Cuff Me(18)

If his skill was in figuring out who did it, her skill was coaxing—or tricking—them into confession.

But from the second Vincent had stepped foot in the stunning home of Lenora Birch on Eighty-First and Fifth, he’d known something was wrong.

The scene was clean. Too clean.

He got no immediate vision of what must have happened. No gut sense of how the legendary actress came to be lying dead on her foyer floor.

He hadn’t panicked. By the time they talked to all the key players, he’d have something to work with.

But he hadn’t.

Nothing from the utterly useless housekeeper.

He hadn’t gotten the flicker from Lenora’s sister.

Nor Lenora’s latest boyfriend.

Nor her ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands.

Hadn’t gotten it from her longtime best friend and legendary Broadway actress.

By the time he and Jill had called it a day with some much-needed caffeine, not only did Vincent have zero sense of who might have pushed Lenora over her staircase railing, he did not have an idea where to start.

Ignorance was not bliss.

Adding to Vin’s nagging sense of unease was the woman currently sitting across the table from him.

He didn’t know what had compelled him to ask Jill out for drinks.

They did it often enough, but usually it was a natural continuation of their day when they were still knee-deep in work talk.

Today had been different.

Today they’d both been exhausted, frustrated from the lack of leads and lost in their own heads.

He should have left it at coffee. Let them both get enough caffeine to make it through the remaining hours of the day, then dropped Jill off to call her fiancé, while he decompressed with a beer and whatever was on TV from the comfort of his couch.

But then he’d come out of the restroom at Starbucks, seen her lost in thought, smiling to herself, and he’d felt a surge of panic.

Panic that he didn’t know what she was thinking.

Panic that he didn’t know what was making her smile. (Although he was terrified that he did know.) Panic that he was losing her.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

She was supposed to have come back from Florida feeling like he had that day he impatiently counted the hours until he saw her at the welcome-home party.

She was supposed to feel what he was feeling.

If he only knew what that was.

Jill cradled a beer in her left hand, her phone in her right as she scrolled through. Then she winced and glanced up, holding her phone up to him. “Story broke.”

He reached for a handful of the complimentary bar snacks the pub offered to customers. “Took them long enough.”

“Right?” Jill said, turning her attention back to her phone. “I’m surprised the media didn’t beat us to the scene. How the hell did this stay quiet all day in the age of Twitter?”

“Lenora Birch is old-school. Way old-school. Everyone we interviwed today was in the geriatric set. You really think they’re on Twitter spreading the news?”

“Everyone’s on Twitter,” Jill muttered, never looking up from her phone.

“I’m not.”

She snorted. “Please. You can barely maintain a relationship with one person, much less hundreds of followers.”

Vin sat back in his chair, and damn if he didn’t feel a little… wounded.

It was strange, considering how long they’d been working together, but Vin had never really given conscious consideration to what Jill thought of him. Their relationship had always been both horribly complicated and wonderfully simple.

Those two elements canceled each other out so that when it came right down to it, Jill and Vincent were beyond definition.

They simply were.

He’d always thought they’d shared a secret understanding that the fact that what was between them couldn’t be named was precisely what made it theirs.

Now, he was realizing that this had been one-sided. That all this time, he’d merely been her colleague while she’d been his… everything.

“Can you put the damn phone away,” he heard himself snap.

Jill glanced up in surprise, and he saw guilt flash across her face. She immediately locked her phone and set it facedown on the table.

“Of course. I’m sorry.”

Her apology was simple. Sincere.

And yet it did nothing to mollify him. He didn’t want Jill to pay attention to him just because he begged her to. He didn’t want to have to compete for Jill’s attention at all. He wanted— Fuck. He didn’t have a clue.

He reached for his beer, then instead changed course and grabbed one of the laminated menus at the back of the table.

“You hungry?”

“Always,” she said. “Nachos? Wings? Ooh, we could split a burger!”

Vin lowered the menu and gave her a look. “One does not split a burger.”

“One can and one should when the burger is as big as it is here,” she said.

In the end, they ordered nachos for her and a burger for him.

“I’m not sharing,” he said, pointing his newly refilled beer at her.

“Of course not,” she said soothingly, picking through all of the nuts to get at the almonds and leaving the peanuts for him.

Vin grunted. He knew that voice. He was definitely going to end up sharing that burger.