Capelli sat back in his desk chair, staring at the precise piles of data he’d compiled in total disbelief. Statistically speaking, the odds that this much information wouldn’t yield so much as a glimmer of a lead had to be astronomically high. Yet this case seemed bound and determined to defy any sort of normalcy, so really, he shouldn’t be surprised.

Christ, they had nothing. And if there was one thing Capelli hated above all others, it was a puzzle he couldn’t analyze and figure out.

Especially when said puzzle came with two dead bodies attached to it.

“Okay,” he murmured, looking at the copy of the main case board screen he’d pulled up on his monitor. The intelligence office was quiet and semi-dark, with Isabella having left to swing by the sufentanil for dinner and Hollister, Maxwell, and Hale calling it quits to celebrate their Friday night at the Crooked Angel not long after that. Sinclair was still in his office, which wasn’t really a fair barometer, because Capelli had a hard suspicion that the guy actually lived in his office rather than the apartment he rented a few blocks away. But the quiet would give Capelli a chance to get some work done, and the work would keep him busy.

Weekends were the hardest, with all their idle time.

He forced his eyes to focus on the screen and his pulse to remain status quo. Scanning the monitor on the desk in front of him, he tapped the touch screen to maximize the crime scene reports, re-reading each one even though he’d memorized them by default the first time through. He was better with numbers and images than words, though, and sometimes the repetition offered up a new angle.

At this point, anything would be better than the nothing he had, so he planted his elbows on his desk and read.

The excessive amounts of water needed to put out the fire had pretty much rendered any evidence that might have been left behind useless, for both the murder and the meth lab. Not that their crime scene techs hadn’t gone through and collected what little they could anyway, but Capelli knew far better than to think that between the soaking and the fire that had required it, any fingerprints or viable DNA samples—or, okay, any clues at all—had survived. Getting anywhere with the Scarlet Reapers had been a bust, too. Their leader, an absolute mountain of a dude who ironically went by Little Ray, had been unequivocally unhelpful when Maxwell and Hale had reached out for a little knock and talk after they’d left the scene of the fire.

They might get lucky with physical evidence on the bodies, but for now, if Capelli wanted to get anywhere, he’d have to rely on background checks (nothing), chatter from confidential informants (nada), and the information gathered from the interviews done at the scene (nil.)

Well, shit. Good thing he loved a challenge.

Closing his eyes, Capelli pictured the scene reports in his mind, marshaling the words into order so he could look at the details in his mind’s eye, like a photograph. Slater’s account had been pretty basic—yes, he’d assessed the fire and seen the chemicals, no, he hadn’t seen the victim until Bridges had made the call to fall out. After that, the only detail he’d been able to recall with any accuracy was the blood that had been everywhere, along with the fact that Shae had run back into the house to grab the victim and lead Slater to safety.

Now Capelli’s pulse did jump, rendering him stupid for the second time today. While the reaction wasn’t entirely unnatural considering Shae’s lack of regard for anything resembling a rule or the all-emotions, all-the-time way she’d abruptly ended their conversation before walking away from him at the scene, it was still dangerous.

Actually, check that. His uncharacteristic reaction wasn’t really the problem.

The impulsive thoughts about the even more impulsive firefighter who had caused it, not once, but twice today? Now those were downright fucking dangerous.

I don’t just see facts, Capelli, came that infuriatingly sexy, borderline overconfident voice from the spot where his memory had stored it with care.

I see everything.

“You’re here awfully late.”

Sinclair’s words delivered him back to the intelligence office with a hard jolt. But since Capelli had been programmed ages ago never to show surprise, he opened his eyes slowly, keeping his face blank and his body angled toward the computer monitor for just a beat longer before turning to give his boss a run-of-the-mill smile.

“You taught me well. Not that I gave you much choice.”

