by D. D. Ayres
“Take a second and feel nice about yourself, Agent. And then realize everybody changes. Before you make another mistake, be certain you like the woman Officer Jamieson has become—not the person you think you remember.”
Scott’s jaw worked for a moment. She decided not to give him the chance to ruin his admirable self-control. “I don’t like being in the middle of anyone’s personal business. But you brought this hot mess to me. So suck it up and tell me. Can you two work this out in a week?”
His anger suddenly dried up, reshaping into concern that softened his expression. “Whatever happens, Nikki’s not to blame. I pushed for this. I’ll take the weight for making it work.”
“Don’t waste your breath on me. Go get shit done. For starters, that woman out there you knew as Nikki?” She hooked a thumb toward the window. “She calls herself Cole.”
Yardley turned and quickly walked away. She’d probably given him too much to think about too soon, but she didn’t have time for subtlety.
God, she hoped he was as much of a quick study on relationships as he was on anger management. But when a man’s heart was in a struggle with his pride?
“Damn you, John Lattimore. I will get even with you for this one.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cole entered the women’s barracks at Harmonie Kennels to hear Hugo growling low in his throat. Her gaze went instantly to the shadowy figure sitting at the table at the far end of the common room. Her free hand moved to her waist until she remembered she wasn’t wearing her weapon.
“Where the hell have you been?” The cranky male voice was familiar.
“Scott?” She reached for the nearest light switch.
Scott occupied a chair on the far side of a small table while Hugo stood guard on the opposite side, tracking him with the single-mindedness he reserved for cornered suspects.
Cole’s lips twitched. “Hugo, what’s that you’ve cornered? A schmutzige Ratte?” She glanced at Scott. “That’s German for ‘dirty rat.’”
Hugo came to his feet, barking his agreement.
Scott stood up. “Very funny. Now call him off.”
“Hugo. Lass es.”
Hugo looked disappointed at the command to leave the intruder alone. He turned and came readily toward her, but looked back several times at his would-be prey.
Amused, Cole deposited her bag of groceries on the counter then retrieved a ball from her pocket, bouncing it toward Hugo. “Gute Hund. So ist brav.”
When Hugo had caught and bounded away to play with his reward, she turned to Scott. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see you.” He rolled his shoulders. “While I waited I thought you might have something to munch on. I had just found your chips when Batman there took exception to my presence. Don’t you ever keep his kennel door shut?”
“That would defeat the purpose of having a guard dog. Still, you seem to be in one piece.” She looked him up and down, ignoring the wave of super self-awareness that seemed to be part of her every encounter with him. “I’d say you got off lucky.”
Scott glanced at Hugo, who was chomping so hard on his toy the jingle bell inside tinkled constantly. “We were actually negotiating pretty well until I ran out of chips.”
“That’s when he cornered you?” Cole bit her lip.
“What’s so funny? He could have taken a chunk out of me at any second.”
“I’m not laughing.” But Cole had to press a hand to her lips to keep back the chuckles bubbling up inside her.
“You’re enjoying this.” He scowled at her, a decidedly sexy scowl that she remembered all too well.
She nodded, trying to hold in a breath that escaped in soft puffs of humor.
“It’s not funny. Well, maybe it is a little.” He cracked a smile. “Don’t tell Yardley about this.”
“What? That I found you hiding behind the kitchen table like a little girl afraid of a mouse?”
“You’re enjoying this entirely too much.” He tried to maintain a scowl but her laugher was infectious. Before long his dimples popped into view. “I had almost forgotten your laugh. Your whole face lights up.”
Cole sent him a sidelong glance. “Don’t make too much of it.”
“Why?”
“Because, just don’t.”
Their gazes met, hers turned a deeper blue than usual, as if something had disturbed those depths and brought up shadows of things past. Maybe she was remembering how much they once laughed together, often in bed. In bed, nothing mattered but them. In bed they were perfect.
One glorious second his dick sprang to life along with the sudden urge to capture her laughter in his mouth. He longed to scoop her up, slam and lock the door, and carry her to the nearest horizontal surface where he could screw his wife until they were both too exhausted to move.
My ex-wife. And I can’t touch her. Can’t do any of the sexy nasty things streaming though my mind.
A man who lived his professional life observing and making split-second judgments about the emotional status of others, Scott clocked the exact moment she began to read his thoughts. Her eyes widened and her lips parted in a soft expression of alarm mingled with resistance.
He looked away first, not because she intimidated him. The exact opposite. If she saw more deeply into the dark dangerous desires swirling through him, she would refuse to continue to work with him. And who could blame her?
So, he slammed the door on his libido and put his emotions on lockdown before he put his hands on her.
All he had left was a jittery anxiety he channeled into the most useful emotion he could find. Anger.
“This is not a game.” He gestured toward Hugo. “How the hell do you expect Hugo to accept me when hostility rolls off you as regularly as waves on the shore?” Lust to anger in less than three seconds. A new record for him.
She didn’t back down. She crossed her arms. “I’m not hostile.”
He took a few steps toward her. “You hate my guts. Admit it. Stands to reason Hugo isn’t going to cuddle up to me.”
