Rarities Unlimited 04 - The Color of Death

going to make this like pulling teeth, aren’t you?” he asked.
    Kate didn’t answer. She was still stunned by the jolt of sheer physical awareness that had arced between her and the irritating FBI agent. She rubbed her work-grimed hands on her jeans, scrubbing away the residual tingling in her palms.
    “I—” She stuck her hands in her pockets. “I’m not used to midnight visits by strange men with badges.”
    “It’s not midnight yet and you’ve met me before.”
    “That still makes you a strange man with a badge.”
    “Do cops make you nervous?”
    “Do you ever stop asking questions?”
    “Sure. As soon as I have the answers.” Sam looked at the hands bunched in her front pockets, stretching her jeans over a good-looking butt and long thighs. “Most women don’t garden at night.”
    “We’ve already established that I’m not most women.”
    “Were you digging in the backyard?”
    “No.”
    Sam waited, letting the silence expand with each heartbeat until it was pressing against Kate from all sides like a vise.
    “I was working,” she said.
    At last. A small crack in her verbal defenses.
    And they both knew it.
    “Doing what?” he asked gently.
    “I work for myself.”
    Sam went back to silence and the sense of a vise squeezing air out of everything.
    “I’m a gem cutter,” she said.
    Bingo.
    “Have you done any big emerald-cut blue sapphires lately?” he asked.
    Kate’s breath wedged in her throat. If she’d had any hope that the man with changeable blue eyes was slow on the uptake, she knew better now. She watched him intently, seeking any shift in his expression when she said, “Not in the last five months.”
    He didn’t miss the faint emphasis on the “five months” or the intensity of her stare. She was expecting him to react.
    He was sorry to disappoint both of them.
    “Is that supposed to mean something to me?” Sam asked.
    “Why should it? It didn’t mean a damn thing to the rest of the FBI.”
    “Try me.”
    “Oh, sure. You’re different. It says so right below the number on your gold-plated badge.”
    “What do you have to lose?” he asked reasonably.
    “My time and my temper,” she shot back. “I really hate being treated like I bark at airplanes.”
    Sam fought it, then gave up and just laughed. “You nailed it. Nobody does high snot like the FBI.”
    She tried not to grin but couldn’t help it. “ ‘High snot.’ Oh, God, doesn’t that just describe it.” Laughing, she decided that Special Agent Sam Groves might possibly be different from the federal robots who’d interviewed her several times in Florida. Not that the agents had wanted to talk to her after the first time, but she’d made their lives miserable by insisting that she had a lead on a kidnapping between Fort Myers and Captiva Island. And then she went to a local newspaper with the same story, forcing the FBI to at least pretend to listen to her.
    She’d paid for it too. That was when the call had come telling her to back off or die.
    “Who’d you tangle with?” Sam asked.
    “Whoever was on nutcase duty in Miami in November of last year. I forget the names. Dumb and Dumber is how I thought of them.” As Kate spoke, she took her hands out of her pockets and decided she had to do something with them besides fidget. “Want a cup of coffee?”
    “I’d appreciate it.”
    “Long hours and less sleep?” she asked, heading for the kitchen.
    “That about sums it up.” He followed her into a kitchen that wasn’t big or small. The appliances were into their third decade. If she made money scamming, she sure didn’t put it back into her house.
    Kate reached for the bag of ground coffee.
    “You going to wash your hands?” he asked.
    She looked at her hands and the dark smudges that came from the various fine grits she’d been using to polish a rather nice orange topaz. “What are you worried about? Strychnine is white.”
    He grinned and wished they had met some other way. But they hadn’t, and wishing wouldn’t change it.
    Kate washed her hands at the sink, wiped them on a small towel, and went back to making coffee.
    Sam leaned against a kitchen counter and watched. She moved quickly yet smoothly, no jerks or jumps or stumbles. Good balance. Great hands. The confidence that came of being in a familiar place.
    Sexy too. Way too sexy.
    Very soon he had a mug of rich, dark coffee steaming underneath his nose. He sipped, sighed, and sipped again. Then he settled back in a