Hitch

by Anne Conley

  He had married Marsha when he was really young and too idealistic. He’d been under the impression he’d be catching bad guys nine-to-five, then home for supper and baby-making with his lovely wife in the evenings.

  That was so far from the truth it wasn’t even funny. Marsha and he had divorced amicably, and she moved on to find someone more suited to her needs. He’d moved on to marry his job for twenty years and hadn’t thought of another woman since.

  Sure, he’d had women, but zero with intentions for more than sex. There was one long-term friend with benefits, a co-worker who had since gotten married. And then there was Eileen, who had been perfect for him until she hadn’t. There hadn’t been anyone serious in so long, Dex was honestly not sure at all how to go about getting Amber.

  One thing was for sure: he would make a play. He’d show her he was serious about something with her. Dex still wasn’t sure exactly what he wanted with her, but it would be more than just sex. He would find out how she took her coffee, what her favorite foods were, and how she liked to dance.

  Dex heard the trashcan fall in his carport almost at the same time he was jackknifing out of bed. Grabbing his sidearm, he moved stealthily to the side door of his house and listened. Nothing. Easing it open, he stepped outside into the chilly air.

  He knew he was in his underwear but didn’t care, as someone was very clearly in his carport. He couldn’t see anything and strained his eyes to make shapes out of the darkness.

  Then everything exploded. Blinding light. Deafening roar. Smoke everywhere.

  He was on the ground, covering his head and flattening his body to become one with the concrete slab.

  When everything seemed to quiet down a bit, he rose up, not finding anything. The house across the street from him had a hole in the roof of its carport, though, and a fire blazing in the assorted junk behind the absent cars.

  Councilman Mims was going to be pissed when he and his family got home from their cruise.

  Neighborhood lights came on, but nobody came out except to peek and make sure they weren’t in immediate danger. Typical. Dex hated this neighborhood.

  He tiptoed to the carport, ignoring the fact he was in boxers and nothing else. Nobody was looking his way. He could see Mrs. Noble peering out her window, trying to crane her neck sideways.

  Dex knew he’d heard someone in his carport—knocking over a trashcan—and it probably had everything to do with the explosion, but there wasn’t anyone there now. With a grunt, he turned to go back inside and put on some pants before going across the street to help over there.

  His door was locked.

  Looking down at himself, Dex rolled his eyes.

  Fan-fucking-tastic.

  He had a gun and was out in his underwear at the scene of an explosion, probably similar to the explosions that had been rocking downtown Austin. Yeah. That wasn’t suspicious at all.

  Sirens screamed in the distance. Dex didn’t have bushes around his house because that would be the perfect place for burglars and home invaders to hide. Of course, now he needed a place to hide. He looked over at his neighbor’s yard.

  Somebody else’s bushes would have to do.

  Twenty minutes later, he was still in the Lockhart’s bushes when Mr. Lockhart left for work. He ducked down further, hoping the enormous, red-tipped Photinia shrubs would hide him sufficiently.

  When Mr. Lockhart left, another car pulled up—another police car. There were already three, plus the arson investigator’s truck. But this car was special. Dex knew it before she even got out of it. The number stenciled on the side of it meant it was her car.

  Amber’s car.

  She got out and stood there, looking over the roof of the car. Bracing her hand on her forehead against the sun, she did a slow perusal of the neighborhood. Dex’s thighs were burning from squatting in the bushes for so long, but he managed to shift so he was on his knees and could see her better. But something about his movements had her zeroing in on him.

  “Hey!” She started walking over, hand on her piece. “Stand up! Hands in the air!” Her voice was authoritative, with an edge of something. Not fear. Nope. But something darker than authority. It was a turn-on, but Dex wouldn’t let his brain go there, not while she couldn’t see him, and he was nothing short of a threat to her.

  He knew he’d been busted, and there wasn’t really any way out of this. Maybe she would show some pity on him and let him get some pants.