Cole bit the inside of her lip. He was pushing harder than the moment seemed to call for. “Are you finished?”
“I haven’t begun.”
“Then this isn’t going to work.”
“Oh, it will work.” He paused before her, reaching out to tug the end of the ponytail slung forward over her shoulder. “But you’re going to have to warm up to me. For the sake of the operation.”
Cole jerked her gaze away. Warm up? She was much too hot already with him just standing so close.
The deep dark secret that had kept her awake for hours each night since Scott had reentered her life was that the connection between them hadn’t eroded during the past two years. She might resent him, blame him for ruining everything, have every sane reason to distrust him. Yet their bodies still knew each other. The attraction held. Easy for him to make light of it. Impossible for her.
When she looked up again he had moved away from her. Was, in fact, peering into the grocery bag she’d brought in. “You can stay for dinner.”
He looked up with the delight of Christmas morning. “Great. What are we having?”
She unhooked Hugo’s leash from around her waist. “Whatever you make. There’s an hour of daylight left and I need to give Hugo all the time I can fit in on that Agility course.” She was out the door before he could reply.
Scott unstrapped his watch and washed his hands before unbagging the groceries. There was a whole raw chicken. Sweet potatoes. Kale. “Beets? Seriously?”
He held up the plastic bag to inspect them. Damn. Some of them were orange. He was all for healthy eating. But beets? He set them aside. Nikki never cooked beets when they were together.
Scott turned and glanced at the door Nikki—Cole, the door that Cole had left through. Yardley’s comment about how Cole had changed skimmed his thoughts. Maybe Cole liked beets. So just maybe there was a way to do something with them even he would eat. Laptop in his cruiser. Recipes at his fi
ngertips.
He finished unpacking bread, milk, and coffee. Onions. BBQ sauce. “Okay, now we’re talking.”
* * *
“We need a cover story.”
They were sitting on the steps of Cole’s barracks watching twilight slide into night in the sky overhead. Hugo lay stretched out beside her while Izzy had deigned to join them, but only at the far opposite end of the porch. At least no one was barking or growling, not even she and Scott.
Cole stretched out her legs, letting her boots make gullies in the gravel walkway. She was full of barbecued chicken, mashed sweet potatoes, and, surprisingly, roasted beets. “How elaborate will it have to be?”
“The best lies are those that stay close to the truth.”
Scott pulled free another beer bottle from the six-pack he had fetched from the barracks he shared with five other male handlers and offered it to Cole.
She shook her head. One was enough. “Could we be brother and sister?”
Scott choked on his beer. “The way I look at you could get me arrested for incest in twenty-five states.”
He said it lightly but Cole found it hard to smile.
“How about this? We’re exes who recently got back together after you blew us up by screwing around. I’m giving you another chance but I’m not betting on this being a permanent arrangement because I don’t trust you.”
Scott took a long pull on his beer. “Is that what you think? That I’m just doing this because I don’t like being the bad guy?”
Cole gazed at him for several seconds. “I think you don’t know what you want. I don’t think you ever have.” She waved a hand around. “If this task force assignment is your way of trying to make something up to me then know that it doesn’t make up for a thing.”
He reached out and touched his little finger to hers. “What do you want?”
Cole looked down at their touching fingers, wondering how such a tiny thing could set off such huge seismic quakes in her middle. She shifted her finger away.
“I want to do something important. I want to prove I didn’t make a mistake in choosing a career in law enforcement.” She lifted her gaze to the night sky. “I want to prove I’m good enough.”
Scott heard an echo of her words in his chest. To do something important. To prove he was good enough. That had been the be-all, end-all of his entire life. And still he’d managed to screw up everything that mattered.
Cole shook her head at some internal thought. “I wasn’t the perfect daughter with As because I wanted to be. I just knew it would have killed my parents if I’d become a rebel after they divorced. Becca and I had to show them we were okay, that they didn’t ruin us.”
Scott pulled up a knee and rested his elbow on it, letting the beer bottle dangle from the hook of two fingers. Unlike his own, he’d always thought she had the perfect childhood. After all, even though they were divorced, her parents had presented a united front to him. They didn’t like him.
“You never told me how the divorce affected you before.”
She glanced at him, for once without her guard up. “We didn’t do much real talking the years we were together.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Too hot to cool down. Plus, to allow her to open up would have meant she would have expected the same from him. He hadn’t wanted her to see him as he really was, not when she gazed at him like he was Superman, the Socrates of law enforcement, and the Sexiest Man Alive all rolled into one. How could he have been so blind?
“So circumstances prevented you from being…?”
She smiled. “Who knows? Goth, maybe, or I might have gotten a nose ring and tattoos—”
“Tattoos? You hate tattoos.”
“Not hate. I just didn’t want you to ruin a great body with one of those ugly biker tats you kept threatening to get. And I certainly didn’t want some biker-gang scum with an ink gun anywhere near you. Hepatitis? HIV?”
Scott let her explanation sink in. He didn’t recall any of their fights on the subject including such a reasonable argument. Or, maybe he had just stopped listening before she could make it.
“Of course, I’m not inflexible.” The corner of her mouth lifted though she didn’t glance at him. “I found a licensed artist who is working to pay her way to become a nurse practitioner.”
