Baby: A Linear Tactical Romantic Suspense Standalone

by Janie Crouch

  “Naw. Bringing a date here is kind of like taking them to meet your family.”

  Quinn had absolutely no idea what to make of that statement, so she decided not to push it.

  The restaurant itself was homey, with an authentic Italian flair—highlighting the comfort and joy of life. The décor was rustic with wooden chairs at the tables and booths along the far wall covered with checkered tablecloths. Quinn loved it.

  She opened the menu to look through it, but Baby didn’t bother.

  “You already know what you want?”

  “One of the advantages of living in a small town your whole life is familiarity with the menus.”

  “Fair enough. Do you have something you always get?”

  “Honestly, you can’t go wrong with anything Mr. DiMuzio makes. But unless you’re opposed to it, I would definitely suggest pizza. We can get one and split it if you want.” He narrowed his eyes. “Unless you’re one of those big city freaks who likes anchovies and pineapple on their pizza.”

  “Together?” She couldn’t help the face she made. “I think you’re safe from this city girl. Why don’t you order whatever you think is best?”

  “Can do, but first we have to rope in the best.” Baby nodded his head, his eye contact slightly over Quinn’s shoulder, grabbing a waiter’s attention before he gazed back at Quinn. “I know exactly what we’re going to get.”

  When the waiter came over, Baby gave him a smile. “Tell Mr. D to make a medium pie of whatever he’s feeling the most love toward.”

  The waiter smiled. “And to drink?”

  “Beer for me.” He held his hand out toward Quinn.

  “I’ll have water, thanks.” Rock-hard abs over there didn’t need to worry so much about the calories they were about to ingest—the advantage of having the metabolism of someone in their twenties.

  Quinn didn’t have that luxury.

  “You’re leaving the order up to Mr. DiMuzio?” she asked after the waiter left. “Aren’t you afraid you might get something you won’t want?”

  “Mr. D has known me since I was in diapers. Not to mention he’ll want to impress you, so I’m sure we’ll get something good.”

  “I guess I’m used to eating with somebody who had specific tastes. Peter was always very particular as to what he would order.”

  “Peter. That’s your ex?”

  “Yup. Going on two years now.”

  “And he’s back in Boston?”

  “Cambridge, yes.”

  “Aren’t Boston and Cambridge the same thing?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “To everyone else maybe, but not to the people who live there. Boston is a city. Cambridge is too, but a smaller one.”

  The waiter brought their beverages and Quinn distracted Baby from talk about Peter or Harvard by discussing the differences between the cities of Cambridge and Boston until the pizza arrived.

  It was beyond delicious. Mr. DiMuzio had done his version of a supreme, complete with gooey cheese and thick crust and a sauce that was both sweet and tangy.

  She looked up from her bite–having to pull strings of cheese from the rest of the slice—to find Baby looking at her.

  “Right?” he said with a knowing smile.

  “It’s amazing.” She didn’t want to think about the number of calories something this wonderful must contain.

  “If you turn Mr. D loose, he’ll never do you wrong. I just can’t eat here very often if I want to stay in any sort of shape.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Ha. As if you have anything to worry about. With that logic, I should probably stop after one bite.”

  “Don’t you dare. Mr. D would be mortally offended.”

  “Okay, but it’s going to make me squishier.”

  He shook his head. “Soft. You’re soft.”

  “Is that okay?”

  “Oh yeah. Soft is good.”

  God. His voice made her squirm. She had to look away.

  They both finished their first slices and were well into their second when the interruption came.

  “Dr. Harrison?” She looked up at the young, dark-skinned man who’d walked past their table then turned back. “You probably don’t remember me; I know you’ve had a lot of students. I was in your Literary Analysis in Contemporary Computer Culture seminar a few years ago. My name is—”

  “Kendrick. Right?”

  He nodded. “Yes. Kendrick Foster. It’s good to see you again.” He turned to Baby. “Hey, Baby.”

  “Hey, Blaze.”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Blaze?”

  Kendrick shrugged. “All these Linear Tactical military guys around here have a codename. I decided I needed one and since I’m half black and half Asian...or as I would say, Blasian. Which got reduced down to Blaze.”

  She couldn’t help her chuckle. “I like it.”

  She didn’t remember a lot of specifics about Kendrick in her class except that he’d been an excellent student and not interested in a Comparative Lit concentration—Harvard’s fancy word for academic major—at all. He’d been studying the crossover effects of literary analysis and cyber culture. He’d spent hours in her office picking her brain about the ramifications.

  “I thought you went to Yale?” Baby asked Blaze.

  “Yeah, for undergrad, graduate school was at Harvard.”

  “Nerd,” Baby whispered under his breath.

  Kendrick thumped him good-naturedly on the back.

  “I’m picking up a pizza to go, but saw you over here, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d heard there were some ...issues on campus and that you weren’t teaching anymore.”

  Well, that was enough to kill her appetite, even for the delicious pizza. “That’s true, unfortunately.”

  Kendrick immediately picked up on her turmoil. “Hell, I’m sorry. Look, all I’ve heard is rumors, and you know how the network has nothing better to do than spread gossip. I ignored it because I remembered what an amazing teacher you were.”

