Cuff Me(75)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR


Jill knew she was gloating. Big-time.

She also knew she didn’t feel even the tiniest bit bad about it. The cork of the cheap champagne finally gave in to all her tugging and twisting and went shooting across the room with a satisfying pop.

She glanced at Vincent, who stood behind the stove stirring some sort of meat sauce that looked amazing. He gave a skeptical look as she poured two glasses of champagne and handed one to him.

“Meat sauce requires red wine.”

“So, when we eat your precious meat sauce, we’ll have a glass of red,” she said, lifting up his hand and then shoving the champagne flute into it. “But first, we toast.”

Jill held up her glass, waiting patiently until he finally rolled his eyes and complied.

“To us,” she said.

His eyes shuttered, and Jill stifled her sigh at how jumpy he was about anything related to them.

“To the best damn homicide detectives in the NYPD,” she clarified, more for his sake than hers.

As expected, the clouds in his brown eyes lifted and he clinked his glass to hers. “That was pretty f*cking exceptional today. Even for us.”

“If we can continue to get a confession on the same day that the bodies are found, we’ll restore our reputation in no time,” she said, taking a sip of the wine, loving the way the bubbles matched her mood.

It’s not that she was okay with the fact that they hadn’t found Lenora Birch’s killer. She wasn’t. At all. In fact, she was sure that the lack of closure on the case would continue to haunt both of them for some time.

But that didn’t change the fact that she and Vincent had done damn good work this afternoon.

Granted, it hadn’t exactly been a stumper.

A twenty-one-year-old girl named Maria Salvez, found dead of multiple stab wounds on her blood-soaked mattress…

But wait, twist!

Only half of the blood was hers.

Quick calls to local hospitals and they’d found themselves victim number two. A twenty-four-year-old male with multiple stab wounds, in serious but stable condition.

It had taken Jill about ten minutes of sweet talk before she found out that the guy had been sleeping with his best friend’s girlfriend.

The boyfriend found them in bed and lost his mind, grabbed a knife…

A classic, tragic tale. One that made Jill positively sick to her stomach, and all the more gratified when she and Vin had found Maria’s killer within two hours of discovering the body. The bastard had been skulking at his sister’s house, drinking a beer and eating a corn dog, looking cocky as hell.

It had taken less than five minutes of Jill and Vincent’s trusty good cop/bad cop routine before the guy confessed.

Open.

Shut.

Awesome.

“I’d forgotten how good it feels,” Jill mused, taking a sip of her champagne.

“Sure,” Vin said, tasting the sauce on the stove. “Until the damn lawyers strike some sort of bullshit deal and the guy gets off easy.”

“Uh-uh,” Jill said. “Don’t rain on my parade right now. We did good, Vin. It was a win.”

A win they’d sorely needed after the Lenora Birch disaster.

Jill watched as Vincent added salt to the sauce, envying his confidence in the kitchen. She knew her way around the stove, but only with the help of a very, very detailed cookbook. She’d never quite mastered the “pinch of this, a dash of that” approach that the Morettis all seemed so comfortable with.

“You’re staring,” Vin said, not looking up as he tasted the sauce once more.

“Because you look good,” Jill said, taking a sip of her champagne and leaning against the counter.

And he did. He’d been wearing a white button-down but had discarded it almost the minute they’d walked in the door, and he was now dressed only in dark slacks and a white undershirt that did nice things for his amazing arms.

“Keep the compliments coming,” he said, holding a spoon out to her so she could do her own taste test of the goodness he had happening on the stove. “It’ll help keep me from being peeved at you.”

“Why would you be peeved at me?” she said, blowing on the steaming sauce before taking a tentative bite.

“Today when we found Garcia—anything seem wrong with that?”

She replayed it in her mind. They’d shown up… found him plopped on his sister’s couch with that damn corn dog. They’d asked where he was at the time of the murder and gotten a f*ck-off, followed by bitch-deserved-it…

They’d hauled him off the couch, read him his rights as she’d cuffed him—

“Oh,” she said, eyes going wide.

Vin lifted an eyebrow. “Yeah. ‘Oh.’”

“Was it your turn?” she asked sweetly.

“That voice doesn’t work on me, sweetheart. Neither do the baby blues.”

She batted her eyelashes. “How about this?”

“Nope,” he said, advancing on her. “It was my turn. Fair and square.”

“Well now, hold on,” she said. “What about the entire three months that I was gone? You got to cuff plenty of people, and I got to cuff none.”

“Doesn’t count. You weren’t there,” he said. “You know the deal. We take turns with the cuffing. And this one was mine.”