Manhattan Flame (A Bridge & Tunnel Romance Book 2) Read Free Page B

this wasn't her first rodeo with an authority figure who just plain didn't like her. Reilly pounded on, asking, “Have you been drinking this evening?”
    “What?” Her fist was on her hip now and she swung her other hand up. “Hell, no. No, I don’t need this.”
    “So is that a yes?” he pressed.
    “No, Officer,” she barked back in a thick New York accent. “I haven’t been drinking. I’ve been taking pictures down at the pier.”
    “Are you on drugs?”
    The second the sergeant had asked, Tasha’s eyes snapped to Kevin, widened, and her mouth drifted open, appalled. Reeling in her emotions in a way that impressed him—if he were in her shoes, he'd probably explode—she turned to Reilly and stated, “No, Sir, I have not been drinking and I’m not on drugs. I don’t do drugs. I do photography. That’s my thing.”
    Reilly was staring at Kevin now as though the two of them might chuckle about this later, but Kevin didn't find it funny and was about to assert as much when Tasha spoke up.
    “You don’t want to believe the young black woman whose trying to do you a favor? Fine. Believe this.” She had her camera in her hands now and clicked a few buttons then turned the view screen towards them and Kevin saw clearly what looked like two men strangling a third on the pier.
    Reilly seized the camera for a closer look.
    “Rapid-fire,” said Tasha. “Click through it fast, it’ll play like a movie.”
    The sergeant took her suggestion and as he clicked through the frames, his pale eyes locking on the screen, Kevin could tell the man was having a hard time pulling his foot out of his mouth. And if he wasn’t mistaken, he thought Reilly looked a strange mix of pissed and scared. Then again, insult brought with it a wealth of emotions and the sergeant was obviously insulted that Tasha Buckley had stood her ground and been right.
    Kevin liked this girl, but he managed to suppress the crooked smirk that was threatening to overtake his expression.
    “Wait here,” ordered Reilly, as he took her camera with him deep into the bullpen.
    Kevin watched him and it wasn’t until Reilly slammed his office door shut that he returned his gaze to Tasha. She looked put-off and he couldn’t blame her so he reinforced the good she was doing by mentioning, “He’s hardheaded, but this is solid. I’m glad you came in.”
    “Hardheaded?” she challenged. “I could think of a better word.”
    The smile he’d been holding in came out and felt good, and to his surprise it was contagious. She let a small smirk form across her face and as her lips parted, he took a moment to eye her straight teeth and the snaggletooth—an incisor—that he hadn’t noticed before.
    When the silence between them, the lingering eye contact, lasted for too long, he asked, “Photographer, huh?”
    “Almost,” she sighed. “Right now I’m working as an assistant, but I’ve got some stuff coming up.”
    “Stuff?”
    “An exhibition down in Chelsea. Nothing too major,” she went on, modestly—it sounded like a hell of a big deal to Kevin. “That’s why I was taking shots near the pier.”
    “At night,” he questioned.
    “At dusk, moody lighting. It’s good for about an hour and I kept fighting myself to just go home.” She shook her head as if wrestling with herself.
    “It’s good that you didn’t go home,” he asserted. “You witnessed something that shouldn’t have happened and now we have a decent chance of catching whoever did this.”
    With that in mind, Kevin glanced over his shoulder and wondered why in the hell the sergeant hadn’t sent officers over to the pier yet.
    Tasha stole his attention, asking, “You ever go to the galleries around Chelsea?”
    “Huh?” Her question registered three seconds after she’d asked it and he blurted out, “Not really. Demanding life up here in Harlem if you can imagine.”
    “I can,” she said, her brows floating up and in delayed reaction he realized she was taking an