Bending the Rules

by Susan Andersen

  Which was so, so, so not her usual M.O.

  Dammit, she’d been in love before, had had her heart broken before—what thirty-year-old woman hadn’t? She’d wanted men, had experienced wanting them with what she’d always assumed was every fiber of her being.

  Except, it hadn’t been. Every fiber of her being was what she’d felt the two times Jason had kissed her—crazy with wanting him, so out of control she’d barely recognized herself.

  And she’d liked it. Right up until the moment he’d shoved her away and to all intents and purposes told her she was a mistake.

  Twice.

  “I should’ve pushed him away,” she muttered.

  Jane leaned over the table, her slippery brown hair sweeping her collarbone as it slid forward over her shoulder. “What’s that?”

  “I said I should have, um, grabbed the waitress.” She nodded at the young woman working the tables a short distance away. “I could really use another drink.”

  “Sure, that’s what you said.” Finn gave her a remember-me-I-saw-you-clinging-to-that-clown look. “But I’ll get her for you.” And, tipping his chair back on two legs, he waited until the waitress moved closer, then reached out to run a single callused fingertip down her arm as she leaned in to take an order at the table behind him.

  The young woman immediately straightened and turned to him.

  “My.” Poppy’s lips curved up in a sardonic smile. “Very impressive.”

  “Damn straight, buttercup. You’re not hanging with the bush league players tonight.” He indicated her empty martini glass. “Cosmo, right?” He made a swift assessment of everyone else’s drinks, placed an order, then—as soon as the waitress finished using her pen to jot down their requests—borrowed it to write her telephone number on the back of his hand.

  Poppy shook her head. “You’re a scary guy, Kavanagh.” But all joking came to an abrupt end as she caught sight of an unwelcome face over Finn’s shoulder. “Shit!”

  “What?” He craned around to look behind him. “Is your detective back?”

  “He’s not my detective! But, no, this is worse than de Sanges. Crap, crap, crap—ten times worse.” She leaned across the table to warn Ava, but she wasn’t quick enough.

  “Hello, Ava,” Cade Calderwood Gallari said in his damn smooth, deep voice and Poppy could only sit there and watch her friend lose all animation and go very, very still. For a moment Ava looked so vulnerable Poppy wanted to leap from her chair and scratch Cade’s Newman-blue eyes out.

  Then Ava rallied. Lounging back in her chair, she hooked her right elbow over its top, a move that thrust her lush breasts against her black chiffon halter.

  Cade’s gaze dropped to the shift of white skin against midnight-dark fabric, then rose to meet hers.

  “What do you want, Gallari?” she asked coolly.

  “Five minutes of your time.”

  “No,” Ava said with cool, quiet finality, while Jane and Poppy, exclaiming the word in unison with her, displayed an overt anger much hotter.

  “Why would you think she’d have any thing to say to you?” Jane demanded. “You kissed that right goodbye with that bullshit bet back in high school.”

  “I don’t know, maybe I thought that this time she’d grant me five lousy minutes to try to explain,” he snapped back, thrusting both hands into his expensively cut blond-and bronze-streaked rich brown hair.

  “What bet?” Finn asked.

  Poppy watched her friend lose what little color she’d had as she clearly braced to hear her humiliation publicly discussed yet one more time. It might have happened a long time ago, but gifting her virginity to Cade, whom Ava had thought cared for her—only to discover that his friends had bet him he couldn’t bag the “fat” girl—wasn’t exactly the sort of thing a woman just laughed and walked away from. “None of your business,” she informed Finn quietly. “It’s not something that needs rehashing here.”

  Ava met Gallari’s gaze with a look so frigid, he should have flash-frozen on the spot. “Go away, Cade. There was nothing you could say then, and there’s nothing you can say now. Just leave it, leave me, alone. I know this is a tough concept for you to grasp, but not everyone in the world is gonna love you. Deal with it.”

  A bitter laugh escaped him. “Oh, trust me, I was born dealing with it. Look, could you please just give me five fucking minutes?”

