by Anne Calhoun
Oh.
If you want to cross something off the list, submit your vet tech school application.
No. Do this.
“Going twice,” Leanne said, a warning lilt in her voice.
“Two thousand dollars.”
Rachel’s voice silenced all chatter in the tent. Stares landed like the humidity before a storm on her face, bare of any makeup, on her hair, held back from her face in a thick French braid, on her simple outfit of jeans and a scoop-necked T-shirt representing Silent Circle Farm, but her gaze never left Ben Harris’s.
Leanne smoothly kept up her patter. “Two thousand, I have two thousand for a night with Officer Harris. Do I hear twenty-one?” she asked.
Rachel didn’t need to turn around to see the response. It was in the way Leanne straightened her back in anticipation of the final bid in the final auction of the night, in Ben Harris’s smile.
“Sold!”
A loud round of applause swept through the crowd, covering Leanne’s final comments. Rachel made her way through all those people to lay claim to trouble, and did what every other winning bidder had done that evening. She reached for his hand.
“Don’t touch me while I’m in uniform.”
She froze, then his palm settled warm and hard on her shoulder, his fingers splayed to her collarbone as he guided her not to the table where she’d make payment but back through the crowd, into the darkness of the parking lot. They left behind the noise and clamor of women released to shop, and headed for the truck he’d stepped out of only ten minutes earlier.
His hand didn’t drop from her shoulder until they reached the vehicle. He leaned back against the driver’s door and considered her.
“Two large?” he said, his demeanor back to cocky flirt. “I don’t know if I can live up to that.”
Two large what? “I have no doubt you will,” she said.
That smile again, the one with so many layers it hid more than it revealed, flashed on, then off, distracting her from her impending heart attack. What was it about that smile? It was somehow arrogant and inviting and hands-off, all at the same time, with an edge underneath it she couldn’t quite place.
A silence fell, awkward with the laughter and chatter in the background. He studied her in a way that made her lift her chin and look right back. He couldn’t tell. There was no way for him to tell just by looking at her.
“We better set this up now.”
“Good idea,” she said. “We’re open late on Friday nights but we close at six on Saturdays.”
“I can’t do either,” he said.
“We’re closed on Sundays,” she offered. Sundays, which used to be her favorite day of the week, were now her most difficult day. Rather than spending the entire day in church, she wrote to her father on Sundays, knowing that she’d mail the letter on Monday only to see it returned on Saturday.
“I’ll pick you up at six,” he said.
“Oh, that’s not necessary,” she said hastily. The farm lay along a river valley a good ways outside town. “I’ve got some things to do in Galveston. I’ll run errands and meet you at Gaido’s.”
“For two grand, I should give you a ride.”
She’d spent enough time listening to Jess flirt with the Texas A&M boys to know how to answer that. “I’ll count on one after dinner,” she said.
His gaze, focused on entering the date into the calendar on his phone, flicked up to hers, and that smile, that wicked dangerous smile, flashed again.
“Maybe I don’t go that far,” he said, an odd, teasing lilt in his voice.
Her mouth dropped open in shock.
He gave an amused huff. “Don’t worry. I go that far. What’s your name?”
“Rachel Hill,” she said.
“Phone number in case something comes up.”
She rattled off her digits and entered his into her phone. Their phones lit up their faces, giving the whole scene an eerie, unreal glow until the thunder rumbled again, and lightning lit up the sky. Unconcerned, he thumbed away at the keyboard with more dexterity than she did.
Catching her completely by surprise, he cupped her jaw, then kissed her cheek. She froze as heat and light danced under her skin.
“See you Sunday,” he murmured.
Rachel stepped back as he got into the pickup, cranked the engine, and swiftly backed out of the lot. Dust lifted in his wake, swirling in the hot night air as she turned and walked back into the tent. Congratulations followed her to the cashier’s table, where she pulled out her debit card and ran it through the scanner. Jess stood behind the table, ringing up customers.