  Holding his hands up in the air, he stood slowly, his gun dangling from one finger by the trigger guard.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” she muttered when he came into view. He could only imagine what he looked like. “Are you even wearing clothes?” Standing in the bushes, she couldn’t see he was not in fact wearing clothes. She gestured for him to throw the gun, and he complied, tossing it at her feet. Lips pressed into a thin line, she holstered her weapon, levelling him with a glare. She was pissed as hell. Pissed as she was, though, Amber stared at his chest, mouth agape, eyes wide. A strange thrill went through him, a definite sense of pride. Dex would not have gotten this reaction from her with his old body.

  “My Haines.” Dex tried a grin and managed a small one. Her anger was helping with his discomfort, but only, like, an iota. Surely, he’d laugh at this someday. Right now, all he could think about was the fact he would for sure be the talk of the task force tomorrow morning.

  “All right, turn around and put your hands on your head.” She reached for the cuffs at her back, and Dex’s cock inappropriately jumped and strained.

  “Why are you cuffing me?” Even though he was doing exactly what she said.

  “You are at the scene of a crime in very suspicious circumstances. You turned up in my investigation yesterday, and now this. And if nothing else, you are in violation of a code or two, Austin or not.”

  “Keep it weird,” he muttered as she cuffed him, none too gently. Still, the erection tented the front of his boxer briefs. “Let me take you to dinner sometime.” It was worth a shot. She had relented and given him her name.

  But the scoff she let out told him he was pushing his luck. Still she had him in cuffs, and his mind was going places. Oh, the places …

  She led him across the street and when they got to her car, he turned on her. Her eyes widened when she got a look at his bulge.

  “I live right there. Someone was in my carport and I was checking it out when the explosion happened. I locked myself out and have been outside ever since.” His explanation did nothing.

  “Great. Get in the car.”

  “You’re detaining me?”

  “I’m securing my crime scene. Get the fuck in the car.”

  When she opened the door, he allowed her to tuck his head in as he folded his bulky frame into the vehicle. His erection needed an adjustment, but he didn’t think she would go for it. Instead, he just hoped it would wilt on its own.

  But she’d cuffed him.

  He shouldn’t be so aroused by that, but he couldn’t help himself.

  Cuffs.

  Chapter Eight

  Holy shit. Dex in cuffs. Her cuffs. And a hard-on the size of the goddamned state of Texas. And the abs of a twenty-something-year-old. He had a hell of a lot of nerve looking like that at his age. It was all ridiculously chiseled, and Amber wanted to touch him so badly. The sight of him was permanently burned into her mind, replaying over and over. He had a smattering of hair across his chest, dark with some silver shooting through it. She caught herself wondering if it were coarse and wiry, or soft and smooth. The trail leading down to his tight boxer briefs looked very happy indeed.

  But that bulge. Holy hell, that bulge just looked delicious.

  She was having hot flashes.

  He had no business looking so freaking sexy this early in the morning.

  Amber swiped a hand across her brow, determined to put him out of her mind, and stalked toward the deputy holding the clipboard in front of the tape.

  Taking it from him, she said, “Get som
eone to tape off that man’s carport and set it up.” She pointed at the house Dex had said was his. “We’ll work there next. Witness says there was someone over there right before the explosion. Could be our shooter.”

  Going over the clipboard, she filled in her name and information before letting herself under the tape. She walked over to the scene of the explosion, noting there were no cars in the carport; hopefully, no one was home and hurt.

  Amber did her job and did it well. When it came to investigations, she was good at it. Working in a small-town police force had given her the experience of having to do everything herself. There wasn’t a whole lot of “that’s this department’s job” or “that’s that department’s job.” In Serendipity, it had all been her job along with four other deputies.

  So she knew how to process a crime scene. It was lucky that she’d been assigned this call. When her supervisor had called and said the others were on the opposite side of town and she was closest, Amber jumped at the chance to prove herself better than paperwork.

  She would process the shit out of this crime scene.