  She shook her head. “You took a class that was primarily taught by my teaching assistant.”

  “But you were always willing to talk to me and answer my questions. You made a difference for me.”

  She folded her napkin in half and then in half again. “I appreciate it. I hope your studies ended up panning out the way you’d planned.”

  “Working with Linear Tactical? Let’s just say it’s not the way I’d envisioned my career, but I wouldn’t change it. Are you going to be around for a while? How did you end up in Oak Creek?”

  “Riley Harrison is my brother. So yeah, I’ll be here for a while. I’m teaching at Teton State College.”

  She looked over at Baby. She knew she should tell Kendrick that she was also waiting tables, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the words or to see the pity in his eyes.

  Baby gave her a smile, his green eyes sympathetic.

  She knew he would keep her secrets, not that it would take long for Kendrick to find out the truth.

  “Phoenix is your brother? That’s awesome.” Kendrick shifted from one foot to the other. “And TSC is lucky to have you. Maybe you’ll break up another scholarship fraud ring like back in Cambridge.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, my claim to fame. I wish that was the gossip still being spread about me.”

  Kendrick’s name was called over at the counter. “There’s my pizza. It’s good to see you, Dr. Harrison.”

  “Please, call me Quinn.”

  It occurred to her that Kendrick was probably Baby’s age. Perfect. Now she felt both fat and old.

  “Quinn,” Kendrick said with a smile. “I hope you’ll stay in Oak Creek a long time.” With that, he waved and turned toward the counter.

  She folded her napkin in half again, creasing the edge with her thumb, waiting for the questions Baby must have about what Kendrick had said.

  “Please tell me Kendrick was the worst student you’ve ever had, or that he did something really stupid that I can use to lord over him.�
� Baby took a giant bite of pizza. “Dude is so amazing with computers that he can be unbearable about his own genius sometimes.”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. I wasn’t in class with him most days, but he was a great student when I did see him.”

  “Damn it. That’s no fun.”

  He continued to eat.

  “That’s it? You’re not going to ask me why I got fired from Harvard?”

  He gave her a shrug. “Doesn’t seem like it’s something you’re very keen on talking about.” He swallowed. “I’m more interested in getting you to eat more of your pizza so that Mr. D doesn’t come after us demanding to know what’s wrong.” He pointed to the half-eaten slice pizza on her plate.

  She picked it up. “I just...” she trailed off with a shrug.

  She wanted to tell him more but didn’t know what to say. She was embarrassed that she hadn’t handled the situation better at Harvard. She couldn’t believe she’d lost everything so quickly.

  She didn’t want him to think of her as the complete loser she felt like.

  She set the pizza down again.

  “I just...”

  He reached over and grabbed her hand, trailing his thumb across her palm. “You don’t want to talk about it. I understand what it’s like to want to keep some things to yourself.”

  “Like you?” she asked. “Do you keep things to yourself?”

  He released her hand and sat back. “Me? Of course not. Ask anybody in Oak Creek. Everyone knows everything there is to know about me. I’m an open book.”

  He tilted his head to the side and gave her a grin. Charming, confident, sassy.

  And absolutely hiding something.

  Baby Bollinger had secrets. Ones hidden so deep no one knew he was hiding anything at all.

  She wasn’t about to press him on it, not while she was refusing to talk about what had happened in Cambridge.

  “Eat your pizza and tell me about this whole scholarship fraud ring you broke up with your bare hands. Did the FBI recruit you? Did you have to go to spy academy? Are you 007 status? You have a gun strapped to your thigh, don’t you?”

  She laughed, glad the crisis had passed. She picked up her pizza again. “I’m afraid you’ll be quite disappointed by that story. I never had to chase anyone through campus or anything.”

  He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a conspirator’s whisper, “Please tell me you at least had to seduce some rogue operatives in order to get the intel you needed.”

  She laughed and took a bite of her pizza. “You’ve been watching too many James Bond movies.”

  “Is there really such a thing as too many? Okay, spill your guts.”

  She laughed. This was much easier to talk about than being accused of stealing and deliberately sabotaging her own career, completely losing her composure, being escorted out by security, and having all her colleagues turn on her.

  “It really isn’t a very exciting story to tell. Part of a professor’s job is to sit on various college-wide committees. I was on the computer science department’s scholarship committee.”

  “Do you teach computer stuff also?”

  “No. But this was for a huge fellowship, a full ride for a master’s degree as well as a doctorate, stipend, living expenses, and pretty much a guarantee that you would get any job you wanted when you got out of school. It was a massive deal, so they always have non-field experts sit on the panel to make sure everything is fair and that they don’t get hive mind or something like that.”

  “Seems pretty smart.”

  She shrugged. She wished she’d never been a part of it. She’d gotten way too much recognition when it all went down, which had been flattering at the time. But when her career started to fall apart around her, a lot of the accusations had come back to that scholarship case. She’d been accused of snobbery, acting like she was better than her colleagues, having a sense of entitlement.