  “No. I gave you that and so much more once upon a time. And just look how swell that worked for me.”

  Finn and Dev pushed their chairs back and rose to their feet, but Cade didn’t even glance at them. He obviously knew they were there, however, since rubbing the furrow between his brows, he told Ava, “All right, fine. I’m leaving. But one of these days you are going to deal with me.”

  “Been there. Done that. Not planning on doing it again.”

  He whispered an obscenity, then turned on his heel and strolled away. Poppy watched him go, thinking there was an almost defeated look to the slump in his broad shoulders.

  Then she snorted. This was Cade Calderwood Gallari she was talking about—with his looks, money and connections, he’d probably never spent a defeated moment in his life. And she’d invested all the thought into him she intended, especially since Ava seemed to be holding it together just fine. If the jerk had problems, she didn’t need to know about them.

  She had her own to worry about. Like how she was going to quash this inconvenient heat she felt every time she thought of a certain infuriating cop.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I could happily go the rest of my life without another day like this one. At least the near-death-experience part.

  “GOOD JOB WRAPPING up that Pinehurst mini-mart case, de Sanges.”

  Pausing with one hand primed to scoop his gun up off the desk and the other with his badge worked halfway into his hip pocket, Jase looked over at his lieutenant. “Thanks. We caught a break or two on that one.”

  “It was good, solid police work that did the trick in the end, though. You heading out to catch up with your kids project?”

  Surprised by the question, Jase slowly straightened. “Don’t tell me Calloway called the mayor again.” And was that a flicker of hope he was feeling that she had?

  Hell, no. He’d been making himself scarce for the past week and a half because it was the smart thing to do. For her, for him. Probably even for the kids. He gave his badge a shove to seat it in his back pocket and slid his weapon into its holster.

  Lieutenant Greer laughed. “Nah—haven’t heard of any calls from that quarter in quite a while.” Then he sobered. “But it’s good PR and the suits upstairs love it—especially since that quickie spot about the project on the news the other day. It didn’t even matter that you weren’t actually there. The youngest kid—Harry, is it?”

  “Henry.”

  “Yeah, he obliged us by mentioning your connection. How did he put it—‘Dude’s not half bad for a Robbery cop’?” Greer laughed, then gave Jase a significant look. “It doesn’t hurt to have your name being bruited about by the people who’ll be filling positions after the next lieutenants’ exam, either. So take the rest of the shift off.” The lieutenant waved him away. “Get on over to the project site and accrue more of those brownie points.”

  “Uh…”

  “Go on.” Greer’s gaze cooled at Jase’s hesitation. “That mighta sounded like a request, but it wasn’t. It’s an order.”

  “I don’t have Calloway’s itinerary on me. I’m not even sure we’re supposed to meet today. She works with a couple other groups like this one and has a mess of odd jobs around town on top of it, so the schedule is convoluted.”

  “Luckily, I happen to have a copy in my office and, unlike you, I even check it now and then. Like every day since that sound bite with Calloway and her kids hit the airwaves and the kudos from upstairs started trickling down. You’re meeting today. They started about ten minutes ago, so I’m sure there’s still plenty of time to get your butt over there.”

 
Shit. But Jase gave his lieutenant a clipped nod. “Right,” he said without inflection. “I’ll head over.”

  As he drove across town he brooded over the attitude Poppy had given him at the bar the last time he’d seen her. Or rebrooded, since he’d been brooding about it for the past week and a half. It bugged him that she’d been so pissy. All because he’d—what?—stepped away from violating an unspoken departmental edict against sleeping with someone on his case? Yeah, yeah, so maybe technically she wasn’t an official part of any of his cases—but that was only because their involvement on this project had kept the kids from being arrested.

  Shit. He followed the rules and she acted like that was a bad thing.

  Still, an attempt to imagine her adhering to them made him snort. That’d be the goddamn day. Poppy was the artsy type. She was a rule-breaker, not a follower.

