by Nika Rhone
“I didn’t realize you and Seth were friends,” Thea said to Peter. She could tell by the way he still wouldn’t look at her that something was up, and she meant to get to the bottom of it.
“Oh, sure, sure,” Peter said. His fingers were drumming a nervous beat on the back of her chair. She didn’t think he realized she could feel it. “He just joined the force, actually, and I thought hey, we should go out and do something to celebrate, and then we saw you sitting here and I remembered that you and Seth used to date back in the day, so we thought we’d come over and say hello, and then, well, here we are.” He cleared his throat and reached for one of the bottles of water. “Man, it’s a little warm in here, huh?”
Thea wasn’t sure which part of that rambling explanation surprised her the most. That Seth had become a cop; that he and Peter were apparently friends; or that Peter actually thought that she and Seth had dated back in high school. They’d gone out a grand total of twice. Neither date had been anything worth repeating, which was why there had never been a third, despite Seth’s dogged persistence otherwise. Graduation had been a godsend if for no other reason than it finally got her away from having to see him every day.
And here he was, four years later, sitting across the table and grinning at her like he’d just been handed his fondest wish. Double damn.
“So, you’re a police officer,” Thea said, using the body language and smile that Des and his friends had taught her sent the “back down, back off, back away” message. Either she wasn’t doing it right, or Seth was immune because his smile just got wider.
“Yeah, I just graduated from the Academy last month. I reconnected with Pete here during one of the ride-alongs we cadets have to do. That was a helluva night, wasn’t it?” he asked Peter, slapping the table with one large hand and making the bottles jump.
Peter made a noncommittal noise that might have been agreement.
“We might not have had a lot in common growing up, but once you wear the badge all that changes,” Seth said. “At the end of the day, we all bleed blue.”
Thea wondered if he had any idea how ridiculous he sounded.
“What have you been doing with yourself since high school?” Thea asked before she could stop herself when silence lapsed over the table once again. Stupid manners.
“Well, you know that after graduation I went into serious training to make the Olympic wrestling team, but, well, things just didn’t fall into place for me on that, so I kind of drifted through a few things here and there, trying to find the right fit, you know?”
Since she’d always known that she wanted to study design, Thea didn’t know, but it did make her feel a little sorry for him.
“I was over in California for a while to see if I could get anything going for me there, but nothing panned out like I’d hoped, so I moved on up to Oregon, until I finally decided last year to come on back to Boulder and see what my hometown could do for me.”
The news that he’d been in California at the same time she’d been attending college there made her doubly glad that a rash of middle-of-the-night hang ups right after high school graduation had forced her to change her phone number. Not that she would have caved and gone out with him even if he had managed to contact her, but still. She’d been going through enough crap trying to get over Doyle and dealing with the Dave Disaster and all its emotional fallout. More drama would not have been welcome.
“I thought about going with the State Patrol at first,” Seth went on, not needing any prompting to keep talking about himself, “but, well, that didn’t feel like the best fit, you know? So I ended up with the Boulder P.D., and here I am.” His gesture strained the material of his shirt, making Thea wonder if he had to have his uniforms custom-made to actually fit him. It was either that, or wonder how fast she could make an escape out one of the bathroom windows.
“And here you are,” Thea repeated, hanging onto her smile by a thread. She looked at Pete in desperation. “Want to dance?” She accompanied the suggestion with a pinch to his side that said he’d better say yes. Before he could reply, though, Seth was already on his feet holding one beefy hand in her direction.
“Great idea!”
Thea stared at the hand for a long second as she tried to come up with a polite way to refuse, but there was just no way to correct Seth’s misunderstanding without embarrassing him. She shouldn’t care about that, but she did, darn it. Seth didn’t have many friends in high school, and she got the feeling that might still be the case, seeing as how his somewhat abrasive personality hadn’t changed much since then. Telling him she didn’t want to dance with him would be like kicking a puppy.
A really large, incredibly annoying puppy.
Damning her manners a second time, Thea got up and stepped past Pete, glaring down at him with promised retribution as she did. Naked baby pictures wouldn’t be nearly enough. No, for this, she was going to have to come up with something much more evil.
As she was tugged along to the dance floor like a dingy in the wake of a tugboat, Thea had the time to wonder if it really had been a misunderstanding on Seth’s part that had gotten her there or just a willful end run to get what he wanted. Seth had been good at making the dumb jock image work in his favor, but she’d always gotten the impression there was a much more devious brain at work underneath all of that muscle.
Thea had to admit that for a large man, Seth danced surprisingly well. And if he hadn’t taken every opportunity to get into her personal space, she might have enjoyed dancing with him. The crowd kept them close, but every time Thea found a few inches of space to retreat into, Seth was right there, closing the distance again, smiling down at her like there was no place on earth he’d rather be.
Thea could think of about a dozen other places she’d rather be at the moment. Several of them involved tearing a strip off of Pete’s butt for bringing Seth to the club to “run into” her. No way did she buy that it was just coincidence.
