Sex, Lies, and Online Dating Read Free Page B

“Nurse my ass.”

Chapter 2
    Dick: Seeks Jane for Funand Games…
    Quinn McIntyre shoved his fingers into the front pocket of his Levi’s and blew the air out of his lungs. His breath hung in front of his face, and his eyes narrowed as he watched the tail-lights of Lucy’s silver Beemer heading down Fairview. She’d taken her coffee cup with her. Short of wrestling it from her hand, there hadn’t been a damn thing he’d been able to do about it, either.
    The rain had stopped since he’d entered Starbucks, but inky clouds covered three-quarters of the full moon. Quinn stepped off the curb and headed across the parking lot toward a black Econoline van. Lucy was no more a nurse than he was a plumber, but he’d known that the first time he’d e-mailed her. He’d known all along that her Internet bio was complete crap, and he’d known exactly what she did for a living. By the time he’d met her tonight, he’d known a lot more about her than the color of her eyes and her blonde hair. He’d known her height was five feet seven inches, and that her weight was one thirty. He’d known she’d been born in the hospital downtown and raised in the North End, where she still lived. He’d known that her father had deserted the family when she was eleven and that that could cause a lot of resentment against men. He’d known she was educated and had sold her first mystery novel six years ago. And he’d known that in the last five years she’d received three speeding tickets and two more citations for rolling through stop signs.
    What he hadn’t known was that her eyes were deeper blue than they were in either her driver’s license picture or in the publicity photo on the inside dust jacket of her books. Her hair had shiny streaks of gold, and her lips were much fuller. Walking into Starbucks tonight, he’d known he was going to encounter a striking woman, but he hadn’t been prepared for the full feminine assault. From photos, there’s no way he could have known that everything about her, from the touch of her soft hand in his to the gentle sound of her voice, was in opposition to a woman who wrote about serial killers and might be one herself.
    Quinn walked beneath pools of artificial light, heedless of the puddles splashing his boots. As he approached the van, the window slowly lowered.
    “Did you get all that?” he asked as he reached behind him and pulled his T-shirt from the back of his jeans.
    “Yeah.” Detective Kurt Weber’s round face appeared in the window. “Did you get the cup?”
    “She took it with her.”
    “Shit.”
    “That’s what I thought.”
    “What was all that commotion toward the end?”
    “Some guy was choking on a coffee bean.” He paused to pull at the transmitter taped to the middle of his back. “I think it’s pretty safe to say that Lucy Rothschild not only lied about being a nurse; she doesn’t even have a passing knowledge of CPR.”
    “All that serial killer stuff was interesting,” law enforcement technician Anita Landers commented from where she sat in the back of the van beside the receiving equipment.
    Quinn had thought so, too. He wouldn’t be surprised if by morning Lucy was the prime suspect in the “Breathless” case, the name they’d given to the woman who met men online and suffocated them in their own homes. An ultrathin wire ran up his side to a tiny flat microphone taped to his right pec. “Shit,” he swore as he ripped the microphone from the bare patch on his chest.
    “What was your first reaction to her?” Anita asked.
    Quinn handed the transmitter through the window and glanced past Kurt to Anita’s dark outline in the back of the van. The second he’d spotted Lucy sitting across the crowded café, his first reaction had been purely male and purely physical. The kind of reaction a man got when he focused on a beautiful woman. The kind that reminded him how long it had been since he’d had sex. “When I first sat down with her, I thought