“Well, look at you,” she said archly as she tucked jars of jam, jelly, and honey into a paper bag. “I never figured you for the type to buy a man, especially one like that. Rob’s more your speed.”
Rob was watching her from across the tent, his brow furrowed.
“What do you mean?” Rachel entered 2000.00 into the machine, stared at the number signaling the biggest purchase of her life, then pressed OK.
“The whole sweet, innocent thing appeals to Rob. The only thing Officer Harris likes about sweet and innocent is the chance to ruin it.”
Perfect, because she’d just bet two thousand dollars that he had no interest in a relationship, no sense that sex was something special reserved for the marriage bed, no inclination to call again. Virginal was the word Jess had used one night when all the apprentices went out for drinks and Rachel volunteered to drive when no one else wanted to. The Virgin of Silent Circle Farm, she’d teasingly called her without knowing the truth. Rachel was a virgin. Never been to bed with a man. Never been touched below the waist, or below the neck. Never even been kissed, until Ben Harris’s mouth brushed her cheek and glancing pressure and hot breath sent sparks along her nerves.
But Jess didn’t need to know that. Leaving Elysian Fields meant gaining a measure of not just control over her body and emotions, but also her privacy. She wanted the full range of human experience, and she wanted the option to keep it to herself.
“Rob and I are coworkers,” Rachel said, choosing to ignore Jess’s comments about the police officer. “And friends. That’s all. Want to help me shop for something to wear?”
A Galveston native, Jess knew all about the area’s upscale secondhand shops, and had a better eye for fit, color, and appropriateness than Rachel.
“Sure,” Jess said with a shrug. “Better pick out some sexy undies, too. Cotton briefs aren’t his style.”
Rachel walked back to help the other farm employees at the Silent Circle table, the memory of Ben Harris’s smile flashing like lightning in her brain.
It didn’t matter that Ben wasn’t her type. She wasn’t going to fall in love with the first man she had sex with. She wasn’t going to tie herself down, not after she’d paid so much to get free from that old life. The costs were too high to make that mistake.
But that smile made Ben Harris the perfect man to take her virginity. Rachel wasn’t the gambling kind, but she’d lay odds he wouldn’t even notice.
Chapter Two
Ben had worked over a week since that ridiculous night at the bachelor auction, a week permeated by the typical things cops smelled. Galveston’s ever-present undertone of salt spray, sunscreen, and fish. Gun oil, gas, hot vinyl, the garlic knots the last guy to drive his patrol car ate then sweated out, the faint scent of burning oil coming from the car’s engine. Rancid sweat and body odor that could drop a bull at thirty paces courtesy of addicts who hadn’t bathed in weeks in an effort to keep the drug from seeping out through their skin. Fear had a distinct smell. So did anger, hatred, rage, and futility. He’d smelled all those things and more, but not even the filtered, cool air blasting from his truck’s vents could get Rachel Hill’s lingering, indefinable scent out of his nostrils.
He
pulled into the parking lot of Gaido’s only ten minutes late. Not bad, given that an hour earlier he’d been braced at attention in a very small office with the shift lieutenant and the precinct captain screaming at him loud enough to wake the dead in crypts in Louisiana.
Yes sir, he observed a robbery in progress at a gas station, called 911, then walked into the middle of it.
Yes sir, he was off duty.
Yes sir, he was unarmed.
No sir, he wasn’t wearing a vest.
Yes sir, he goaded the robber, providing a distraction for the mother sheltering her young son behind the lids-and-straws counter to bolt out the back door and the attendant to hit the alarm, and yes sir, when the robber swung his gun from Ben to the attendant, Ben fucking cold-cocked him.
He flexed his fingers when he got out of the truck. Hitting solid cheekbone, feeling it crack under his fist. Goddamn. An adrenaline high smelled like the best sex ever.
No surprise there.
