She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Maybe once I get the tox screen on her blood back,” she said. “For now… there’s some bruising to her knuckles that looks a few days old. It's premortem.”
“Can you get the tox screen rushed?”
Sun shook her head. “I doubt it,” she said. “There are other cases with more urgency in the queue. Sorry.”
He waved that off. It wasn’t Sun’s fault. “Would you give me a call when they come back?” he asked. “Just for my peace of mind.”
“You want to be a detective now?” Sun teased him and then relented at his look. “Okay, okay. I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve told O’Hara. Now go on. I have work to do.”
She flapped her hands at him. Marlow took the not-even-a-hint and left.
“Continue the sweep.” Cade paced back and forth across the width of the hall. The thud of his booted heels as they hit the floor echoed off the walls. “I know we found the girl’s hands, Lem, but I want to know if there are any other traps. And I want them removed. Today. Before one of our clients wakes up in the morning with a missing foot.”
He hung up and looked like he was going to throw the phone at the wall for a moment. Instead, he grimaced and shoved it into his back pocket.
“Do you think the police department would be interested in a lightly-used ex-Marine who just got sued into bankruptcy?” he asked, in a voice that was too harsh for the joke. “Or would crime be a better bet?”
Cade took a step back and slouched against the wall, his head tilted back and lower lip folded between his teeth as he exhaled raggedly. The last time Marlow had seen him in that pose he’d been naked.
“You want to go get a drink?” Marlow asked.
Cade lifted his head and gave Marlow a suspicious look out of wolf-amber eyes in a human face. It hitched Marlow’s heart with a jolt of adrenaline that was half fight and half fuck. He already regretted the question.
“So you went and decided on your own whether I was a flirt or an asshole?” Cade said as he pushed himself off the wall and stalked forward. “Or did it not matter if I’m picking up the check?”
Marlow snorted.
“Don’t know where the fuck you think serves whiskey before noon,” he said as he turned away. The rest of the sentence he tossed over his shoulder as he walked down the hall. “But trust me, the most expensive bottle behind the bar costs about twenty bucks. If you want me to be impressed at you paying the tab, we’ll need to run one for a year first.”
He was pretty pleased with that. Then Cade caught up with him. His hand skimmed down Marlow’s spine and settled in the small of his back, high enough to be appropriate and low enough it wouldn’t take much to change that. The breath caught hot and scratchy in Marlow’s throat.
“See how the first date goes first,” Cade said in his ear. “Think of it like a job interview.”
Chapter Eight
“JOB INTERVIEW,” CADEmuttered to himself as he leaned against the bar and waited for the barman to make his way down. He rubbed his eye with his knuckle until he saw blurs of color behind the lid. “Fucking hell.”
Hecouldhave just kept his mouth shut. That had been an option. No, he had to open it and try to be clever. It hadn’t worked.
To be honest, Marlow’s main flaw, as far as Cade could see anyhow, was that he was still willing to share a table with Cade after that. Low self-esteem was all Cade could put that down to at this point.
And possibly the fact Cade was rich and handsome. That had never hurt.
The barman finally finished dishing out foil-wrapped burritos and bottles of cheap beer to the bone-weary ER doctors. He wiped his hands on the old rag of cloth behind the bar and turned toward Cade.
“What can I get you?” he asked.
“What’s the most expensive bottle you have?”
Cade scanned the shelves behind the heavy-shouldered gray-bearded man. He hoped for a good Japanese whiskey, but a cursory glance convinced him he was out of luck there.
The barman looked at him for a second, then bent down to reach under the bar. He came up with a dusty bottle decorated with a bright red ribbon.
“Grey Goose,” he said, one beefy hand still wrapped around the neck. “For you, fifty bucks.”
“And if it wasn’t me?”
When the barman smiled, a gold tooth glittered in the side of his mouth. Null then. Cade supposed that made sense for a bar called the Moon After.