He sat forward suddenly. “You’ve got a tattoo?”
She nodded. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Scott’s gaze swept over her. She’d showered and changed before they ate. Her hair was swept up in a ponytail he longed to tug at. No designs on her slender neck. The sleeveless vee-neck tee and shorts she wore couldn’t be hiding a tattoo on her arms or her legs, which meant no thigh or chest tattoos. It had to be in a secret place. A variety of possibilities invaded his thoughts, each one more intimate than the last. He felt himself begin to sweat. “Can I see it?”
To his astonishment, she gave him a secret naughty-girl smile. “In your dreams, Agent Lucca. In your dreams.”
Well hell. Now he was going to have to see it. Somehow.
Cole reached for the beer she had earlier refused. “We need to get back to business.”
She did, maybe. He wanted to continue to think about her hidden tattoo. He stretched, deliberately allowing his legs to spread until one of his denim-clad thighs leaned against her bare one. When she didn’t immediately shift away, he smiled. Now they could talk business.
“Lattimore called this afternoon. He’s sending out people in the morning to evaluate our progress. We need to get our story straight and prove to them that we can do this before we take it on the road.”
“How do we do that?”
“Glad you asked.” He clinked his bottle to hers. “We need to move in together.”
Cole bit back her initial reaction. Of course, they had to move in together. They were going to pretend to be a couple. A real couple.
“Is that a problem?” Scott leaned toward her. “You got a boyfriend somewhere who won’t like it?”
Cole had been expecting he would ask, sooner or later, if there was a man in her life. She even had a story ready. “He understands.”
“Does he?” The question came out of Scott in a huff of surprise.
Shit. That wasn’t the answer he’d wanted to hear. But he tried to play it off casually.
“I most definitely wouldn’t understand a woman I cared about moving in with another guy, even if it was strictly for the job. I’d be a wild man.”
“Yes. You would.” Kate Winslow was in the house. “That’s why he’s nothing like you.”
Scott reared back, bracing his elbows on the porch. Cole tried not to notice how his sprawl showed off his long lean body to good effect. “So, what’s he like?”
“He’s a podiatrist.” She saw his jaw drop a little before a smirk punched dimples into his cheeks. “I know. Feet. That’s what everyone thinks. But he’s a surgeon. Sports medicine. Specializing in injuries to the foot, ankle, and lower leg.”
“Sounds like a busy guy.”
“He is. Sports medicine is very lucrative.”
He gazed at her between narrowed lids. “Interesting.”
“What?”
“You haven’t mentioned his name.”
“Robert Dawson. Dr. Robert Dawson. Becca introduced us.” She had looked up the name of the doctor her sister had been trying to set her up with, in case Scott decided to check. She just hoped the guy would never know how she was lying about him.
“Doc Rob? Cute.” Scott rocked back into a seated position. “You’ve known him long?”
Cole crossed her toes inside her boots. “Nearly a year.”
“Sounds serious.” He picked up her left hand and turned it palm down. “But I don’t see an engagement ring. I thought you’d be remarried by now.”
“No. You cured me of the habit. You?”
He merely shook his head, sucker punched by her candor. He’d cured her … of what? Wanting to be married? She’d loved being married, said so pra
ctically every day they were together. She talked about a house and kids … kids.
He glanced at her sharply. He didn’t know how to start that conversation.
“What about you, Scott? Got a girlfriend?”
“I was seeing someone. Sort of.” No point in telling her there hadn’t been anyone special in his life since she walked out of it. He had gone back to strictly one-night stands. Even so, it had been months since he’d been with a woman. Next to Doc Rob, it would make him sound like a loser. “Nothing serious.”
“I seem to remember you prefer your women raw and raunchy, like that skank who gave you a blow job in public.”
Shit. Back to the heart of their split. “It was a biker initiation.”
“Oh, and that was supposed to explain everything?”
“I’m not making excuses. I screwed up. Got in a situation where I couldn’t back out without causing suspicion. Who the hell knew the bar owner would call the police?”
Cole leaned in, her shadowed expression going from serious to pissed off.
“You were in my precinct, Scott. Even if I hadn’t been one of the officers who answered the call, those who did would have seen you and talked. By the time the night was over, everyone we worked with would have known it anyway. This way, at least, I got to walk out first.”
Scott’s expression went dark with anger. “You should have waited to talk with me. You owed me that.”
“Did I? If I had waited for you, what would you have said?”
“Shit. I don’t know. Something.” Anything to make her stay.
He stood up suddenly and heaved his beer bottle across the yard so that it smashed against the telephone pole a healthy distance away.
After a moment she spoke, her voice quiet. “You had enough of tiptoeing down memory lane?”
He sucked in a breath, trying to regain control of his temper. “Yeah.”
He offered her a third beer.
She shook her head. “I’m in rehab. Have been for a while.”
“Rehab?” His gut tightened. “For what?”
“Stupid heart syndrome.” She rose. “I’m going to bed. You can, whatever.”
She reached the door before she looked back at him. “Just so you know. I forgive you. I just don’t want to go back. Hugo. Come on, boy.”