“Hm.” The corners of Sinclair’s mouth twitched in the smallest suggestion of amusement, an expression he kept in place as he said, “Well, I’m not giving you much choice now, either. It’s late, and it’s Friday to boot. This case isn’t likely to get much warmer until we get those reports from the ME’s office and CSU, and even then, leads are going to take both work and luck. Go home, Capelli. Decompress. I don’t want to see you again until Monday morning.”

Without letting his own smile slip, Capelli weighed all the logical reasons he could craft into an argument for staying. But Sinclair knew him better than pretty much anyone, just like Capelli knew from countless past attempts that there was a zero percent chance the guy would ease up on his demand, no matter how good of an argument he made. Which meant Capelli’s only viable option was to ghost.

Greeeeat.

He pushed back in his desk chair, his movements perfectly measured even though his heartbeat worked overtime in an effort to unsteady them. “You’re the boss.”

“That’s what they tell me,” Sinclair said. Turning on his heels, he moved back toward his office, tacking on a quiet but serious “good night” before disappearing through the door. Capelli resignedly went through the motions of powering down his machines, making certain to leave all traces of the case behind him on his desk for Sinclair’s benefit. He didn’t really need the files anyway—thank you, eidetic memory—and even if he did, he could use his laptop at home to pull them from the RPD database faster than most people could order a pair of pizzas. What he did need, though, was to keep his over-active brain from wandering. Making all sorts of suggestions he’d be tempted to consider. Sliding back into the past.

Don’t go there. Not even in your head.

Check that. Especially not in your head.

Grabbing his jacket from the back of his desk chair, Capelli shouldered his way into the thing and headed through the glass double doors leading out of the intelligence office. His past wasn’t a secret (public records were funny that way), nor was his history with Sinclair. While no one in the unit ever started a conversation with “hey, remember that time Sinclair arrested Capelli on multiple felonies and instead of throwing his ass in jail where it belonged, he gave him a job instead?” they never really dodged it either. Mostly because it was the truth.

Disclosure was a presentation of facts. And facts were everything.

That Capelli’s had turned him into a white knight and a black king at the same time just made his personal chessboard extra-fucking-special.

He walked the same path as always out of the intelligence office—down the second-floor hallway to the open stairwell, sixteen steps to the main floor of the precinct, ten paces to the front door. As if there were some switch in his subconscious connecting work and the rest of the outside world, his stomach began to rumble the minute his boots had crossed the threshold of the Thirty-Third. Capelli did a mental scan of the contents of his fridge, and yeah, unless he wanted to eat mayonnaise or some leftover vegetable Lo Mein of dubious quality, he was going to have to grab some groceries on the way to his apartment.

Shifting a little deeper into his jacket, he let his mind turn even as he surveyed the street and the sidewalks around him. Today’s case, and the frustrations that went with it, had him wound pretty tight. He needed to keep his brain occupied, but keeping the rest of him busy might not be the worst thing in the universe, either. Truthfully, it had been a while since he’d blown off any steam between the sheets, and if he was jacked up enough for Sinclair to kick his ass out of the building, maybe he should take the hint.

Maybe, just maybe, if he got laid, he’d finally stop thinking about Shae McCullough’s smart mouth, and all the hot, impetuous-as-hell things she could probably do with it.

“For Chrissake,” Capelli muttered, slipping the words far enough under his breath that he was certain no one on the sidewalk had overheard him. He needed to get his thoughts of Shae—and her sexy, overbold mouth—in line and out of his head, once and for all. Ordering his grocery list in his head, he made a beeline for the Stop ‘n Shop six blocks away. The place was essentially empty of other shoppers courtesy of his Friday night timing. But since that just meant a more time-efficient circuit up and down the usual aisles for the usual items, Capelli was all for the solitude.

At least, he was…until he rounded the corner of aisle twelve and caught sight of the woman in front of him in the frozen food section.