  And, hey, he got that—people were what they were, and trying to change their basic nature generally only earned the changer a massive headache. What he had a tougher time getting was the way Poppy had totally busted the mood with which he’d started out that evening. He’d been all geared up for a quick talk with her that night, after which he’d planned to kill two birds in one cop bar by having a couple beers with Hohn and the guys while scoping out a hook-up with some nice easygoing woman who could douse these damn fires that flared to life every time he got close to the Babe.

  A plan that had been blown to hell when Poppy had first ignored him, then melted in his arms for about three and a half minutes before publicly commanding him to take a hike. Face it, a cranky woman tended to color a guy’s desire to even talk to another of her species.

  So once again he’d gone home alone. Which was why he was feeling more than a little cranky himself these days.

  Wheeling into Harvey’s parking lot a few minutes later, he was more than ready to shelve the entire subject. He’d barely killed the engine, however, when Danny G. came striding up.

  “Detective,” the teen said the instant Jase opened the door. “You gotta talk to her, man.”

  Jase sighed. There could only be one “her.” Resigned, he looked across the lot to see Poppy packing a huge-ass aluminum stepladder. Ignoring the little kick in his belly at the sight of her, he shoved down his first inclination, which was to go take the damn thing away from her and carry it wherever she intended to set it up. Instead, he tore his gaze away and gave Danny a level look. “About?”

  “The ladder, dude! She says she doesn’t have insurance that’ll cover me or Cory if we get hurt on it. Like we’re fuc—That is, we’re damn—” He pulled his hair in frustration. “Like we’re babies, man! Look at that!” He waved at the nearly done detailed combination of scenery and graphic urban comic they’d drawn across the entire south wall of Harvey’s building—a blueprint for their as-yet unpainted masterpiece. “The drawing stage is almost done, but now that we’ve finally got a ladder to finish the top part she won’t let us climb it! She’s gonna do it. This is our project!”

  “It’s her project, too. In fact, without her, the three of you would have just done the cleanup work then gone home—not to mention been arrested and charged. There would be no cool mural.”

  “I know, but—”

  “She had to fight like hell to get permission for you all to even do that part of it.”

  “Even so—”

  “Does she strike you as rich, Danny?”

  “No, but—”

  “She ever lied to you or shined you on about anything?”

  “No.”

  “Then you have to trust her when she says she can’t afford to have anyone injured on her watch. Because if that happens, kid, even if nobody sues her ass I imagine every one of her teen projects will be pulled so fast she’ll be left with nothing but a bad case of road rash.”

  Danny exhaled gustily. “I guess. But it still sucks.”

  “I hear that.” Eyeing the round press of Poppy’s butt against the seat of her worn jeans as she set up the ladder and bent forward to wrestle its legs apart, his mind drifted for a second to those brief moments he’d held her on the dance floor. Then the image of being kicked to the curb immediately afterward pulled him back to the present. He gave the teen a nod of understanding. “Sometimes stuff just sucks big-time.”

  FEELING DANNY’S eyes burning a hole in her back, Poppy glanced back over her shoulder, wondering if it would be a waste of breath to try explaining things to him one last time. But it wasn’t his gaze that hers clashed headlong with. It was Jason’s.

  Great. Turning back to the heavy-duty ladder that her father had left for her last night between this building and the business next door, she took out her irritation over the sudden racing of her heart by kicking its legs the rest of the way apart and slamming the locking crosspieces in place. Just what she needed to round out her day.

  Things were sure out of whack this afternoon. Danny was all bent out of shape and Cory was skulking around in the shadows, looking upset and blue. De Sanges hadn’t bothered showing up the past two times they’d gotten together and despite the fact that Henry at least had seemed a bit disappointed that he wasn’t there, Poppy had been perfectly fine with the situation. So why did he have to pick today to put in an appearance?

  Then she shrugged the question aside. She had things to do; more important matters to worry about. The kids’ wall plan in hand, she climbed the ladder, whipped out her pencil and started rapidly sketching the missing top section of the mural. She wasn’t wasting any more emotion or brainpower on this. Screw him.