The beat slowed, the crowd shifted, and Seth stepped right up into her personal space again, his hands going to her shoulders as though he was going to pull her up against him in a full-frontal press. Thea stiffened and shot her hand against his chest to hold him away, anger burning away the manners that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.
“Look,” she said, only to be cut off when Pete appeared at her side.
“My dance.” He gave Seth a look that wasn’t entirely friendly as he claimed both of Thea’s hands and danced her into a turn that put her out of the other man’s reach.
There was a second where Thea thought Seth would try to snatch her back, but after giving her a final covetous look, he turned and bulled his way through the dancers and off the dance floor. The tension that had risen in her washed out with a relieved sigh. She took a second to get her emotions back in check then looked up at Pete, who was watching her with serious eyes. Cop eyes.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You shouldn’t be thanking me. I should be apologizing. If I’d known he would be such a douche—uh, dumbass, I would have never agreed to bring him tonight.” He glared off in the direction Seth had disappeared.
“Was that your idea or Lillian’s?”
“Mine. I thought—” His gaze swung down to hers in surprise.
“I’m not a complete dimwit, you know,” she said, enjoying the way he squirmed at being caught out.
“I was only trying to help.”
“How, exactly, is throwing me in the path of someone I haven’t seen since high school—by choice, mind you—supposed to help me? Help me what?”
He mumbled something that the music drowned out.
“What?”
With a sigh, Pete repeated louder, “Make sure that you’re not so focused on Doyle that you miss out on someone else who might be a better fit.”
Thea stared at him in disbelief. “And you thought that person might be Seth?”
Pete had the decency to look embarrassed.
“Well, we got t
o talking about high school one day, and he remembered that Lil and you were friends, and that kind of led to talking about you and him. He made it sound like you two were pretty tight before you went off to college.”
“Do you remember me being tight with him?”
“I didn’t exactly pay attention to your love life back then,” he replied with a roll of his eyes. “Do you remember who I was dating senior year?”
“It was a cheerleader.” Thea tried to dredge up the vague memory. “Buffy something. No, Bitsy. Betty?” She huffed. “Okay, I see your point. But the truth is, no matter what he might have told you, we had a grand total of two dates, and we were done way before I left for California.”
“I guess he remembers things a little differently.”
Revisionist history at its finest. Something else she was just now remembering that Seth had always been good at.
“You wouldn’t have any reason to think he was exaggerating.” Thea sighed. Although, lying through his teeth might have been a more accurate description. “So you’re forgiven for bringing him tonight, but your reason for bringing him was way out of line.”
“Hey.” Peter gave up even pretending they were dancing and tugged her off the dance floor on the side of the club opposite where their table was and away from the giant speakers.
Thea allowed herself to be pulled along because she had a few things she wanted to say to him about his sticking his nose into her personal business, and shouting at him over the music in the middle of the dance floor wasn’t how she wanted to do it.
“Look,” Pete said when he parked them in a relatively private spot, “I get that you’re a little pissed at me for tonight, but you don’t have a big brother of your own to watch out for you, so I feel that I kind of have to step up and take on that role whenever the time comes that you need one. And I kind of felt that time was now. So I did.”
He couldn’t have said anything better designed to puncture her anger at him.
“You’ve been all starry-eyed about Doyle for years, and after listening to you talking with Lil the other day about how hard you’re willing to work to get him to notice you, I gotta admit, I was a little worried. I didn’t want you to get sucked into this tunnel vision with him as the only guy who exists for you.”
He shook his head and scowled. “If you want my opinion, if Doyle is still so blind to all you have to offer after all these years, then he doesn’t deserve you. You can do better. There are guys out there who would worship the ground you walk on. I’m not kidding,” he said when she snorted and rolled her eyes. “I think you’re really selling yourself short if you think Doyle is all there is.”
Wow. Pete was far from stupid, but he was a guy, which meant he didn’t think about things like feelings and relationships the same way women did. For him, that statement had been quite eloquent.
Wrong, but eloquent.
“Pete, I appreciate that you’re worried about me. But the fact of the matter is I’m in love with Doyle. He’s it for me. Right or wrong, I can’t help the way I feel. I don’t know if he’ll ever want to love me back, but I have to give myself the chance to find out.”
“I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“There’s a really good chance I will be.” Thea felt a pinch in her chest at the painful truth of that statement. “But love is worth the risk.”
“Okay, no more butting in unless you need me to,” he said as they started walking back toward the table. “But I’m still going to be your stand-in big brother.”
“Big brother, huh?” She looked up at him with her head cocked. “You do remember that I’m older than you by like two months, right?”
“You are never going to let that go, are you?”
Thea grinned, having gotten the reaction she wanted. The humor of their usual banter faded fast, however, when she saw that Seth was waiting at their table, staring out at the dance floor while talking to Lillian, who was sitting across from him typing on her phone, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else.
Thea could sympathize because she felt the exact same way.
