LITMIR.BIZ

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between them as he possibly could—especially with his mind straying back to that tantalizing glimpse of stocking every other minute. He wasn’t about to be rude, however. “Amanda.” The name pleased him as it rolled off his tongue. “Could you tell me why you were visiting Victor Gallagher today?”

      She blanched. She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She might as well have shouted through a megaphone that she was about lie to him. “It was just a simple…social call.”

      Duke hadn’t suspected Clyde Matthews’s daughter of anything save poor judgment in boyfriends, but now he began to wonder. She looked as guilty as a sinner on Sunday. “Apparently you were going to surprise him…?”

      She adjusted the coat over her lap for the tenth time. “What makes you say that?”

      “If he knew you were on your way over, don’t you think he would have showed his lady friend to the door?”

      Her cheeks grew as pink as her stockings. “Then it’s a good thing I didn’t tell him I was on my way, isn’t it? I never would have known.”

      God knew he could relate to how she felt. He’d learned quickly that the cop groupies he’d dated when he first arrived in New York weren’t picky about which detective they slept with. Duke’s attempts to be selective since then had left him with long dry spells. In fact, his current dry spell had him drooling over Amanda Matthews’s trim calves beneath those sheer stockings, and wreaking havoc on his concentration.

      Duke squelched his sympathy, needing to focus on his job. “So your visit today was social?”

      She nodded, looking a bit calmer now.

      Duke moved on, filing away her reactions along with her answers. He would uncover Amanda’s secrets sooner or later, even if he had to keep her and her very short skirt here for another hour.

      Heaven help him.

      He withdrew a pen and paper to give himself something to do, a way to distract himself. “And how would you characterize your relationship overall? Is it mostly social, or do the two of you discuss business when you spend time together?”

      Amanda heard the detective’s question, but she didn’t want to answer it. She watched his pen seesaw back and forth over his thumb, mesmerized, and tried to think of a way around the question. She didn’t need another cop nosing into her family’s business. Her father might look like a favored son of the mob, but he only made suits for them. The association had troubled her for years, but she had yet to talk her father out of his bigwig clients.

      “Victor and I rarely discussed business,” she replied, shifting her position in the gray leather wingback chair.

      Her limbs were stiff with the tension of her rigid posture, but she refused to unveil another millimeter of stocking. Had it been her imagination, or had Duke Rawlins’s eyes widened at the revelation of so much thigh a few moments ago?

      Had he been admiring her stockings or contemplating indecent exposure charges?

      “When you did discuss business, what sorts of things would come up?”

      “Victor is not on the creative side of my business, so there wasn’t really much for us to discuss. He’d encourage me to find out what kinds of fabric I thought my father might want for his next collection ahead of time so that Victor could be first in line to give him good prices on it.”

      The pen stopped seesawing. “Did you?”

      His intent look made her wonder if she should have called a lawyer. But then, what did she have to hide?

      Besides the obvious.

      “Would it be a crime if I did?” She would brazen this out.

      “No, Amanda.”

      Why had she asked him to call her that? Her name on his lips had a way of slithering over her like a slow caress. As if in response, the ties on her merry widow began to unravel from their loose knot, threatening to leave Amanda as unbound and jiggling as that hussy Victor had been sleeping with. She sucked in her belly, hoping to ease off any extra pressure from the garment.

      This particular article of clothing was not designed to wear for more than five minutes anyway. It was intended to drive a man wild in thirty seconds flat. No wonder she was springing out of it. “Well, I have never been able to anticipate my father’s creative direction, so I never supplied Victor with any inside information. He found out what Clyde Matthews wanted when the rest of us did.”

      Her father thrived on the aesthetic of a successful artist—the lunches in trendy cafés, the shows in Paris and Milan, the endless parade of up-and-coming designers, artists and models that peopled his studio at all hours. It didn’t seem to bother him that his artistic immersion had never left time in his life for anything else, including his only child.

      Duke Rawlins cleared his throat and set aside his hyperactive pen. “So how long have you known Gallagher?”

      Something in his demeanor, the way he leaned forward slightly, made the question sound personal.

      The silk lining of her coat teased the tops of her breasts with every breath she took. The fabric would be teasing a whole lot more if her merry widow sprung loose and wound up around her ankles. “For almost a year.”

      And Victor had never given her more than a good-night kiss in all that time. Obviously, he’d had a more pleasing partner to fulfill his other needs.

      The dog.

      “Has he ever offered you illegal drugs?”

      “I beg your pardon?” Righteous indignation fired through her.

      “You know, methamphetamines, crack, ecstasy, any number of lab-created specialties—”

      “He most certainly did not!” Just who did Duke Rawlins think she was? Amanda might not be wearing anything but lace and satin beneath her coat, but she was not that kind of girl.

      Trying to coerce her boyfriend into an intimate relationship ranked as her biggest moral transgression to date.

      “I have to ask, Amanda.” At least the detective had the decency to flash her a semi-apologetic smile. “If it makes you feel any better, you don’t seem to fit my profile of a drug user anyway.”

      Before Amanda could splutter a retort, a uniformed police officer approached.

      “Excuse me, Detective.” The young woman lifted a shopping bag to show Duke Rawlins. “We are finished here. I checked and rechecked all the labels and the evidence-gathering procedures. We dug up a few bills of sale for fabric, a list that might be potential drug buyers. Everything is in order.”

      Amanda eyed the tall female officer labeled R. Patterson as the woman spoke with Amanda’s interrogator. Ms. Patterson didn’t look like the type to ever wind up half-naked in a police interrogation. Amanda would also lay odds that R. Patterson would kick her boyfriend’s butt if he dared to treat her the way Victor had treated Amanda.

      Amanda had that kind of confidence in her professional world, but on a personal level, she couldn’t seem to get her act together. She’d let her father take advantage of her half her life, and now she’d obviously allowed Victor to do the same thing.

      “Thanks, Patterson,” Duke Rawlins called over his shoulder as the woman left with the last remaining uniformed officer.

      Leaving Amanda alone with a very sexy detective.

      The quiet of Victor’s apartment seemed to intensify after the door shut behind the departing officers. Amanda became aware of the clock ticking on the wall, the hum of the overhead light in the kitchen.

      And she became keenly aware of Duke Rawlins’s intensely blue eyes upon her.

      How could she feel such tangible lust for a man she’d just met? A man who’d arrested her boyfriend, witnessed the biggest humiliation of her life and held her captive with his interrogation while an even bigger humiliation threatened in the form of a renegade

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