Her back was completely to him as she leaned down to drop a few ready-made dinners into her cart, but with a view like the one her low-slung jeans and form-fitting shirt were treating him to, Capelli was all too cool with that. The woman’s brown-gold hair spilled down her back in long, thick waves, her dark green top cropped just short enough to have revealed the sweet, muscular curve of her lower back when she’d bent forward. Heat rushed under his skin to head directly south, and damn, it looked like a more primal part of him than his stomach wanted attention.

Hard attention. Fast attention.

Right-fucking-now attention.

Before he could cage the wild, sudden impulse pumping through his bloodstream, he covered the space between himself and the woman in a handful of strides. Her shoulders tightened just slightly, a sure signal that she’d heard him and he wouldn’t startle her or—worse yet—come off like a total creeper. Striking up conversations with strangers in the Stop ‘n Shop wasn’t exactly his MO, even if they were sexy enough to make him drop his normally cautious demeanor. He might like control—crave it, even—but come on. He wasn’t a monk. Especially not with a woman like this in front of him.

“If you’re trying to choose between the Salisbury steak and the chicken piccata, I’d go with the steak. Although personally, I’m more of a spaghetti and meatballs kind of guy.”

The woman shifted, just enough for Capelli to catch the vanilla and brown sugar scent of her body lotion.

But the attraction making his heart beat faster and his dick half-hard turned into a bolt of pure shock when she turned on her three-inch boot heels, and he found himself nailed into place by Shae McCullough’s brassy, sassy smile.

* * *

Shae wasn’t sure what surprised her more—unexpectedly running into Capelli at the Stop n’ Shop at nine o’clock on a Friday night, or the fact that her girly bits were currently an involuntary hot zone at the sight of the slow, sexy smile that had been riding his mouth when she’d turned around.

“Spaghetti and meatballs, huh?” Shae inhaled to counter the thrum of her pulse, grateful that they were surrounded by wall to wall freezers on both sides of the aisle. “I’ll be honest, I didn’t have you pegged as a frozen dinner kind of guy.”

In fact, all the leafy greens and bottled water and items in his cart boasting words like multi grain and organic suggested he wouldn’t touch a frozen dinner with a forty-foot pole. Which could only mean one thing.

James Capelli was flirting with her.

“Shit. I mean”—he cleared his throat, tugging a hand through his dark blond hair and taking a step back on the overly buffed linoleum—“I apologize. I didn’t mean to be so forward.”

“Really?” Surprise of a more traditional sort rippled through her chest. “Because I’ve gotta tell you, you kind of nailed it.”

She’d been trained to be more aware of her surroundings than most people, so she’d heard Capelli’s footsteps the second he’d turned the corner of the otherwise dead-empty aisle, just as she’d caught the darkly flirty intention in his smile when she’d turned around. He might not have ever aimed a look like that in her direction before, but Shae wasn’t thick. She knew attraction when she saw it.

Just like she knew when she felt it back.

“Yes, really,” he said, driving her surprise into confusion. “I didn’t recognize you.”

Shae gestured to her jeans and long-sleeved top with a laugh. “I’m hardly in disguise. Look, I’m not even wearing a coat. Again.”

The revelation seemed to unnerve him another notch. “Your back was turned, and you just…you normally wear your hair in a ponytail, is all.”

He gestured to her hair at the same time she reached up to skim a hand through it. “Ah,” she said, her confusion waning slightly. “Must’ve forgotten to pull it back tonight, I guess.”

At that, his brows tucked from behind his dark-rimmed glasses. “You don’t have a routine?”

“You do?” Shae asked. She was about as familiar with routine as she was with astrophysics. Which, come to think of it, might be right up Capelli’s alley.

“Well, yes. I…” He broke off with a wave of one hand. “It’s not important. Anyway, how come you’re grocery shopping? Aren’t you supposed to be on shift at Seventeen until tomorrow morning?”

Just like that, her gut did a flawless impersonation of a rusty corkscrew. “Yeah, that’s a long story that should probably be told over one too many gin and tonics,” she said, tacking a smile over her face even though it was a poor fucking fit. A few seconds ticked by, punctuated by the strains of some pop song on the overhead speakers and Capelli’s chocolate-colored stare, and jeez, how had Shae not noticed the sexy-factor of those glasses before now?