He swung out of the truck, and crossed the parking lot to the front door. The bar to the right of the hostess stand was packed, so he stood in the door, searching for the woman willing to drop two grand on a night with him. When a group left to claim their table, Ben saw his best bet, but slowed his progress through the crowd to be sure, then stopped behind her, absently watching the light glinting off a thick, complicated knot of hair in a dozen shades of brown and gold. She wore a knee-length, sleeveless fitted dress the same bright copper as the bottom of his mother’s pots. He inhaled slowly.
Definitely her.
“Rachel,” he said.
She turned to face him, and the sight knocked speech from him for a moment, because this woman looked nothing like the farm worker who’d waited until the very last moment to bid on him. In the bar’s dim lighting, the skin of her throat and shoulders reminded him of hot nights in the back of a pickup, and sultry eye makeup and mascara turned her pale brown eyes to mysterious, catlike pools.
The combination made him want to bend down and lick her throat before he set his teeth to her neck. Instead he settled for another kiss on the cheek and got soft, sun-warmed skin and another halted breath, just like the one at the bachelor auction in return. Hot blood eddied to his cock.
He was so getting laid tonight.
If he didn’t crash from exhaustion first. He’d worked until two at No Limits, gone to a party for a couple of hours, slept for a couple until daylight made it impossible to sleep. A simple trip to the gas station for coffee and the newspaper turned into a day at the station, complete with two senior officers taking turns going at him.
Just wait until his SWAT lieutenant heard about this. There would be more hell to pay later, but now . . . now he had Rachel Hill to attend to.
When he drew back, her eyes were wide. He cleared his throat, tried for normal conversation. “What are you drinking?”
“Water,” she said.
Usually women had a cocktail in hand by now, but maybe she was dehydrated after a long day outside. He ordered a Shiner Bock and swallowed a good half of it before looking at her again. This time he caught her gaze skimming over his suit, the one he’d last worn for his sister’s and brother’s weddings. Despite the day he’d had, a two-thousand-dollar date called for a suit. In that dress they’d probably just walk around the Pleasure Pier, skip the rides. Catch the sunset in the Gulf before they disappeared into the darkness of his apartment or hers.
He picked up what was left of his beer and extended his hand toward the hostess stand. “Let’s see if our table is ready.”
She preceded him out of the bar and into the foyer, where couples sat or stood waiting for a table. Ben checked in with the hostess, who pulled two leather-bound menus from a shelf inside the stand, and led them to a table near the window, overlooking the ocean. The hostess stepped back to let him hold Rachel’s chair, and while she seated herself, Ben found himself trying to identify each component of her scent. Heat and sweat, not masked by perfume or the artificially scented shampoos and body lotions so many women favored. Rachel smelled elemental, like the air before an electrical storm. Hot earth and humid air, danger, destruction.
She sat down, flashed him a quick smile over her shoulder at this common courtesy, then laid her napkin in her lap as he seated himself and accepted a menu. He picked up his own menu, found rib eye in the steak section, and closed it again. “See anything that looks good?”
“Everything looks good,” she said, still studying the menu.
The waiter showed up and rattled off the specials, then asked if they’d like anything to drink. “Wine?” he said, looking across the table at Rachel.
“Yes, please,” she said.
“Red or white?”
“We have a very nice house red that pairs well with the beef medallions,” the waiter offered.
Rachel considered the menu again, then said, “I’d like the seafood platter.”
She wasn’t going to be talked into something she didn’t want. He liked that, flicked her a smile. “White wine to go with that, and I’ll take the rib eye.”
“Appetizers?”
“No, thank you,” Rachel said.
Ben held up a hand, stopping the waiter in his tracks. “You were looking at something.”
A blush bloomed on that tanned skin, and for a moment Ben wondered whether he could feel the heat rising under his fingertips if he touched her smooth cheek. In the setting sunlight filtered through the big windows overlooking the ocean, she looked like autumn dusk, a hint of mystery clinging to her tanned skin.