  “Really, all I found was an abnormality. Something about the way one of the candidates worded his essay caught my attention. Honestly, I’m not sure why. I knew I wasn’t of much assistance with the computer stuff, so I was focusing on what I knew. I won’t bore you with all the details of late-night rendezvous and shootouts, while, of course, dressing in bikinis to distract the bad guys.”

  She laughed as Baby clutched his heart and pretended to fall over.

  “Basically, when I looked a little closer, I found that one of the candidates had written a program which pulled in terms and phrases from hundreds of different popular and well-known essays. Almost plagiarizing but not quite. Honestly, given that it was a computer engineering scholarship, not creative writing or literature, I don’t think that would have been much of an issue for the rest of the committee, so I was just going to bring it up in passing, almost as a positive. But then when I started looking into the guy more, a lot of things about him were fake. There were discrepancies about his family life and with one of his test scores. He’d inflated some of his undergraduate individual class grades as well.

  She shook her head. “Nobody else was looking at that stuff, they were too busy being wowed at his spectacular computer abilities. I brought it up when all the discrepancies were finally too much for me to ignore.”

  Baby finished his last bite of pizza. “Oh man. So what happened?”

  She shrugged. “It was a huge debate. At first, nobody wanted to believe it. Then they said an essay wasn’t really important, but then when they started looking into the applicant further, more stuff came to light. It was sad really because none of that should have affected the decision. The guy was obviously a computer genius overall, and if he’d been honest, even if the other stuff wasn’t perfect, he might’ve still been the best fellowship applicant.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, it was high drama. Word got out that I had been the one to blow the lid on this scammer, although scammer is way too harsh a word, and I never used it. But my linguistics department was more than glad to take the credit for what they’d called a near-disaster averted. So, that was my five minutes of fame.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “About ten months ago.”

  She could see him do the math in his head, trying to figure out how she’d gone from hero to zero so quickly. It was something she’d tried to figure out herself.

  How she wished to God she’d never been part of that scholarship committee. Yeah, she’d been a hero for a few days, but how many times had that situation been thrown back in her face? Saying she’d become an attention-whore. Accusing her of leaking the story so that she could get the recognition. She would have much rather that kid be starting his fellowship at Harvard regardless of his lies than for her to have exposed him and lost everything because of it.

  “Well sounds like you were the hero. You figured out what nobody else saw.”

  She finished her last bite of pizza. “And it got me a trip to Oak Creek for my trouble.”

  “As all heroic deeds should. After all, we’re the ferret capital of the world.”

  She laughed; she couldn’t help it. “Ferret? I thought Wyoming was the Cowboy State.”

  He grinned. “Ferret capital of the world is the official slogan of Meeteetse, a tiny town about an hour from here. Most people think of cowboys and rodeos because of Cheyenne, but out here...”

  Baby forced her to try Mr. DiMuzio’s world-famous tiramisu the waiter brought over as he gave her what couldn’t possibly be a true history lesson about this part of the state. By the time the dessert was gone, her problems at Harvard seemed far away. She couldn’t remember ever laughing as much as she had here with Baby tonight.

  “You need to laugh more, Cupcake,” he said as he signaled the waiter for the bill.

  “I’m not really a laugh out loud sort of person.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” he said. “Maybe you’ll find in this new situation that the sort of person you are might be a little different.”

  Baby paid the bill and she than
ked him for dinner. He placed his hand at the small of her back as they left the restaurant. He waved to Mr. DiMuzio and praised him for the magnificent food as they went.

  “We missed the sunset. That was why I was originally picking you up at four o’clock,” he said. “I guess that will have to wait until next time.”

  Next time.

  Another date. Another date she shouldn’t say yes to but knew she would.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Baby held the truck door open for Quinn, and she slid inside. This woman was dangerous for him.

  The more he knew about her, the more he wanted to know. But he was a little afraid the same might hold true for her. She might not fall into the same trap as everyone else here in Oak Creek. She might see him for who he really was rather than seeing what she wanted to see.

  And where would that leave him? The woman had been a professor at Harvard, for God’s sake. She may not be there right now, but it was evident in everything about her from those sensibly heeled shoes right on up to that bun that drove him insane.

  He should end this before it went any further. Get some distance between them. Help her adjust to life here by being her friend. He could do that. Hell, he was a pro at keeping people at a distance by keeping them close.

  Emotional distance before things got any more out of hand. That’s what he needed to do.

  But she was smiling at him when he got into the truck.

  A downright genuine smile that made the skin around her eyes crinkle. The way it had when she’d been laughing throughout dinner.

  That laugh, that smile...he was helpless against it.

  Fuck distance.

  He grabbed her by the back of the neck and slid her over until she was almost in his lap before his brain could warn him of the pitfalls of this plan.

  It might have been the least amount of finesse in which he’d ever kissed a woman, but she didn’t seem to mind. If anything, she crawled closer.

  Their mouths dueled with each other—open, messy kisses which were greedy and sloppy.

  And the most real, amazing kisses he’d ever known.

  When she pulled away from him a few minutes later, both of them breathing hard, he thought maybe she was coming to her senses.