Squaring her shoulders, she approached the table and took the empty seat next to Lillian, fishing out one of the last two bottles of water sloshing around in the bucket of half-melted ice and holding it to her face before opening it. “Wow, I’m totally beat. I think it’s time to call it a night.”
“I bought you a drink.” Seth slid a large martini glass across the table toward her.
“I…oh.” Thea stared at the familiar sugar-rimmed glass.
“A lemon drop martini. That’s your drink, right?”
Since she hadn’t developed a taste for them until her last year of college, she had no idea how he would know that, unless…She glanced at Lillian, who gave a small shake of her head. She hadn’t mentioned it. That left only one other person. Pete. Thea gritted her teeth with renewed annoyance. Apology or not, he was so going to pay for being a blabbermouth.
“Thank you, but it’s getting late and we really do need to be going.”
Seth stared at her in mild confusion. “But…I bought you a drink.” He nudged the glass a little closer toward her. “Go ahead, try it.”
Not a chance. Even if she’d been in the mood to prolong the evening, Thea would have had to decline. One of the strictest, not to mention smartest, rules she’d ever been given, even before she’d reached the legal drinking age, was to never drink something that wasn’t sealed or handed directly to her by the bartender or someone she trusted. Even being an old acquaintance and a cop didn’t give Seth a pass on that one. Date rape drugs had become a much too common occurrence to take stupid chances.
“And I appreciate the gesture, Seth, but I’m afraid we’re leaving now.” Thea looked at Lillian as she said it, daring her to argue, but Lillian was already starting to stand up, more than ready to go herself.
Seth got to his feet as Thea did, knocking the table in his haste and spilling the oversized drink. Thea barely scooted out of the way in time to avoid getting splashed. Seth didn’t even seem to notice.
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
“That’s okay. I have it covered.” Doing something she rarely ever did, she sought out Daryl and gave him the signal that meant she wanted to be escorted out of the building rather than just followed at a discreet distance. From his new position on the wall, she realized that he must have followed her and Pete around the club when they’d left the dance floor. What only earlier that night she’d considered overkill she now found comfort in, especially with the way Seth was looking at her.
For a minute, she thought he might try to insist on walking her out despite Daryl’s towering presence at her back. Thankfully, Pete broke the tension. He stepped between her and Seth to give her a peck on the cheek goodbye and then stayed there, blocking Seth from trying to do the same. If he had, she was pretty sure Pete would have slugged him, and while she didn’t condone violence, she was also pretty sure she would have been okay with that.
“It was great to see you again, Thea,” Seth said.
Not wanting to lie, Thea didn’t return the sentiment. Instead, she said, “Thanks for the dance and the drink. Goodbye, Seth.” She didn’t think he registered the finality in her choice of words.
Neither woman spoke until they’d settled into the back of the car Rick had brought around to the front of the club. It wasn’t a limo, meaning there was no privacy glass to raise to keep Rick and Daryl from hearing their conversation, so Thea kept her comments to a minimum.
“Did you know he was bringing Seth with him?”
“God, no!” Lillian sounded offended she would ask. “I didn’t even know he was planning on going out tonight. He must have overheard me talking to Mellie on the phone earlier.” She shook her head. “I have no idea what he was thinking.”
“According to him, he was thinking that maybe I’m too focused on, uh, one thing and not considering all of my options.”
“This is what happens when men read C
osmo,” Lillian said with a sad shake of her head. “One quiz and they start to think they understand the mysteries of the female mind.”
“It was kind of sweet in an annoying, intrusive kind of way,” Thea said. “You’re lucky to have him as a brother.”
“Yeah, tell me that again after he’s followed you on a few of your dates.”
Now that was a truly horrifying thought.
“Pete does have a point, though,” Lillian said, her eyes darting toward the front seat as she lowered her voice. “You have been totally focused on that one thing for a while.”
“You’re the one helping me with that thing,” Thea whispered back, feeling confused and the teeniest bit betrayed. “You’ve never mentioned thinking I was making a mistake before.”
“That’s because I don’t.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
Lillian twisted the cord of her small purse between her fingers. “You met a lot of men tonight. And you had a good time. Right?”
“Yeah. Your point?”
“How did they make you feel?”
Despite the urge to snap at her friend, Thea gave the question due consideration.
“They were all really nice.” She gave a small shrug. “I had fun talking to them. After I relaxed and stopped trying so hard to not sound like an idiot,” she added with a self-deprecating grin.
“That’s good, but how did they make you feel?”
That’s when she got it.
“Nothing like how he makes me feel,” Thea said after glancing toward the men in the front seat, who were busy having their own low-voiced conversation. “Not even close.”
“Some of them were better looking than him.”
“Prettier, maybe,” Thea said, “but not better looking.”
“And none of them did anything for you, huh? Not a single quiver of interest?”
“Not so much as a tingle.”
Lillian stared at her for a second and then gave one slow nod before straightening in her seat and relaxing back into the cushion. “Okay. So now you know.”
Thea tipped her head against the back of the seat and smiled. “I already did.”