  A cough of involuntary laughter erupted in the back of her throat. Okay, regrettable choice of words, considering that was exactly what she wanted to do to him every time they got within touching distance. Still, she stood by the sentiment. She was through allowing him to mess with her head.

  Finishing what she could reach, she climbed down, stood back to make sure the proportions were correct, then scooted the stepladder a few feet down the line.

  “You’re fast,” Danny muttered behind her. “And good.”

  If his voice was grudging, at least he was talking to her again. She’d been surprised by how upset he’d gotten, since he was the most even-keeled of the three. But she thought she understood his reasons and smiled at him as she headed back up the ladder. She’d given them a project they could sink their teeth into and he thought she was taking it away again. “I’m not trying to usurp your baby, Mr. Gardo. You guys will still be doing ninety-five percent of the work.”

  “Yeah.” He shuffled his feet. “We’re cool. Detective de S. said to chill because if any of us got hurt on the ladder—” he made a derisive like-that’s- gonna-happen noise “—all your other projects would be yanked.”

  “He did?” Twisting around, Poppy stared at Jason where he was talking to Henry across the lot. Damn the man—just when she had him pegged as a total ass, he had to go and smooth things over for her. Could he just once be consistent?

  As if he felt her stare, his head started to come up and she spun back, not wanting to make eye contact again. The ladder seemed to take a spongy dip beneath her weight and she grabbed the top. Yet her precautions to protect the kids aside, she knew darn well her father kept his stuff in tip-top shape. So this sudden unstable feeling likely had more to do with a case of the whirlies from her quick turn than a problem with the stepladder. Pulling her pencil out from behind her ear, she consulted the master drawing again and set back to work.

  A short while later she leaned out to finish a mountain peak that, after all her big talk about safety, she knew she shouldn’t attempt before moving the ladder. Just as she stretched to her fullest extension, she felt a slight jolt beneath her. Immediately the stepladder’s front right footing torqued in a direction it was never intended to move. Then both sets of legs started sliding beyond what should have been their securely locked position. The front set hit the wall and abruptly stopped, throwing her off balance.

  Her hands shot out to prevent her head from coming into
contact with the wall, then scrabbled for a grip on its ungrippable flat surface while the section she stood on kept going in the opposite direction. The space between her hands and feet grew wider and wider as the ladder angled away from the wall toward the ground.

  She heard Danny yelp and jump away from the heavy-duty aluminum legs skittering toward him across the concrete as the ground rushed up at her at warp speed. As her hands slid down the wall while her body became less and less upright, she had just enough time to realize that when she pancaked on the concrete it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  Then a hard arm hooked her around the waist and jerked her against a harder body before she could plummet that final few feet. Having her descent halted in such an abrupt manner folded her in half, which cut off her breath. Jerking back to a less hinged position, she cracked her right elbow against the wall.

  “Sssssshit!” Pain zinged up to her shoulder and down to her fingertips. But when Jason set her gently on her feet and supported her back against his strong torso, it dawned on her she could probably stand on her own.

  She didn’t bother to try, but it was good to know that she could. Drawing a few unsteady, deep breaths, she took stock.

  And discovered that thanks to a much less nasty landing than she’d anticipated in those few eternal freefall seconds, she was in damn good shape.

  She felt Jason’s heart pounding against her back as his hands slid up to her shoulders then down to her wrists before slipping beneath her underarms and running down her sides, his fingertips brushing impersonally across the sides of her breasts on their way to her ribs, which he palpated lightly as if seeking fractures.

  “Are you okay?” his voice rumbled in her ear.

  She sucked in a breath. Blew it out. “Yes.”

  Stepping back, he turned her to face him. “What is it with you?” he demanded, sounding surly and on edge. “First you’re nearly clocked by that wrench and now your ladder fails?” He squatted to examine the cross-struts that should have held it upright.