She shifted her weight from one boot to the other, trying to displace the warmth prickling between her thighs. “So how’s your murder investigation going?”

It was a bit of a lame attempt to swerve the subject from her admittedly shitty day and her even shittier benching, she knew. But his shoulders loosened just a fraction beneath his black canvas jacket as he opened his mouth to answer, so score one for subterfuge.

“Slow, but we’re still working on it. We don’t have a whole lot of evidence to go on though.”

“With how quickly that fire moved through the house, I can’t say I’m shocked,” Shae said, a thought percolating in the back of her mind. “Hey, did you hear anything from arson yet on the cause of the fire?”

He shook his head. “No, but the fire marshal has to do a scene inspection first. The only reports we have so far are the ones we took from you and Slater at the scene. Why?”

“The fire was really intense, and the flame patterns seemed kind of…I don’t know. Wonky.”

“Wonky,” Capelli repeated, dark blond brows lifted as if she’d just started speaking in tongues.

She mirrored the expression right back at him. “Yeah, you know. Weird. I was wondering if they thought the fire had been set intentionally.”

“Oh.” He paused for a second, clearly thinking. “Well, it definitely wouldn’t be the first time some dirt bag tried to use arson to cover up a murder, but we haven’t seen a proven case like that in Remington in the last five years. There were a ton of chemicals at the scene today, all of them volatile and highly flammable. That seems like the most likely cause of the fire, and it probably had a lot to do with how quickly the blaze spread.”

Shae opened her mouth, set and ready to argue. Yeah, she’d responded to a good half-dozen fires that had been obvious meth-cooking accidents, but still. Proven arson was pretty uncommon, period—mostly because it required a lot of undisputable evidence, and fires didn’t usually leave a ton of that behind. But burn patterns told stories just like DNA and blood spatter and anything else at a crime scene, and Shae knew what she’d seen. Even if all she had to go on was a weird gut feeling.

Which would probably fly with Capelli about as well as a box full of bricks, and on second thought… “You’re probably right. I’m sure the fire marshal and the arson unit will look at everything carefully and let you know if the fire was deliberate. The scene this morning was pretty crazy. Guess my mind is just caught up in the adrenaline of the whole thing.”

“Speaking of which”—he looked at her, his expression unreadable yet not unkind—“I should apologize for earlier.”

“Okay,” she said, elongating the word until it nearly grew into a question. “I’m not sure I follow.”

Capelli slid a hand over the front of his long sleeved T-shirt, his gaze dropping to the floor for just a breath before he lifted his eyes back to hers. “For our conversation earlier this morning,” he clarified. “I don’t normally conduct interviews for the intelligence unit, and I guess I’m not used to a lot of face-to-face, especially at crime scenes. I didn’t mean to offend you with anything I said, though.”

“You didn’t mean to call me impulsive?” Shae’s disbelief edged out her surprise, but only by thiiiis much. She might not know him all that well, but she wasn’t blind, and she certainly wasn’t an idiot. She’d seen advanced algebra equations less calculated than this man. If he’d called her impulsive, it was because he meant to.

“Well, no. I mean, yes.” Capelli paused. Took a breath. Let it out slowly. “You did behave impulsively on the call. But Slater was pretty rattled. You two are engine-mates. Logically, it makes sense that you were just looking out for him when we showed up to question the two of you about the scene.”

A pang unfolded in her chest, swift and deep and completely unexpected. “I was,” she said, giving the odd sensation a second to dissipate before adding, “I appreciate the apology, but you don’t have to worry about offending me. At least, not over something like that.”

“You weren’t mad?” he asked, his doubt obvious.

“Oh no, I was plenty pissed,” Shae said. She wasn’t about to scale back on the God’s honest, no matter who she was talking to. “I just tend to burn bright, then burn out in the anger department. I don’t really see much point in holding grudges. Life’s really too short.”