  Amber spent the next twenty minutes taking pictures, then she gloved up and spent another two hours scouring the carport for anything to give any indication of who had done this. A police officer came and told her who the house belonged to, a Carson Mims, which meant nothing to her. But she wrote it in her notebook and filed it away in her brain for later as she got back to work on her scene.

  Gabby showed up, coffee and a bag of pastries in hand.

  “How’d you get on the scene so quick?” he asked around a mouthful of sweets.

  Amber affected a nonchalant shrug, not wanting to give away the fact she had sped here from her house, about six blocks away, as soon as she’d heard the call. She’d been drinking her morning tea, just waiting for time to come into work, looking at all the boxes in her living room.

  “I only live a few blocks away.” She sipped the coffee he passed her. He hadn’t figured out she didn’t really drink coffee, but she was thankful for the effort.

  “I hate being the first on a scene. So much paperwork.” He looked around the neighborhood, eyes squinting at her car. “Who’s in the back of your car?”

  “Dex Hollerman lives across the street, where the shot was fired from. I caught him sneaking around when I got here.” Attempting the professionalism she needed when speaking about Dex was harder than it seemed. Her voice wanted to go all breathy, but she managed to steel it. Gabby looked thoughtful.

  “Well, that’s certainly an odd coincidence, but you don’t think he had anything to do with it, do you?”

  Odd coincidence indeed. No, she didn’t. Not really. But the coincidences were a bit more than odd when she took into account the number of times he’d just bumped into her. Not that any of that was on the books, so she couldn’t really let Gabby know of her suspicions.

  Besides, Gabby would just tell her she was making more work for herself. God, he needed to retire.

  “Not really. At this point, though, he was hindering my securing of the scene, so I put him in my car to teach him a little lesson.”

  Gabby’s chuckle was almost infectious. She knew it would be a downright belly-laugh if she told him Dex was in his underwear. Some part of her felt a little bit bad for him, though, and didn’t want him to be the butt of some inter-force joke.

  “It’s a Carson Mims’ house. Ring any bells?”

  Gabby took another bite of whatever he was eating, and it left an ever-widening ring of sugar around his lips. “Yeah, he’s on the City Council. Pretty outspoken about the traffic situation downtown. You ever get stuck in that? It’s a nightmare.”

  “Hmm …” It must be random, then. She couldn’t imagine anyone blowing up things in Austin because of traffic. Still, it gave her something else to look at. As she turned around and saw Dex in her car, her thoughts jumped back to him.

  Now that things had calmed down a little, and she was in the zone of work, Dex in her car wasn’t unhinging her anymore. The weather was nice, and her crime scene did need to be secured. But still, he needed to stop showing up while she was working. Maybe this would get that point across to him.

  More members of the task force had shown up, and Gabby left to go get them coffee and pastries, not that anyone had asked. They all worked in a comfortable silence, even if the task force detective did question everything she had done when he got there before begrudgingly nodding his approval.

  Then Amber went over to the house across the street. In the carport was one spent shell casing. Picking it up with the end of her pencil, she read the numbers .243 on the bottom. A deer rifle bullet. She placed a tent card on the spot where the bullet was and made a notation, taking pictures and documenting everything.

  She’d learned that mistake the hard way and lost her first case because she’d gotten butterflies and started gathering willy-nilly. Now she was methodical as she went over Dex’s carport with a fine-toothed comb, noting the stacked locking cabinets, the SUV she’d seen him inside yesterday—washed to a gleaming shine—and the locked door into the side of his house. It was a middle-class house, a middle-class neighborhood, with no landscaping to speak of and a neatly mowed lawn. Non-descript. Neatly kept. Not even a fake rock to keep a house key in, which any law enforcement officer would never do. Those fake rocks all look the same, and everybody had one.

  While she processed his house, the detective went over to question Dex. Amber watched from the corner of her eye as the detective laughed at Dex before settling in to take some notes. Apparently, he was buying Dex’s story. Amber wanted to hear it, but she couldn’t. Instead, she was doing her job. Thankfully, the detective came back over to her.

