“Whoa!” Capelli’s hands shot out to wrap around Shae’s shoulders, and for the love of all things sacred and holy, would this woman ever stop doing things he couldn’t predict? “What are you doing out here?”

She gripped his jacket at the elbows, the flowery scent of her hair filling his nose and doing nothing to calm his out-of-control pulse. “I’m waiting for you,” she breathed, her voice just one step above a whisper.

Great. Now his pulse and his dick were out of control.

Capelli cleared his throat, ignoring the protest rising up from the primal part of his gut as he lifted his palms from the soft cotton of her sweater and took a step back on the concrete. “Why?”

“Because.” Shae blinked, but only once before her expression turned to steel and her voice shifted to match it. “I know you’re going to work on this case, and I want to go with you.”

“No.” The word pushed past his lips before he realized it would tell her she’d been on the beam about his intentions to go home and dig back into the case, and God dammit, this woman turned his equilibrium into pudding.

Shae’s exhale was all frustration. “Why not?” she asked, but then seemed to think better of waiting for him to answer. “Look, we were a good team, going through the scene of that fire. I’m your contact at arson. Sinclair told us to work together.”

“That was just for yesterday,” Capelli argued.

Of course, she stepped right on up to the plate. “Maybe, but it worked.” Sliding her hands to her hips, she said, “Come on, Capelli. You’re just as stuck with the murder investigation as I am with the arson. You’re going to work on the case anyway, and I’m game. We could help each other out.”

Her eyes flashed with the sort of undiluted intensity that made him want to simultaneously run screaming and pin her to the nearest flat surface to fuck her senseless, and hell if that wasn’t the crown jewel of reasons to stay away from her. Not only could he not predict anything Shae would say or do, but he couldn’t predict anything he’d say or do or even feel when he was around her.

“No,” Capelli said again. He turned to move around her once and for all, but her hand shot out to wrap around his bicep.

“Please,” she said, and truly, he couldn’t tell what stunned him more—the word itself or the need with which she’d spoken it. Some emotion he couldn’t be sure he’d seen, much less identify with any certainty, darted over Shae’s face in the glow of the ambient light being cast down from the bar behind them. “I want to help. Not just tag along for a day or send you reports from arson, but really help. So could you please do me this one fucking favor just for tonight and let me?”

“Okay.”

The word sailed out of his mouth before his brain could lock it down, and speaking of not being able to predict what he’d say in her presence. Jesus Christ, was he insane?

“Really? You want to work together? Tonight?” Shae asked, and if her wide-eyed stare was anything to go by, the two of them were a matched set in the surprise department. But as much as the idea made Capelli’s defense mechanism want to self-destruct, from a logical standpoint, teaming up with her again wasn’t the worst plan ever. For whatever reason, his normally ironclad system wasn’t working. His brain was working too much.

He needed to figure out what he was missing in this case, and as cracked as it was, reason dictated that working with Shae might at least help more than it hurt.

She didn’t wait for him to realize out loud that he’d agreed, much less give him a chance to recant. “Yes! You won’t regret this. So do you want to go back to the precinct?”

Shit. Clearly, he hadn’t thought this through. “It’s after hours,” he said slowly. “I was actually going to work from home.”

Shae didn’t skip so much as a beat or a breath. Naturally. “That works too. I can just follow you there if you want.”

She pulled a set of car keys from the pocket of her jeans, but Capelli shook his head. “I live eight blocks from here, so I walked.”

“Oh.” Her brows lifted. “Alright, then. Why don’t I give you a ride? I’m parked a block over, on Delancey.”

“Okay.” They started to walk, the chilly night air settling in around them, and he eyed her thin gray sweater with a twinge of concern. “I realize you’re not a big fan of outerwear, but aren’t you freezing?”

Shae looked down at her body as if it had just now occurred to her that a coat in January might actually be a decent idea. “I guess I didn’t really think about it when I left my apartment.”

“You didn’t notice the whole thirty-five degrees thing and go back to grab a jacket?” he asked, unable to keep a wry tone from lacing over the words.

