impressions. It helps, in my line of work.”
“And I strike you as a man who likes doughnuts.” His voice was bland. His shoulders were broad. And his stomach, beneath his starched shirt front, wasn’t anywhere near the edge of the table. Whatever the new chief’s reasons for leaving Chicago, he obviously hadn’t spent the past ten years eating doughnuts behind a desk.
She felt caught out by her stereotyping and struggled to make a recovery. “Maybe not,” she said. “You impress me as a man in control of himself and his waistline. You’re—what?—thirty-eight? Thirty-nine?”
“Forty.”
Just out of her age range and way out of her league. She looked at his hands, clasped on the table in front of him. His fingers were long and blunt-tipped, the nails neatly trimmed but otherwise neglected. “You’re not married now, but you were once. Maybe more than once. You’re straight. You don’t smoke, you drink beer, you vote Democrat and think Republican. How am I doing?”
He waited while their waitress, a straw-haired blonde in wilted polyester, filled his cup. “Pretty good…Sherlock.”
Maybe he had a sense of humor after all. Maybe she had a shot at a story. She had been so afraid, back at the station, that Sweet’s snotty comment or her own impulsive confession had ruined everything. But maybe there was a real, live, warm human being buried inside the Man of Ice.
She smiled engagingly. “Your turn.”
He took a sip of coffee. Black. “A good detective doesn’t theorize ahead of his facts.”
She sat up straighter on the vinyl bench. “What does that mean?”
“It means I’d have to spend more time with you before I developed any theories.”
She was deflated. Provoked. “That’s an interesting pickup line,” she said coolly.
“Just making conversation until our order gets here. Tell me about your ride in a police car when you were fourteen.”
The Man of Ice was back. “That was a long time ago.”
“But you remember. Were you scared?”
“I’m not scared of anything.” But she had been. Oh, she had been.
“So tell me about it.”
“It wasn’t anything. Kid stuff. Shoplifting.” It had been her brother’s birthday, she remembered. Mark had had his eleven-year-old heart set on a football, and she’d had her heart set on getting it—on getting anything—for him. Both of them had been disappointed. End of story.
“And you’ve been on the straight and narrow ever since,” Denko said dryly.
She raised her chin at his challenge. “Pretty nearly.” No point in pouring out the particulars. She was big on telling the truth. But not about her own past.
The waitress arrived with their food. She started to set the grapefruit in front of Tess when Denko stopped her.
“Other way around,” he said. “You’ve got us mixed up.”
Noreen wasn’t the only one who’d turned things around, Tess thought morosely. She stared at her plate. A mound of butter slid from the stack of pancakes to plop against the lonely orange wedge. For crying out loud, she was the reporter. She was used to getting people to talk, to confide in her. She was good at it.
But Jarek Denko was better.
She picked up her knife. “So, what brings a big, bad detective from Chicago to our little town?”
“How do you know I’m from Chicago?”
That was a cop’s trick, answering a question with another question. Reporters used it, too.
“I asked the mayor,” Tess said. “Were you fired?”
He didn’t get mad. “No.”
She poked a wedge of pancake. “You can’t have moved here for the excitement.”
He almost smiled. “No.”
“Then, why did you move here?”
“Personal reasons,” he said briefly.
Tess sniffed. “Oh, that’s illuminating. What kind of personal reasons? Breakdown? Breakup?”
A brief gleam lit those remote gray eyes. “What do you want, Miss DeLucca? My medical history or a blood test?”
Oh, boy. He wasn’t—he couldn’t be flirting with her. Could he? She swallowed a lump of pancake. “If you want to share.”
“No.”
“Trouble on the job?” she prodded sympathetically.
He eased back in the booth, his gaze steady, his voice calm. “Why don’t you ask the mayor?”
“I did. She said you were a regular Boy Scout.”
His smile appeared, a thin sliver in the ice. “That would be my brother. I was an altar boy.”
“You’re Catholic?” Ha. Her mother would love that. Not that
