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just because you’re pissed at me?”
    “Who are you?”
    He gave her an exasperated look. “Right now I’m a man with his foot on what could possibly be Typhoid Tommy’s throat. Get cracking, Emily. I’m not kidding. We could be breathing in spores as we speak. Move it.”
    EMILY MIGHT BE STUBBORN, MAX THOUGHT. BUT SHE WASN’T STUPID.Once she grasped the magnitude of the situation she went downstairs, leaving him to wait for backup.
    The intruder still wasn’t talking. He would eventually. They always did. Within fifteen minutes a full garbage team arrived and the guy was unceremoniously hauled out, strapped to a stretcher. While the hazmat team went in to sweep Emily’s bedroom, Max and the medic went downstairs.
    He’d never seen her studio before. He was impressed. The enormous room was brilliant with artificial, full-spectrum light that reflected off the whitewashed walls and ceiling. It was a working studio, crusted with paint and well-worn furniture. How the hell she found anything in here, he had no idea. There wasn’t a clear inch of flat surface to be seen.
    Simple wood shelving bulged and bowed with the weight of countless art and art history books. She seemed to own tomes on every artist, living or dead, that he’d ever heard of and many he hadn’t. She also collected auction and museum catalogues.
    Pinned to every vertical surface were sketches, gesture drawings, and notes. Stretched canvases leaned haphazardly against the far wall in groups of tens and twenties, and in various sizes. Many others, removed from their stretchers, were simply stacked on the floor. An empty easel stood in the center of the room, and a long table nearby held paints and brushes and various boxes of charcoals, pastels, pencils.
    Interesting place. But Max only had eyes for Emily, who was seated on a bar stool, sipping a cup of something that steamed around her face. She looked up as the two men came down the stairs. Her eyes appeared enormous, her skin stretched over the elegant bones of her face. She glanced from Max to the man clothed from head to toe in white hazmat gear.
    Lowering the cup to her lap, she asked, “Did they find out what it was?”
    “Not yet. Emily, this is Dr. Tesorieri. Doctor, Emily Greene. We need to be tested,” he told her briskly, shoving up the long sleeve of his T-shirt and baring his forearm.
    Within minutes they were swabbed and had blood drawn. Max’s estimation of her went up several notches when he realized she didn’t like needles, but bared her arm for the swabbing. The skin around the corners of her eyes twitched as the doctor approached her with the syringe. She didn’t shut her eyes, but stared off into the middle distance, her even white teeth clamped down on her lower lip.
    The doctor packed away his syringes, the nearly full, tightly sealed vials of blood—three from each of them—and disposed of the alcohol swabs inside a small, bright red medical waste container.
    “I’ll let you know our findings.” The doctor’s voice was muffled behind the face mask.
    “Yeah, you do that,” Max said, pulling his sleeve down. He glanced at Emily, who had her arm bent to hold on the cotton inside her elbow. She still looked pale and shell-shocked. He wanted to kiss away the indentation of her teeth marks on her lower lip.
    It was fucking good to want things, he reminded himself.
    Get over it.
    She held up a pale bare foot with bright pink polish on her toes. “I need shoes.”
    Even her feet turned him on. Craziness. “Where can I find them?”
    “I have some packed, or I can just get my rain boots when we go up.”
    “It’s raining. The boots will work. Here.” He handed her a large, black leather tote that had been sitting on top of one of her packed suitcases in the foyer. Damn thing weighed at least ten pounds. “I’ll get your cases from upstairs,” he told her, intentionally not sounding sympathetic, as he looked into those large, confused eyes. As scared as she was,