She looked nervous again. “I’m not...not completely sure.”
“Why don’t we try it for a while and see?”
Some of the stiffness eased from her shoulders. “Fair enough.”
He had the job, Jase thought. Now all he had to do to gain Kate’s trust was to find her a killer. A look passed between them, and the air in the room seemed to thicken and heat.
The sooner he got the job done the better.
CHAPTER FOUR
Kate could hardly believe it. Jason Maddox, the last man in the world she wanted to see, was sitting right beside her. Worse yet, he was the man she had just hired to help her find Chrissy’s killer. What the unholy hell had just happened?
“So...um...where do we start?” she asked, accepting whatever circumstances fate seemed to have set in motion.
“I need to take some notes,” Maddox said. “I’ll be right back.” He rose from the swivel chair next to hers, and she tried not to think how good he looked in a yellow knit pullover and dark blue jeans.
But the pullover stretched over his powerful chest and an amazing set of biceps, one with a tattoo of an eagle perched on a globe and the wordsSemper Fiinked beneath it. She had noticed it that night in the parking lot.
She blocked the thought as he walked away and tried not to notice his long legs, broad back and round, muscular behind. She felt like fanning herself. Just looking at all that hard masculinity made her face feel warm.
He disappeared out the door, returned a few minutes later with a lined yellow pad and sat back down at the conference table.
“In my line of work you have to be pretty tech savvy, but writing things down helps me focus and gives me something solid to look at.” He clicked the end of his pen and settled back in his seat, stretching those long legs out in front of him.
“Tell me about Chrissy.”
She forced herself to concentrate, thought of her sister as a child, and warm memories slipped through her.
“She was a beautiful little girl. By the time she was a teenager, she was gorgeous. Blond hair and big blue eyes. She was always popular in school. In her freshman year, she was a cheerleader.”
Kate told him how she and Chrissy had been raised in Rockdale, a tiny town northeast of Austin, how Chrissy had always hated it and wanted to move to the city. “I left for college as soon as I finished high school, and as she grew older, she got so envious. She couldn’t wait to be old enough to leave.”
“Were the two of you close?” Maddox asked. Kate forced herself to think of him that way, as Maddox, not Jason, not the man she had kissed, then seduced in the parking lot, not the man who had held her when she cried.
“She was eleven years younger, so no, we were never very close. By the time Chrissy was in high school, I was working in Dallas. By then, Mom and Dad were fighting all the time. That’s when Chrissy started having trouble with drugs and alcohol. When Dad left home, things got worse.”
“In what way?”
“Mom couldn’t control her. She was constantly in trouble at school. I tried to talk to her, but it didn’t do any good. She was sixteen when she ran away. My dad was remarried and living in New York. Mom blamed herself. She died later that year.” And Kate missed her every day.
“The cops never came up with any information on your sister’s whereabouts?”
“The police did everything they could to find her, but it was like she had vanished into thin air. I never saw her again, not until I went to the morgue.” She glanced away, the pain still close to the surface. “If I’d known she was in Dallas, maybe I could have found a way to help her. At least talked to her, donesomething.”
“Maybe that was the reason she came here. She wanted to see you again.”
A lump swelled in her throat. “There’s a chance, I guess, but it never happened. I wish it had.”
Maddox made notes on the yellow pad, but she thought he was using it more as a tool to connect with a client than a way to jog his memory.
“I need to see the police report,” he said. “See what they’ve got on the case so far.”
“They said she was using the name Tina Galen. According to Detective Benson, she was a heroin addict and a prostitute. God, just saying it hurts.”
“Benson’s the lead on the case?”
“Yeah. He seemed like a real dick, but I guess I could be wrong.”