She lifted her obviously coat-free arms and laughed. “No offense, but for a guy who works in the intelligence unit, you kind of suck at the whole detective thing. Anyway, like I said the other day, the cold doesn’t really bother me. I guess my internal thermostat is just a little left of center.”

“Kind of like the rest of you?”

She hitched in surprise, just for a fraction of a beat, and dammit, could he have put his foot in his mouth any more thoroughly?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

But she cut off the rest of his apology with a deep, unexpected laugh. “I don’t make any apologies for who I am, Capelli. So please, don’t make apologies for noticing.”

The no-bullshit way she claimed her personality was as palpable as a touch, slicing through him with an odd brand of jealousy he didn’t see coming. They walked the rest of the block in silence, their footsteps creating a steady rhythm on the pavement. Shae hit a button on her key fob, and the lights on a mud-splattered Jeep Liberty flashed through the nighttime shadows.

“Sorry it’s in need of a bath,” she said, although the grin on her face was far from apologetic. “I did a little off-roading over the weekend and haven’t had time to hit the car wash yet.”

“A little off-roading,” Capelli repeated, and who knew her grin could grow even bigger.

“Okay, so I might have spent six hours on the trails out at Spearhead Valley. But it’s too cold to go rafting, and my mountain bike has a flat. Off-roading was the next best thing.”

Capelli took in the state of her Jeep, unsure whether to be a little bit stunned or a whole lot impressed. “It sure looks that way. Hey”—he lasered in on her windshield, where a bright white slip of paper stood out in stark contrast against the dusty glass—“looks like someone left you a note.”

“Ah, it’s probably just some ad. I swear, that new pizza place over on Fourth Street is wallpapering the city with them.” Shae pressed up to her toes to pluck the single sheet from beneath the windshield wiper, but her movements froze less than a second later.

A shiver touched Capelli’s spine beneath his jacket, lingering at the base of his neck. “Shae? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head with a self-deprecating sound that fell just shy of a laugh.

Nope. Not tonight. “Try again.”

Releasing a sigh, she handed over the note, and a bubble of adrenaline rose quickly in his chest at the sight of the bold block letters printed across the page.

I SEE YOU.

“Jesus,” Capelli bit out. Taking an instinctive step toward Shae, he swiveled a methodical stare over their surroundings, vaguely aware that she was doing the same. Nothing looked unusual—all four streetlights on the block were fully functional and shining away. Nobody lurked on either street corner or in any of the cars parked quietly on the street, but still, his heart thumped in steady warning. “We need to call intelligence.”

“What? No.” Her fingers wrapped around his wrist before he could get more than halfway to his pocket for his cell phone. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s probably kids playing some stupid prank. Fifty bucks says there’s one on every car out here.”

A lightning-fast re-check of the other vehicles on either side of them proved her wrong.

“Can you think of anyone who might want to scare you? Anyone you might have pissed off?” Capelli asked.

Despite the situation, Shae’s lips folded over a smile, and she lifted a brow at him in the streetlight spilling down from overhead. “I irritate a lot of people—including you, might I add. But no, Mr. Paranoia. I don’t know anybody who would even think of trying to scare me on purpose. I’m telling you, this is just some random idiot getting his chuckles on.”

“Chuckles or not, protocol dictates a call-in on something like this,” he said, taking another look at the admittedly generic, possibly pseudo-threat in his hand.

“And how many times do call-ins on notes like this turn out to be actual, real-deal threats?”

Capelli hesitated, unable to do anything but. “Not too often,” he admitted, although he kept the single-digit figure of the percentage to himself.

Not that the non-disclosure mattered, because not only had Shae proven her point with the question, but the expression on her face said she knew it. “Look, I might love a good adventure, but I don’t have a death wish, Capelli. If I thought for a second that this was a legitimate personal threat, I’d call intelligence myself. Besides, I’m about to spend the next few hours with you, right?”

“That’s the plan,” he agreed slowly.

“Okay. So if anything out of the ordinary happens, we can both call in the cavalry, and if it doesn’t, we’ll know this was nothing. But truly, I don’t want to waste intelligence’s time over something stupid when we could be making real headway by working on this case.”

