Page 21 of The Agent
For a moment she answered him with a cool, measuring look. Then the corners of her lips curled upward. “I’m not sure about Alice, but Dawn might kick your butt.”
Her smile arrowed right down to his groin. “How much longer do you need here?” he asked.
“Honestly, my concentration is shot,” she said with a glance at the laptop in front of her. “I might as well admit it and go home.”
A door slammed at the back of the salon and Tully tensed. “Who’s that?”
When footsteps sounded on the stairs that ran up the wall beside her office, she said, “It must be Deion. He rents the apartment upstairs.”
“Let’s go talk to him. See if he’s noticed anything out of the ordinary around here.” Another long shot, but some people observed more than they realized. It just took the right questions to draw the knowledge out of them.
Tully shifted into what Natalie had come to think of as “FBI mode.” His eyes took on a glint of purpose, the angle of his jaw hardened, and he exuded a coiled energy that sent a sexual thrill zinging down to her belly. She forced her gaze back to her laptop, shutting down the accounting program and closing the computer.
“Give me a quick background sketch on your tenant,” Tully said.
Natalie pulled her focus back to Deion. “He’s young—in his midtwenties. He works a lot of odd hours at the Harper Court Mall selling men’s suits. He’s saving up to travel to Patagonia because he’s an outdoor lover. As a landlord, I couldn’t ask for a better tenant. He keeps his place immaculate and always pays the rent on time.”
He also had been arrested for shoplifting when he was a teenager. The social worker he’d been assigned was one of Natalie’s clients, and she was the one who’d suggested Deion as a tenant when the apartment became vacant. Natalie admired him for working hard to change his life, so she’d rented to him for below market rate. However, she wasn’t going to share all that information with Tully.
“How long has he lived here?” Tully asked, his attention focusing like a laser.
“About eight months.” She gave him back an equally level gaze. “He’s not my stalker.”
Tully held up his hands. “I didn’t say he was.”
“You have that look in your eyes.” She stood up. Deion didn’t need to deal with being treated like a suspect.
He nodded and rose, standing aside in her small office so she could go through the door first. “Actually, I want to recruit him,” Tully said. “Everyone around you should know about the stalker so they can keep an eye out for someone who behaves strangely. He’s an excellent candidate because he’s familiar with what’s normal around the salon at all different times of day.”
Natalie felt a pang of guilt for misjudging Tully’s intentions. “I hate people knowing about this whole stalker thing. It’s so ... melodramatic. Sometimes I think I must be imagining it.”
She’d felt that way about some of the things Matt had said and done to her as well. She was just an average, everyday person. How did she get involved in these crazy situations? What did she do to attract such awful people? The questions shook her and she inhaled sharply.
Tully stepped in front of her and pivoted, his head tilted downward so she could easily look into his eyes. “You’renotimagining it. Your reality has just shifted for a short time because you are the victim of a crime. This is not melodrama. This is real.”
“I hate that word, ‘victim.’ I don’t ever want to be a victim.”Again.She’d allowed Matt to crush her into a person she barely recognized. She refused to let that happen to her now for any reason.
Tully cupped his hands over her shoulders, their strength and warmth seeping through her blouse to her skin. “Bad choice of word. You’re the stalker’s target, his prey. But prey can be smart and lead the predator into a trap.”
The concern that softened his face brought a prickle of tears to her eyes. She blinked them back hard. “Then let’s set that trap.”
He dropped his hands, the loss of his touch more noticeable than she wanted it to be. “We’re working on it.” He fell into step beside her, his gaze sweeping back and forth as they walked down the hallway beside the front staircase and through the door to the kitchen. He winced. “I hate french doors. They’re worse than sliders.”
Natalie smiled. “Pam wasn’t crazy about them either. But they’re alarmed and there’s a glass-break detector in the corner there.” She pointed.
He just shook his head. She knew he was thinking what Pam had voiced—that the alarm only discouraged amateur thieves. Someone who really wanted to get in would know that it took at least ten minutes for the phone calls to go out and the police to arrive.
“It’s not as though I sleep here, you know,” she pointed out, opening the door to the back foyer. The back stairs were narrow, so she went ahead of Tully, marveling at the fact that her footsteps made more noise on the oak treads than his, despite his cowboy boots. By the time they reached the landing where the steps turned, her whole back fizzed with a delicious tingling. She could almost feel his eyes resting on her. She had to control her primitive urge to put an extra sway in her hips.
She knocked and turned her head to watch Tully’s reaction to his first sight of Deion. She heard the door open and caught the slight widening of Tully’s eyes before she looked at her tenant.
Deion was flat-out gorgeous and the sight of him never got old. He had huge brown eyes, glorious high cheekbones, a perfect jawline, and spectacular dreadlocks. Since he’d just come from work, he was still wearing one of the tailored suits that emphasized his trim, fit build, although he’d discarded the necktie.
“Hey, Nat,” Deion said while eyeing Tully warily. “What’s up?”
“This is my”—she stumbled over what to call him—“friend, Tully Gibson. He’s helping me with a problem I have. May we come in?”
“Sure.” Deion led them into the living area, which was furnished with the inexpensive furniture Natalie had left behind when she moved to her new house. Except Deion had rearranged things and added little decorative touches that jazzed it up. “You want something to drink?”
