Cuff Me(17)

“And that’s stopped you from guzzling caffeine since… when?”

He stared at her for several long seconds, and she cradled her coffee to her chest protectively. “Well I’m not throwing out mine.”

Vincent didn’t seem to hear her. “Do you want to grab a beer?”

It was a casual question.

Nothing special. They’d grabbed drinks a thousand times before after the end of their shift, sometimes without even discussing it. They would just wordlessly find themselves in the same restaurant, sharing a drink or two.

But there was something different tonight. A nervousness, as though he’d been thinking about the question for a while.

It was as though he was afraid she was going to say no. Afraid she was going to choose phone sex with Tom over drinks with him.

Jill glanced down at her coffee. Took one last big sip, then stepped around Vin, dropped the cup in the trash can behind him, and smiled. “Absolutely.”

He didn’t smile back, but his eyes crinkled in the corners, and that was something.

No, not just something. It was a big something.

“Everything okay with you?” Jill asked as she got into the passenger seat. Vincent liked to drive, and she didn’t mind one bit. Driving in the city made her crazy.

“Yeah. Why?” he asked.

“I dunno. You’ve been strange since I’ve gotten back.”

“So, like all of twenty-four hours?”

She studied him.

He gave her a quick glance across the car. “Quit it.”

“Quit what?”

“Staring at me.”

“I’m not staring.”

“You’re looking at me without blinking with those big old eyes. It’s staring.”

She continued to look at him, deliberately trying not to blink now, just to annoy him. “You never told me what you’ve been up to.”

“Huh?”

“While I was gone,” she explained with what she thought was admirable patience. “What did you do? Give me the highlights. Any new women or new restaurants discovered? Did you get that weird squeak in your heater fixed? I mean, three months passed. You must have done something.”

“Three months where you were off getting engaged, you mean.”

His statement hung between them for several moments, although she didn’t really understand why.

“Yeah. Like that.” Her voice was just the tiniest bit touchy, but she really wasn’t loving the way he acted pissed about the fact that she was getting married.

It’s not like she was expecting him to go dress shopping with her or be the one to give her something borrowed, but Vincent Moretti was…

He was her best friend. Not in the traditional sense, of course. He was closed-off and irritable, and most of the time he acted like he didn’t even like her. But over the years, they’d become partners in more than just the work-together kind of way.

They were like two halves of… something.

Or at least they had been. There seemed to be a rift now, and Jill was oddly desperate to fix it.

“I didn’t do much,” he muttered finally. “Watched a lot of football. Fixed the heater myself, because my landlord’s useless.”

She noticed he didn’t answer her question about women, and she should probably just let it go, but… she didn’t.

“Did you date?”

He glanced across her again before easily parallel parking into a spot directly across from one of their favorite pubs on the Lower East Side.

“No,” he said as he turned off the car. “I didn’t date.”

Vincent climbed out of the car and slammed the door shut, but Jill sat frozen for several seconds, trying to figure out why his announcement sent such a stab of relief rippling through her.

Relief over what, though? That Vin was still single? That shouldn’t matter because Jill wasn’t single.

Not only was she not single, she had a ring on her finger.

Jill closed her eyes and twisted the diamond in an effort to refocus her thoughts on her fiancé. The handsome, kind man she was going to marry. And when she opened her eyes, she’d stop thinking about Vincent. And the fact that he hadn’t dated while she was away.

And maybe, just maybe—she’d stop herself from thinking about how much she’d dread the moment when he did find a girlfriend.





CHAPTER EIGHT


Vincent Moretti’s adult life had always involved two infallible constants: (1) his legendary “whodunit” hunch

(2) Jill Henley

It was just his f*cking luck that both of those things would give up on him at the exact same time, leaving him feeling a little lost.

And a lot pissed.

When Vin and Jill had gotten the early-morning call about a body at Lenora Birch’s house, Vin hadn’t even felt a flicker of warning that the case was going to be an elusive one.

In fact, he’d actually been fairly damn confident that it would be an easy one. The more high-profile cases usually were. The more famous the victim, the more people who wanted to be famous by association.

Even if that association was murder.

Vincent had cockily assumed he’d have a solid sense of their guy—or gal—by the time the news hit the media.

They’d bring the suspect in for questioning, and that’s when Vincent generally passed the baton to Jill.