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  She stopped with a small waxed carton in her hand. “Really?”

  “He’s very young,” Gabe said. “I take mine black.”

  “He’s very boring,” Riley said. “Is that real cream?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Riley peered into the box and pulled out a bottle of glass cleaner. “What’s all this cleaning stuff for?”

  “The office. You really should hire a cleaning service.”

  Gabe frowned at her. “We have a cleaning service. They come once a week. Wednesday nights.”

  She shook her head. “This place hasn’t been cleaned in at least a month. Look how thick the dust is on the windowsill.”

  There was a faint coating on everything, Gabe noticed. Except for the bookcase where the new coffeemaker perked cheerfully, the whole office was full of dust and gloom.

  “The number for the cleaning service is in the Rolodex.” Gabe opened the door to his office, escaping before he went headfirst into the coffeepot. He’d forgotten anything could smell that good. “Hausfrau Help.”

  “You’re kidding,” she said, and he closed the door behind him to shut her out. Thank God he had an office to escape into.

  An office that looked like hell, he realized when he was sitting at his desk in the unblinded light from the broken window. The room was littered with papers, Styrofoam cups, books he’d pulled off the shelf, and the other general rubble of his daily work. When had this place been cleaned last? Some of the mess looked like it dated back to his dad’s day. His keyboard was buried under more paper, and there was dust on everything, and suddenly it mattered.

  It was Eleanor Dysart’s fault. He hadn’t noticed any of this until she’d come in with her coffee and her china and her Windex and torn down his blinds.

  He picked the Styrofoam cups out of the mess and threw them away and went through the papers, pitching notes he’d already dealt with and putting letters that the Dysart woman would have to file in a separate stack. That would slow her down. He’d just turned on the computer when she came in, bearing a china cup and saucer and a determined expression that sat strangely on her finely drawn face. Gabe thought of his father, three sheets to the wind, reciting Roethke to placate his furious mother: I knew a woman, lovely in her bones. Eleanor Dysart was too thin and too pale, but she was lovely in her bones.

  “I called your cleaners,” she said, setting the cup down. “They haven’t been here in six weeks because they haven’t been paid.”

  Gabe frowned at her and forgot his father. “Of course they have. I signed the checks.”

  “Not for July and August, according to their bookkeeper. If you’ll tell me where you keep the canceled checks, I’ll fax them over.”

  “Reception desk, bottom right-hand drawer,” Gabe said automatically as he hit the keyboard to open the office bookkeeping program. He did a search for “Hausfrau.” Eight entries came up for 2000, including two for July and August. “There,” he told her, and she came around behind him.

  “That’s Quicken, right?” she said. “Is that on the computer on my desk? Good, I’ll take care of it. Thanks.”

  “For what?” Gabe said, but she was heading for the door, a woman on a mission.

  When she was gone, he sat back and picked up the coffee cup. It was a sturdy but graceful piece of china, cream colored with a blue handle, and it felt good in his hand, a luxury after the flyweight Styrofoam he’d been drinking from for years. He took a sip and closed his eyes because it was so rich, speeding caffeine into his system while assaulting every sense he had. When he looked again, there were blue dots on the inside, appearing as the coffee level dropped. It was absurd and charming and completely unlike the tense woman vibrating outside his door.

  Maybe he’d misjudged her. Maybe she was nervous because it was her first day. He didn’t care, as long as she kept the coffee coming.

  Fifteen minutes later, he went out to the reception room for a refill and found her with a frown on her face.

  He picked up the coffee carafe and said, “You okay?” as he poured.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “You have a problem. Look at this.”

  She had eight checks spread out before her. “These are all from Hausfrau,” she told him. “Here are the endorsements from January through June.”

  Gabe shrugged as he looked as six smudged stamped endorsements. “Okay.”

  She pointed to the last two checks. “These are the endorsements from July and August.”

  The checks were endorsed in blue, loopy handwriting. “That’s Lynnie’s writing.”

  “It appears she turned to embezzlement in her last two months with you.”

  “She was only with us for six weeks,” Gabe said and thought, Damn good thing, too. “Give Hausfrau some story about administrative screwups. I’ll handle the rest.” He took his coffee back to his office, thinking of Lynnie, black-haired and lovely, making lousy coffee and embezzling the cleaning money, and now sitting at home recovering from her sprained back with a thousand dollars and, he hoped, a sense of impending doom.

  He took another sip of coffee and felt slightly better until another thought hit.

  He was going to have to hire Eleanor Dysart permanently. For a moment, he thought about keeping Lynnie—so she stole money, she was cheerful and pretty and relaxed and efficient—and then he gave up and resigned himself to a tense reception room filled with the smell of great coffee.

  An hour later, Riley knocked on Gabe’s heavy office door and came in. “I finished most of the background check,” he said as he lounged into the chair across from Gabe’s desk. “I’ll go see the last guy and then I’ll ruin the rest of my day with the Hot Lunch.” He ducked his blond head to look at Gabe. “What are you pissed about?”

  “Many things,” Gabe said.

  “Nell?”

  “Who?”

  “Our secretary,” Riley said. “I said, ‘I’m Riley.’ She said, ‘I’m Nell.’ I think she’s doing a pretty good job.”

  “She seduced you with her coffee,” Gabe said. “And you have no idea what a good job she’s doing. She was only here an hour before she nailed Lynnie for embezzling the cleaning money.”

  “You’re kidding.” Riley laughed out loud. “Well, that’s Lynnie all over.”

  “Since when?” Gabe scowled at his partner. “If you knew she was bent—”

  “Oh, hell, Gabe, it was in her eyes. Not that she’d embezzle,” he added hastily as Gabe’s scowl deepened. “That she’d cheat. Lynnie was not a woman you’d leave alone for a weekend.”

  “Or with a checkbook, evidently,” Gabe said.

  “Well, that part I didn’t realize,” Riley said. “Although she was into luxury. Her furniture was all rented, but everything else in her duplex was first class with a label on it, right down to the sheets…” His voice trailed off as Gabe shook his head.

  “We have three rules at McKenna Investigations,” he said, reciting his father’s words. “We don’t talk about the clients. We don’t break the law. And—”

  “We don’t fuck the help,” Riley finished. “It was just once. We were doing a decoy job, and I took her home, and she invited me in and jumped me. I got the distinct impression she was just doing it for practice.”

  “Does it ever occur to you not to sleep with women?”

  “No,” Riley said.

  “Well, try to restrain yourself around the new secretary. She has enough problems.” Gabe thought about her tight, frowning face. “And now she’s sharing them with me.”

  “If you’re that unhappy, fire her, but do not get my mother back from Florida.”

  “God, no.” Gabe said, picturing his aunt behind the reception desk again. He loved her dutifully, but duty only went so far. She’d been a lousy secretary for ten years, and a worse mother for longer.

  “Get Chloe back. She’s tired of selling tea, anyway. She asked me if I knew anybody who’d like to run The Cup for her.”

  “Great.” Chloe and the stars. “I married