“Maybe later. I’m warming up just fine now.”

“Yes, but will you be able to sprint across that yard if you have to?”

Ivan sighed. “I bet you were a terrific cop. Certainly never corrupted by forbidden temptations.”

“I had my moments.” She sat cross-legged and tugged her sweatshirt into place, turning her attention to the house. “What do you think of Melody?”

“I think she’s a fraud.”

“You have any idea who she is?”

“Not a clue, but she has a lot of nerve and a sinful sense of humor.” Ivan opened the thermos, and the rich aroma of strong coffee rushed out in a swirl of steam. “I didn’t pick up on her until tonight at the dinner table. I saw the expression on your face and knew you’d caught on, too.”

“I’ve been thinking about it. The reason we finally caught on is that she shifted her position. Up until tonight, we were the ones being tricked. Tonight she changed sides and threw in with us-at least for a while.”

“You sound cynical.”

Stephanie took a sip of coffee and returned the cup to Ivan. “She lied to us. You should be cynical, too.”

“You lied to a lot of people when you went undercover. Sometimes there are good reasons.”

She knew he was right, and she liked Melody, but she knew the danger of being betrayed by someone close. You kept your eyes open for the bad guys, but if you misjudged a friend, you were left hideously vulnerable. In undercover work it could cost you your life. She’d learned that the hard way. She reminded herself that this wasn’t undercover work and was most likely some goofy prank, but that was an intellectual conclusion and had little effect on the apprehension she felt.

They sat on the blanket in companionable silence for a long time. Finally, Ivan looked at his watch and sighed. “For two nights now, some idiot has dangled a dead body in front of the rear windows. Where is he tonight? Why is it you can never find a sicko when you want one?”

Stephanie kept her eyes on the house. “Now you know the truth about police work. Hours of tedium, occasionally livened up by a few moments of sheer terror.”

A chill ran along Ivan’s spine. He didn’t know what sort of terrors she’d experienced in the past, but he was going to make sure her future was free from that sort of fear. He wrapped her in the extra blanket and drew her into the circle of his arms so they were sitting her back to his front. “I’m glad I didn’t know you when you were undercover. I wouldn’t have been able to deal with the terror.”

“Undercover was cushy. I was always scared to death they might reassign me to traffic detail. I knew a school crossing guard who got her toes run over by a Volkswagen.”

He understood what she was saying, just as he understood that statistically air travel was safer than driving in a car, but those statistics didn’t make planes or police work any more appealing to him. He touched her hair with the tips of his fingers and wondered how she got it so silky. He felt the heat return and searched for a diversion. “Tell me more about being a cop. Did you like it?”

“Yup. It was the right thing for me to do at that point in my life. It wasn’t dramatic like on television. It was a job, and it gave me a sense of purpose. I think I basically have a blue-collar mentality. I like jobs that are physical. I wouldn’t be good sitting behind a desk all day making decisions or analyzing computer printouts.”

“I bet you were a good cop.”

“I was okay. Until the end.”

More silence stretched between them while Stephanie ran through the end in her mind, just as she always did when she thought of her life in Jersey City. She could feel Ivan watching her, feel the invisible support his presence always brought, and she knew he wanted to know more. She was surprised to find that she wanted to tell him more. He was a good partner. A good listener. A good friend.

He stretched his legs and leaned back on one elbow. “Are you going to tell me about it?”

“About being a cop?” She was hedging, she thought. Old habits die hard.

“About the end. Why did you quit?”

“Going for the jugular, huh?” Stephanie asked.

“I’ve been patient.”

She nodded. It was true. He’d been patient. And besides, the wound had healed. The embarrassment and disillusionment of her past had faded beside the glorious vitality of love and lust. “Okay. You want the long story or the short story?”

“The long story.”

Stephanie poured out the last cup of coffee and sipped slowly.

“When I graduated from the Police Academy, I didn’t look a day over sixteen, so I was the perfect person to plant in the schools. It was very small-time crime. All they wanted was to find out who the abusers were so they could get them into rehab and get rid of the pushers in the hallways and playgrounds. As I got older I gradually did more counseling and PR than undercover work.

