“Don’t.” His smile disappeared. “Don’t apologize if you don’t mean it, and I don’t think you do. You like her, and that’s fine. So don’t apologize for liking her. I won’t apologize for thinking she’s a worm.”

“It wasn’t about her, not really. You know that. I just couldn’t take the idea of waiting while he beat her.”

A cocoa-warm silence filled the cool fluorescent kitchen. Jim reached over and traced the line of her cheek with one finger.

“I know,” he said. His finger found the bump at her jaw where the break hadn’t healed cleanly. “Funny, even when you talk about him, you sound like you love him.”

“He was my father,” she said, as if that explained something. She leaned her cheek against his hand, closing her eyes. “Which mall today?”

“Oh, I don’t know. We’re going after the blue-collars at the hockey game tomorrow, want to go after the ladies who lunch? I like playing Robin Hood. Rob from the rich, give to us.”

She felt her lips lift in a grin. His warm thumb traced them; she opened her mouth and nipped it lightly.

“Not fair,” he said, and she opened her eyes to his smile. Warm, so warm.

With a surge of wickedness she had never known she had, she licked his thumb and took it in her mouth, sliding down to the base. His eyes widened. She flicked his thumb lightly with her tongue, let it slide out again, and said, “Is that better?”

“You’ve been hanging around the hooker way too much.” She liked the unsteadiness in his voice. “Robby—”

She set her cup aside and came into his arms. His lips and tongue tasted of chocolate. He smelled of clean male skin with just a touch of sweat, and in the intimate body-to-body pressure she felt his erection nudge at her. His hands slid down under her coat and brushed over her sides, her breasts, her hips. Her breath sighed out into the hollow of his neck.

In one of those strange fits of chauvinism, he picked her up and carried her to the bedroom.

The afterglow left her lazy and jittery, more than an hour later. She had to concentrate to dip the wallet cleanly, concentrate harder to pass it to Jim’s waiting hand as he passed. The deft brush of their fingers made her smile. She turned off into a store and examined a rack of women’s suits—conservative, well-made, in solid businesslike colors. At the end of the rack a mustard-yellow jacket hung in forlorn exile. Robby’s fingers brushed it lightly, gliding over the wool. She draped the sleeve over her skin and made a face.