He thought a week between being bought and being had would dull his response to her. No such luck. Unlike a woman picked up at No Limits, he was pretty sure sleeping with the bachelor-auction winner wouldn’t be appropriate. But, unlike the last few women he’d brought home, Rachel hadn’t faded from his memory.
“The calamari,” she admitted.
“We’ll start with the calamari,” he said.
The waiter confirmed salad dressings, took their menus, and disappeared. Rachel neatly aligned her silverware, sipped her water, then folded her hands in her lap, and it hit him.
“You’re nervous,” he said.
The bloom on her cheeks darkened from pink to rose. “Yes.”
“I’m surprised. You wanted to do this badly enough to drop two thousand dollars on it. I don’t bite. Until later, and then only if you ask.” His response, a smile to go with the teasing, was as natural as breathing, and to no great surprise, it seemed to settle her down. “Tell me about the fund-raiser.”
“That’s right. You weren’t supposed to be there at all. Why did your friend have to cancel?”
The waiter arrived with the wine, uncorked it, and poured a small amount into Ben’s glass. Perfunctorily, he tasted it and nodded approval to the waiter, who then poured full glasses for them. “I joined the SWAT team a few weeks ago,” he said as he finished off his beer. “Rogers went to Vice, and he was working that night.”
Rachel’s eyes widened over the rim of her glass. “We were fortunate you were willing to step in,” she said and sipped.
“I beat him out for the SWAT spot,” Ben said. “He said it was the least I could do. What’s with the bachelor auction anyway?”
“It was a fund-raiser for the community garden initiative. Rob wants to extend it through a program he calls Truck Garden, kind of like a CSA, but one that travels. Last night he raised enough money to buy the truck and renovate it.”
“You worked at the farm long?” he asked as the calamari arrived. He gestured to the heaped platter. “Go ahead.” Squid wasn’t his thing, but he’d eat a few pieces to be polite.
“Just this season, I hope.” She transferred a few golden-fried pieces to her plate and scooped out a small amount of the sauce. “I grew up on a farm, but I want to go to vet tech school and w
ork in a vet clinic. What’s it like, being a cop?”
That was the number one most common question he got asked at parties, on dates, in groups. Experience taught him no one wanted the real answer to that question. Instinct told him what his lieutenant called bullshit-death-wish-hero-complex-fucking-crazy stunts wouldn’t impress Rachel Hill, either.
He sat back, beer in hand, and started. “So, last week I’m on patrol, and there’s this homeless guy pushing his shopping cart on the sidewalk in the Strand. It’s bad for business and someone reports him to 911. I show up. He’s stumbling, maybe sick, more likely pub intox. I pull over and start talking to him. He smells like the last time he bathed was in a keg, but the stumbles are from withdrawal because he asks me for money for beer before he throws up. I round up him and his shopping cart full of grocery bags of stuff to take him up to the shelter near the medical center. The intake clerk asks for his name.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Go on.”
“He pulls himself upright and says, ‘Jesus,’” Ben said, replicating the drunk’s offended, exasperated tone. As if anyone could doubt the presence of the Son of God in a homeless shelter.
The corners of her mouth lifted.
“The clerk’s used to stuff like that, so she just goes on. ‘Last name?’ ‘Christ.’” Ben drew out the word like the drunk had, way past exasperated into are you fucking stupid? “‘Common spelling?’ she asks, quick as a flash.”
Laughter huffed from Rachel.
“That’s what it’s like, being a cop.”
She made a little noise that might have been assent, or just an I’m listening noise. When their food arrived, she offered a story about an escapist goat, so he kept things light as the meal progressed. Nothing about the risks, the dark alleys or hallways with no backup, the furious tirade from his lieutenant for what he’d done today. Between them they finished the wine. He poured the last of it into Rachel’s glass when dessert arrived. An alcohol flush stained her cheeks and lips, and her eyes were the slightest bit glassy as they studied him across the candlelit table. He signaled for the check as he watched the last bite of crème brûlèe disappear between her lush lips.