"No, but at least I know what love feels like."
"Are you sure about that, Captain?"
"Positive."
"Have you ever been hurt?"
"Yes. My senior year in high school, I fell hard for a girl who wound up marrying my best friend. I've never been more miserable."
It took her a moment to come up with a response to that. "You seem to have survived," she said. "But back to Kalyna."
"We were talking about Paris."
"We were done with Paris."
"Not yet. Did she or did she not admit I was never violent with her?"
He wanted an answer and he knew what that answer would be.
"Fine. If it'l allow us to move on, she said you were never violent."
There was more. Ava was holding out on him; he could tell. "What were her exact words? Your investigator asked, 'Was he ever violent with you?' And she said..."
Ms. Bixby blew out a sigh. "Never. He was an amazing lover.' Happy now?"
"I'd be happier if you believed her," he said.
"I'l take that part on faith because whether or not you were amazing in the sack isn't really the issue here. Just because you never hit Paris doesn't mean you've never hit anybody."
He hung an elbow over the back of his chair. "If what Paris had to say has no bearing, why'd you track her down in the first place? Her testimony only counts if it's dirt?"
She frowned. "She's stil in love with you. That doesn't make her praise very reliable."
"You can talk to any of the women I've dated. They'l all tell you I'm an amazing lover." He laughed at his own joke. But she didn't even crack a smile. "What, you have no sense of humor?" he asked.
"I'm not sure that was a joke."
He splayed his hands. "I was kidding. You know I was kidding."
Her eyebrows arched.
"Forget it." He made a dismissive gesture. "I'm not a sexual predator."
"Can you back that up with more than your word and a couple of character witnesses?" she asked.
He tipped his cup to get at the ice. Ava was looking for hard evidence, but what evidence there was seemed to support Kalyna's side.
"The cabdriver who took us to her place can tell you I got into his cab alone and gave him my home address. He'l also tell you that Kalyna climbed in at the last second, of her own volition, and insisted he take us to her place instead."
"You didn't mind having your vehicle commandeered?"
He put his cup back on the table. "I was pretty preoccupied."
"Doing what?"
Their eyes met again, and this time he refused to glance away. "Use your imagination."
When the color in her cheeks heightened, he hid a smile. For all her tough talk, Ms. Bixby wasn't nearly as world-wise as she pretended. And that was good to know, because it finally gave him an advantage. "Did the cabdriver see what was going on?" she asked.
"He couldn't have missed it."
"Did he ask her to buckle up or do anything else to acknowledge the fact that he'd witnessed this behavior?"
"No. But I could feel him watching us in the rearview mirror. That's why I tried to convince her to back off until we got to her apartment."
Ava asked him for the name of the cab company and the approximate time and wrote it down, but he got the impression she could easily have remembered that information. She was using her pen and paper to regain her bearings. The conversation, and the visual images it aroused, was affecting her more than she wanted.
"You asked her to stop but she couldn't wait?" she said when she looked up.
He nearly cracked another joke about his sex appeal. She already thought he was arrogant, which tempted him to play it up. But he knew it wasn't in his best interests to make himself look bad. So he overrode the impulse by getting far more specific than he would have otherwise. If she wanted answers that wouldn't spare her sensibilities, he'd give them to her.
"She wouldn't. She was moaning and talking dirty to me, telling me she'd never touched a man who was bigger and thicker than I am. She was putting on a show."
He'd expected to see her writhe in embarrassment. But she didn't.
She was on to him. "Apparently, so are you," she said dryly.
He tried an innocent scowl. "I'm just telling you what happened."
Her gaze remained steady. "Sounds like you have an excellent memory of the night's events, including word-for-word snippets of the conversation."
The cab ride was mostly a blur. He knew Kalyna had been all over him, because he'd tried to stop her, but that was it. "Well, I'm guessing she said something like that," he told her. "But to be honest, I don't remember much more than her grinding against me while trying to stick her tongue down my throat."
Ava's face reddened, but her emotions had nothing to do with embarrassment. "You think it's funny?" she snapped. "You're accused of rape!"
The desire to laugh disappeared as the R word scraped through Luke's brain like broken shards of glass. He managed a careless shrug, but he was sick inside and doing everything he could not to show it, especially to this particular woman. He had no idea how his life had come to this. One bad decision--that was all it had taken. "I might as wel have a good laugh at your expense, Ms. Bixby, because you're not going to believe me no matter what I say."
This seemed to bring her up short just when she was about to let him have it. "That's a rather fatalistic view, wouldn't you say?"
"You've been biased since I introduced myself."
"If I didn't want to hear your side, I wouldn't be sitting here."
"You're sitting here, but you're not really listening. You're merely searching for tidbits to support what you've already heard from Kalyna."
"That's not how it is," she argued. "Anyway, I can't form a fair opinion if you won't cooperate with me."
Muttering an unintelligible curse, he pressed a thumb and finger against his closed eyelids. What was wrong with him? He was panicked, frantic, furious--and when she'd provided a target, he'd gladly gone after it.
But he was only hurting himself.
"Fine," he said, sobering. "I get it. You're right. I'm sorry." He didn't give her the chance to accept or reject his apology; he immediately went on, hoping to get this over with as soon as possible. "What else do you want to know?"
If she was surprised by his sudden reversal, she didn't comment on it.
She remained very much in control--calm and cool. But then, she wasn't the one whose life hung in the balance. "What happened after you reached the apartment?"