Logic and determination. Talk about hitting a guy where it hurt. “Fine,” he said after a second that felt more like ten. “But we’re going by my definition of out of the ordinary, and I’m walking you to your car later, just in case.”

“Sounds fair.”

After one last look around them that yielded nothing other than a whole lot of nothing, Capelli reluctantly slid into the passenger seat of her Jeep. He placed the menacing note in his lap, careful not to touch it any more than he already had, just in case. Five minutes’ worth of easy directions had them in front of his apartment building, where there was thankfully a vacant spot in reach of the security cameras by the front entrance.

“It might be a little tight,” he said, eyeballing the space and considering the dimensions of her Jeep.

But Shae just laughed, the throaty sound making him wish the space between them was both bigger and nonexistent all at the same time. “Nope. I’ve got this.”

Twenty seconds and one extremely skillful parking job later, Capelli stood totally corrected. “Guess I forgot about the whole driving the fire engine thing,” he said, allowing a smile of his own to poke at the corners of his mouth.

“And that’s just one of my many talents,” she quipped back, and okay, yeah. Time to go. Now. Before the dark, wicked back rooms of his brain could conjure up exactly what she might be good at in vivid, cock-hardening detail.

“Right.” Clearing his throat twice for good measure, Capelli got out of the Jeep and led the way toward the glass double doors of his building. Nine steps through the lobby. Six steps past the mailboxes. Do not look at her flawless ass in those jeans. Focus. “So, um, do you live nearby?”

Blessedly, Shae didn’t seem fazed at all by the subject change. “About ten minutes from here. But I move to a new apartment every couple of years.”

“You haven’t liked any of the places you’ve lived?” he asked in surprise, but she shook her head to cancel it out.

“The apartments are just fine. It’s staying in one place I’m not a fan of.”

“So you move all over Remington?”

“Mmm hmm.” She looked at him with wide-open honesty for just a second before following him into the elevator. “I like having options. How about you?”

The quiet sounds of the elevator moving upward became the backdrop for his pulse pressing against his eardrums. “I’ve lived here for eight years.”

More specifically, eight years had passed since Sinclair had walked him down the exact hallway he was now walking down with Shae and pressed the key into Capelli’s palm. He hadn’t been able to afford the place—shit, everything he’d owned that hadn’t been seized by the RPD had fit into the duffel bag that had been on his shoulder. But Sinclair had worked out some sort of legal judo with the landlord that neither man would talk about, let alone let him repay, and Capelli had been an upright tenant ever since.

“Are you sure?” Shae asked, her smile cutting through his thoughts with an odd sense of calm as they crossed the threshold and moved through the small, tidy space of his apartment. “Because no offense, but this place is neat enough to give me hives. Don’t you have any clutter? Dirty dishes? Anything even remotely resembling imperfection?”

Startled, Capelli froze halfway out of his jacket. “I’m far from perfect.”

“I didn’t mean it in a bad way,” she said, her shoulders lifting in a shrug delicate enough to belie their obvious strength as she moved to sit down on the couch a handful of feet away. “You’re just really organized.”

It was a perfect segue, not to mention an even better dodge and deflect, and he took it even though part of him didn’t want to. “Speaking of which”—he finished shrugging out of his jacket, hanging it up neatly before grabbing his laptop from the nearby side table where he’d left it this morning—“we should get started on the case.”

“I’m going to take a flyer and assume you’ve got a method.” Shae’s openly excited smile took a chip out of the tension that wound its way through his shoulders every time he thought of this case, and he nodded, sitting down beside her.

“Analyze, then hypothesize. The facts will get us where we need to be.”

“So all we need to do is figure out the right way to see them,” she said, causing Capelli’s brows to pop at how quickly she’d caught on to his process.

“Yeah.”

She leaned in, her smile growing even bigger, and fuck, she was unreasonably pretty when her face lit up like that. “I’m ready whenever you are, Starsky. Go ahead and start from the beginning.”