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which was shaped like a huge musical note. “Thanks.”
    “Hold it.” He placed the palm of his hand on the door as she unlocked it. “You’re not going to ask me in for a cup of coffee?”
    She didn’t turn, only twisted her head. “No.”
    She smelled like the night, he thought. Dark, deep, dangerous. “That’s downright unfriendly.”
    The flash of humor came again. “I know. See you around, Slick.”
    His hand dropped onto hers on the knob, took a firm hold. “Do you eat?”
    The humor vanished. That didn’t surprise him. What did was what replaced it. Confusion. And—hecould have sworn—shyness. She recovered so quickly that he was certain he’d imagined it.
    “Once or twice a week.”
    “Tomorrow.” His hand remained over hers. He couldn’t be sure about what he’d thought he saw in her eyes, but he knew her pulse had quickened under his fingers.
    “I may eat tomorrow.”
    “With me.”
    It amazed her that she fumbled. It had been years since she’d experienced this baffling reaction to a man. And those years had been quiet and smooth. Refusing a date was as simple as saying no. At least it always had been for her. Now she found herself wanting to smile and ask him what time she should be ready. The words were nearly out of her mouth before she caught herself.
    “That’s an incredibly smooth offer, Detective, but I’ll have to pass.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t date cops.”
    Before she could weaken, she slipped inside and closed the door in his face.
    ***
    Boyd shuffled the papers on his desk and scowled. The O’Roarke case was hardly his only assignment, but he couldn’t get his mind off it. Couldn’t get his mind off O’Roarke, he thought, wishing briefly but intensely for a cigarette.
    The veteran cop sitting two feet away from him was puffing away like a chimney as he talked to a snitch. Boyd breathed in deep, wishing he could learn to hate the smell like other nonsmokers.
    Instead, he continued to torture himself by drawing in the seductive scent—that, and the other, less appealing aromas of a precinct station. Overheated coffee, overheated flesh, the cheap perfume hovering around a pair of working girls who lounged resignedly on a nearby bench.
    Intrusions, he thought, that he rarely noticed in the day-to-day scheme of things. Tonight they warred with his concentration. The smells, the sound of keyboards clicking, phones ringing, shoes scuffing along the linoleum, the way one of the overhead lights winked sporadically.
    It didn’t help his disposition that for the past three days Priscilla Alice O’Roarke had stuck fast to his mind like a thick, thorny spike. No amount of effort could shake her loose. It might be because both he and his partner had spent hours at a time with her in the booth during her show. It might be because he’d seen her with her defenses down. It might be because he’d felt, fleetingly, her surge of response to him.
    It might be, Boyd thought in disgust. Then again, it might not.
    He wasn’t a man whose ego was easily bruised by the refusal of a date. He liked to think that he had enough confidence in himself to understand he didn’t appeal to every woman. The fact that he’d appealed to what he considered a healthy number of them in his thirty-three years was enough to satisfy him.
    The trouble was, he was hung up on one woman. And she wasn’t having any of it.
    He could live with it.
    The simple fact was that he had a job to do now. He wasn’t convinced that Cilla was in any immediate danger. But she was being harassed, systematically and thoroughly. Both he and Althea had started the ball rolling, questioning men with priors that fit the M.O., poking their fingers into Cilla’s personal and professional lives since she had come to Denver, quietly investigating her coworkers.
    So far the score was zip.
    Time to dig deeper, Boyd decided. He had Cilla’s résumé in his hand. It was an interesting piece of work in itself. Just like the woman it