“Then last fall two college kids I knew got hold of some bad stuff and died. They were good kids. Played basketball and thought they needed an edge, I guess. Turned out there was a lot of this junk floating around on the local campus. They needed someone with experience to find out where the stuff was coming from, and I was assigned to the project.”

She made a disgusted sound. “It was stupid of me to accept the assignment. I let my emotions and my ego override my good sense. I didn’t fit into the college scene, and I didn’t have the professional maturity to play with the big boys.

“Anyway, I graduated from high school to college and went undercover for four months. I was working with a federal agent named Amos Anderson, and one day he set up a meeting with a dealer at one of the Prentice Avenue piers. It was February, and the wind was blowing so bad across the pier the seagulls were flying backward. We stood there waiting, and after a while a big black limo pulled up and four people got out. Three kneebreakers and a suit, and as soon as I saw them I started to sweat. We were out there on this godforsaken pier with no place to go, and my knees were knocking together so bad you could hear them in Hoboken.

“The man in the suit walked right up to us, holding his hat on his head with both hands. ‘Windy,’ he shouted to us. ‘Yeah,’ we answered. ‘Lonely out here on a Sunday.’ ”

Stephanie gave her head a disbelieving shake. “No kidding. Who else but two crazy cops would be standing on a deserted pier in gale-force winds with a chill factor of twenty below?

“So the guy looked at Amos and said, ‘I understand you want to buy.’ Amos was such a pro. He came from Miami, and he’d been through this a hundred times. He just shrugged and said, maybe. They started talking, and in the middle of the transaction, the man turned to me, looked me in the eye, and said, ‘You’re a cop, aren’t you?’ It was the first time I’d ever known absolute, total terror. I heard an overcoat rustle open, and the guy behind me put a gun to my head… right here.”

She pointed to a spot just to the side of her temple and realized her hand was shaking and thought it would probably shake for the rest of her life, every time she told this story. “I swear, my heart was pounding so loud it drowned out all other sounds. I was so scared, I was dizzy, and the next thing I knew, I was flying through the air and sinking like a stone in the river. I came up next to the cement pilings, and by the time I got myself to shore, there must have been forty agents on the pier.

“Thank heaven Amos had been smart enough to pre-position backups. When everything started going wrong, he managed to knock the gun away from my head. People tell me he picked me up and threw me into the river like a Frisbee. I’d be dead if he hadn’t.”

“How’d they find out you were a cop?”

“One of the other women working under-cover was setting up her own retirement plan, compliments of the mob. She’d provided them with photographs of all the narcs and all the undercover people, and this guy suddenly recognized me.”

She was amazed at how easy it had been to retell the story. A few weeks ago she could hardly bear to think about it. She’d crammed a lot of personal growth into a few weeks. Because of Ivan, she thought. It seemed as if she’d known him all her life. He’d given her other things to think about besides death and stupidity.

“I stayed with the case until we wrapped it up, but I’d changed. Somewhere between the pier and the river, my love affair with law enforcement died a quick death. I asked myself, did I want to spend the rest of my life getting tossed into the Hudson River? And the answer was no.

“Looking back, I think I was just burned out. I was tired of being submerged in an adolescent world. I was becoming jaded by the easy access and the acceptance of drugs. It was starting to seem too normal to me. When I was standing on that pier with a gun at my head, I should have been outraged, but I wasn’t. I was just plain scared. Somewhere along the line I’d stopped being a tough idealist.”

Ivan took the empty cup from her and screwed it back onto the thermos. “I don’t think so. If you’d really stopped being a tough idealist, you wouldn’t care that you’d stopped. You just needed a vacation. Maybe your views on life were adjusting to meet more realistic expectations. That happens as we get older,” he said, smiling.

“Did that happen to you?”

“To some extent. I have a better sense of my limitations. That doesn’t mean I always live within them,” he added ruefully.

Stephanie caught a flash of movement at the top of the house and put a silencing hand on Ivan’s arm. “The cupola,” she whispered. Someone was up there, moving onto the widow’s walk. No moon. No stars. Nature wasn’t helping out, Stephanie thought, straining to see. A second form appeared. It stood ramrod straight, and Stephanie shivered. “Tell me that’s not a body bag.”