Love Can Be Murder

doll?"
    "I asked Liz and she said no." Penny blushed. "They, um, brought the blow-up man."
    He leaned in close to her ear. "A woman who looks like you do shouldn't have to resort to...artificial means."
    She swung her head up to see if he was flattering her, and suddenly her mouth was mere inches from his. His warm breath fanned her cheek, and desire hooded his eyes. She had the distinct feeling that if they hadn't been in a public place, they would have been going at each other. The attraction she felt for this man was crazy—it had all the hormonal earmarks of a teenage infatuation, but instead of being flush with the curiosity of sex, she was flush with the suspicion that they would be savagely compatible in bed. A current of energy passed wordlessly between them. His lips parted, and she unwittingly mimicked him, lost in the fantasy.
    The waitress reappeared, breaking the moment, her hands full, and plates in the crooks of her elbows. B.J. smacked his lips at the cholesterol-laden plate she set before him. "Looks great."
    Still shaken by the connection she felt to this man, Penny stared down at her bowl of chicken soup. A pool of clear yellow grease floated on top like an oil slick, suffocating the noodles and little bits of carrot. "Looks...hazardous."
    "You always been such a picky eater?" he asked before taking a gigantic bite out of his two-story burger.
    She dunked the spoon into the grease and pulled it back out, cringing when the lumpy yellow stuff actually congealed against the metal. "I'm not picky—I'm health conscious." She abandoned the soup and scrutinized the cellophane packet of saltines for the sodium content. But when the aroma of his burger reached her nose, her stomach howled, and she tore open the crackers and begrudgingly bit into one. The sodium would no doubt raise her blood pressure. She could practically feel her arteries contract even as she swallowed.
    B.J. had already inhaled half his burger and was making a dent in the mountain of curly fries. She pointed her pinky in the vicinity of his well-developed chest. "Chargrilled food is carcinogenic. Free radicals are spinning through your body as we speak, looking for a healthy cell to latch onto and mutate."
    "I bet you're always the life of the barbecue," he muttered.
    "I'm telling you for your own good. I bet you don't take a multivitamin, either."
    "No, that ranks right up there with tofu."
    She dug into her purse and removed the little plastic bag that held her daily vitamin pack—twelve pills in all, two of them fairly large. B.J. stared as she swallowed them one by one.
    "You're healthy and you take that many pills?"
    "I'm healthy because I take this many pills."
    He shook his head. "That's not natural."
    "Really? So tell me, what tree did they pick those curly fries off of?"
    He grinned. "That's different. Besides—" He looked her up and down. "You could stand to put on a few pounds."
    She frowned down at her baggy clothes. "How would you know?"
    "Are you kidding? All I can think about is what you're hiding under there."
    Ignoring the spike in her vitals, she narrowed her eyes and ordered a cup of hot water for the emergency bag of green tea she carried with her; one never knew when one might need a booster dose of antioxidants.
    He laughed and continued eating. Rankled, Penny sat brewing right along with her tea. Who was he to make fun of her? The health rituals she'd developed over the past year—the meals, the supplements, the exercise programs—had given her life new structure, new meaning. Her body was a lean, mean, autoimmune machine.
    She frowned into her cup—that information probably wouldn't look very appealing in a singles ad.
    "Don't you miss it?" he asked.
    "What?" she asked, and absurdly, sex came to mind.
    He gestured vaguely toward the food all around them, the dessert counter. "The fat, the salt, the sugar. It tastes good."
    "A high-fat diet kills your libido." She regretted those words as soon as they left her mouth.
    He laughed. "Couldn't prove it by me."
    She chewed on a cracker and tried to force erotic images from her mind and back to the matter at hand. She remembered Gloria's pledge to make some calls regarding B.J. "How long have you been an investigator?"
    He shrugged. "Five years or so. My brother was a cop who decided to go out on his own. I had a job in technology that was slowly killing me with boredom, so I decided to join him."
    "You must like it," she observed, although it was obvious from his