Capelli nodded, the fluorescent lights overhead glinting off his glasses. “I guess that’s good to know for the next time I piss you off.”

Shae very nearly laughed, until his expression told her he wasn’t kidding. God, he was so serious.

Suddenly, impetuously, she wondered what it would take to undo him.

“We should probably stop meeting like this, you know,” she said, her legs taking a step toward him before her brain recognized the command to move.

Her blood flared hotter when he didn’t take a step back to counter it. “Us running into each other is purely coincidental,” he replied. “I didn’t even know you shopped here.”

“Relax, Capelli.” This time, she did laugh. “It was a joke.” At his continued lack of a smile, she added, “Because we’ve run into each other unexpectedly twice in one day.”

“Oh. Right, of course,” he said, still going no joy on a smile.

Rather than backing down, though, Shae tried again to get him to loosen up. “And actually, I don’t shop here, but I was out for a walk and I got hungry, so…”

She gestured to the small grocery cart behind her, filled with a stack of frozen dinners, a six-pack of ginger ale, and the king-sized Hershey bar she’d been craving all damned day.

“So here you are,” Capelli said. “Unexpectedly.”

Shae’s pulse quickened, a deep pull of attraction spearing through her belly at the way his eyes had flared over the last word. Between helping each other at scenes from time to time and all hanging out at the Crooked Angel after hours, the cops in intelligence and the firefighters and paramedics at Seventeen knew each other both professionally and socially. A hookup or two had been known to go down between the group of friends—hell, Isabella and Kellan had even moved in together. Shae might have a pretty hard and fast rule against extra-curricular relationships with her fellow firefighters, but as she stood there on the linoleum looking at the hey-now angle of Capelli’s shoulders beneath that jacket and the serious/seriously sexy look on his handsome, clean-shaven face, she had to wonder why the hell she’d never slept with him.

Then again, with the way his stare had just lingered on her mouth for a second longer than was cordial, she could probably remedy that gaffe right. Now.

“So what do you say we trade this six-pack of ginger ale for a six-pack of beer and go heat up a couple of these mealsicles together?” She let her smile hang between them for just a beat, then tacked on, “I’ll even give the spaghetti and meatballs a shot.”

“I’m not sure that would be such a good idea.”

Surprised, Shae paused. “You never know. It might be fun.”

Now it was Capelli’s turn to pause. “I’m sure it would be a lot of fun, actually.”

“What’s the matter, Capelli? Aren’t you a fun kind of guy?”

The tight spot between her legs filled with nine kinds of heat at the idea of just how much fun might be lurking under all that controlled composure of his. Again, his eyes lowered to rake slowly over her smirk, and oh God, how could she feel him so much when he wasn’t even touching her?

Shae closed the rest of the distance between them save a scant inch, completely uncaring that they were smack in the middle of the frozen food section. “I mean, we’re not exactly strangers. It seems kind of silly for us to spend Friday night alone when we could be having a little fun, don’t you think?”

“I think…”

Capelli trailed off. Lifting one hand, he brushed the pad of his thumb over her bottom lip. The hot, unfettered sensations from the contact stunned Shae into place, turning her breath into a soft gasp and her nipples into aching peaks. He reversed the path of his thumb, the teasing, barely there touch making her sex clench. She parted her lips under his attention, pressing forward with every intention of letting him kiss her senseless right there in the grocery store, when the clack clack clack of shopping cart wheels filtered in from the next aisle over.

Just like that, Capelli’s head whipped up. Yanking his hand from her lips as if she’d scorched him, he stepped back swiftly to regain a full bubble of personal space.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his expression neutral and his brown eyes as cool as the freezer case behind him. “I really can’t. Have a nice night, McCullough.”

He turned on his heels to walk a precise line toward the end of the aisle and out of Shae’s line of vision, leaving her more turned on and pride-stung than ever as she stood there trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.