  “Good job locking him in your car. If you hadn’t done that, he’d be all over this scene, helping. He can’t help himself.” Detective Chavez was the head of the task force, and Amber liked him well enough. “I left him in there, but I don’t think he had anything to do with this. I’ve known him a while.” His grin spoke volumes about the grief he’d probably already given Dex for ending up handcuffed in a cop car.

  Chavez could say what he wanted, but Amber knew from experience that just because you worked with someone did not mean you knew them.

  It was three hours after putting Dex in the car before she went back to him. Most of the other cops had left—it was just her, the arson investigator, and the poor sap stuck keeping the scene secure. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten about Dex, it was that she couldn’t think about him or she’d make herself crazy.

  Because as much as she didn’t want it to be so, she really had a gut feeling he was connected to all this somehow.

  Putting her game face on, Amber stalked back over to her car and leaned on the open window. He watched her with that sexy glint in his eyes, like it seemed he always did.

  She’d managed to get his body out of her mind, but now she was looking at it again, and it slammed into her full-force. Chiseled abs, rock-hard chest, biceps for days, all that power scrunched up in the backseat of this car.

  It made her warm inside, and she hated it.

  “Okay. Tell me what you know. You didn’t tell Chavez about your assignment, did you?”

  “Can you take the cuffs off?” His eyes twinkled, but he was pleading with her, trying to look pathetic, which he sort of did. A pang of sympathy hit her, and she acquiesced. A light sheen of sweat coated Dex’s chest and forehead, and she felt a little bad. It wasn’t super-hot, though, and he’d live.

  “Okay, I’ll let you out. I’ll walk you home so you can put pants on. Then we’ll talk. Got it?” And maybe she would insist on a shirt. Yup. Definitely a shirt. At least the bulge in his boxer briefs had gone down.

  He nodded, relief evident in his face. Amber opened the door and swung it wide so he could unfold his frame from the car. Dex stood and spun around for her to release the cuffs.

  She ignored the muscles in his back, the large muscles on his slim hips that swelled to the taut globes of his
ass, the underwear stretched so tightly over to be nearly see-through. Yup. She didn’t hardly look at that at all. The cuffs clicked loose, and his arms went up into a stretch as he turned, and Amber went stupid as all the muscles and ridiculously smooth looking skin took over her vision. A forty-something-year-old ex-cop had no right looking like he did.

  She barely noticed his arms coming back down around her, gripping her shoulders as he spun her around and pinned her to the car. Amber let out a squeak of indignation as one of his hands sank into her bun at the base of her neck and the other went around her waist, pulling himself toward her.

  Amber should have used some of her self-defense moves on him. She should have sounded an alarm, even though she was the one of last ones here. She should have at least protested somehow. But it all surprised her so much, and aligned perfectly with her wayward thoughts, that she wasn’t the least bit surprised it was happening.

  Instead, she breathed deeply and savored the warmth of his hard body pressed up against hers, the cool car metal on her backside.

  “Your car doesn’t smell like you yet,” he murmured as his eyes trekked across her face, landing on her lips.

  “It’s not mine,” she responded stupidly. Why couldn’t she talk around this guy?

  His eyes traveled down to her modestly buttoned uniform, making her feel practically naked. Whatever he imagined made his eyes darken to a dark blue and her insides started quaking.

  “Your focus is sexy, Amber.” Her insides shivered at the way he said her name. “I’ve been making myself crazy watching you all morning.”

  Her hands reflexively went to his chest, but she found her fingertips stroking his skin, rubbing over the coarse smattering of chest hair. It was coarse. That was good to know. One less thing to worry about while she wasn’t sleeping at night.

  “I’m going to taste you now,” he muttered before he moved. He leaned down, and she found herself swimming in the impossible blue of his eyes. Or drowning, she couldn’t tell, but she didn’t care, either. Then his lips brushed against hers while his hands tangled in the bun at the base of her neck.