This was it. No time for lines. Just fucking talk to the gorgeous creature. “Seems I’ve been caught staring,” he said as he reached her, claiming a patch of concrete real estate a foot away.

“I’m afraid I’m guilty on that count, too,” she fired back, her voice laced with a torch-singer sultriness, her words telling him to keep going.

She had the pen in her hand and she twirled it once absently.

He tipped his forehead toward it. “Incidentally, I’m astonishingly good at picking up pens that beautiful women drop outside our fine city’s government buildings.”

Her lips twitched. Red. Cherry red and full. He wanted to know what they tasted like. How they felt. What she liked to do with them.

She brought the pen to her lips, danced it between them, raised her eyebrows in an invitation, and then let it drop. It clattered to the sidewalk. “Is that so?”

The pen was like a promise. Of something more. Of flirting, and then flirting back. Of phone numbers to follow. And then some. Oh yeah, so much and then some.

“That is so,” he said in a firm voice, bending down to pick up the writing implement, just as Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ crooned from her phone. He rose, and she was tapping her screen, sliding her thumb across it.

“Must answer this. But thank you so much for the pen. By the way, I like your tie.” She reached out to trail a finger down the silky fabric, her hand terribly close to his chest. Then she held up that finger, asking him to wait.

“So good to hear from you,” she said into the phone, keeping her eyes on him the whole time. “I can’t wait to see you tonight at the gala at Aria,” she said, arching an eyebrow at Ryan as she emphasized that last word. “It’s going to be a fabulous event and we’ll raise so much money. My only hope is there will be some gorgeous man there in a green tie who can afford a last-minute ticket.”

He shot her a grin—a lopsided smile that said yes, the man in the green tie could absolutely afford a ticket.

He nodded his RSVP to the gala. She waved goodbye and walked down the street.

Suddenly, Ryan had plans that night.

* * *

Ryan wondered if everyone he encountered today had been hired from Central Casting. Because the detective was straight out of a script. If there was a dress code for police detectives, rule number one must be: thou shalt not tightly knot a tie. John Winston had taken that to heart and was sporting the slightly-loosened look, as if he’d been tugging on his navy tie all day, frustration increasing as he questioned belligerent suspects. Then there were the other hallmarks of the job, from the striped button-down with the cuffs rolled up, to the paper cup of deli coffee on the desk in his office. Even the stubble seemed to have been custom ordered to fit the part of homicide detective.

Funny how people could look like their jobs. Briefly, Ryan wondered if the blonde was a movie star. He wouldn’t be surprised.

“Thanks for coming in,” Winston said, shutting the door to his office behind them. Glass windows looked out over the rest of the department, and a sea of half-empty desks. Ryan wasn’t sure if that meant business was good or bad in homicide. “Have a seat.” The man gestured to a frayed brown office chair. “Ordinarily, I’d chat with you in a witness room, but they’re all full right now.”

So it was a busy day here.

“This works fine for me. What can I do for you?” Ryan asked as he sat down, eager to glean any details he could about the reopened investigation into his father’s murder.

Winston had called earlier in the week and asked him to come in. To help shed some light on the case, the detective had emphasized. “You’re not the target of the investigation. This isn’t about you. But you are a potential witness so I’d like to talk to you,” Winston had said on the phone.

Ryan was flying solo here today. Bringing a lawyer in for routine questioning would make it look as if he had something to hide. He did have something to hide, but he didn’t need an attorney by his side to keep the vault in his brain locked tight. That had been sealed for eighteen years, and no crowbar would get it open, so he wasn’t worried.

He was, however, damn curious. He wanted to know what Winston knew about his family. About his mother in prison. About his father, six feet under. Ryan quickly scanned the detective’s desk for any clue as to who John Winston was—a family photo, pictures of the detective with his kid, maybe even some sports memorabilia. But there were no telltale signs, save for an autographed baseball in a plastic case amidst a neat desk covered only with newspapers and a stack of Manila folders.

Ryan was left to his own devices to construct his character bio for John Winston, and he certainly didn’t need a photo on the desk to know the chances were good that Winston was a cop because his dad had been one, or because someone he cared about had been a victim of a crime.

That was how a man usually went into this business. He wasn’t judging Winston. Hell, Ryan fit the bill himself. He ran a private security firm, and he matched the job profile for that profession. Given that his father, Thomas Paige, had been gunned down in his own driveway when Ryan was fourteen, his job motivation was no mystery to anyone.

The detective grabbed the chair opposite Ryan. “I appreciate you coming in,” Winston said, as he held up a digital recorder. “I’m going to record this. Standard procedure whenever we talk to someone.” Ryan nodded as Winston set the recorder on his desk. “And, please, I’d like to keep what you say just between us. We’re going to be talking to a lot of people, and I want you to feel free to speak about what you know of your parents, and for others to do the same. I’m just hoping you might be able to answer a few questions that could help us in this investigation.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Ryan said, shooting him a smile. See? Nothing to hide. “You’ve got us all curious. Not gonna lie—we were pretty damn surprised when you showed up at my grandma’s house and told us the case was being reopened. Last thing I expected to hear. What have you got?”

The shooting was eighteen years ago, and his mother was doing hard time for it. She’d gone to trial quickly for murder for hire, along with the gunman, and both were behind bars. Ryan was dying to know why after eighteen years a closed case had gotten hot again.

Winston clucked his tongue and held out his hands wide, as if he was saying he was sorry. “I’m not really at liberty to say yet, since nothing has been confirmed. But some new evidence has come to light, and we’re trying to determine the validity of it.”

“New evidence about my mother’s guilt, or innocence?”

Dora Prince had steadfastly maintained her innocence. Of course, there was hardly an inmate in any prison anywhere who didn’t. Still, she was his mother, and he wanted to know if there was truth to her claim. He’d love to believe her. Hell, he’d be beside himself to learn his mother wasn’t a killer. He’d held on to the possibility for as long as she’d been locked away, grasping it tenaciously, never letting it go, waiting for a moment like this. For the chance that she might not have done it. That he wasn’t raised by a murderer. He dug his fingers into his palms in anticipation.

But the expression on Winston’s face was stony, his eyes hard. “New evidence about the crime,” he said, giving nothing away. “I know you were fourteen at the time, but is there any chance you remember some of the people your mother was associating with then?”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. The answer was yes, and the answer was no. Ryan knew more than he should, but not enough to make sense of what his mother had given him, and he sure as hell didn’t want to say the wrong thing. He bought himself some time. “Can you be a little more specific?”