Chalk Dirty to Me (Madd CrossFit 3)

“You found the one, huh?” she asked.

The ‘one’ was the man that I planned to burst through my wall with.

Or, maybe, the one that would bust through my wall for me.

Someone that would hopefully help me get over Toot, as well as help me move on from this awful sense of doom that always seemed to cling to me wherever I went, and through whatever I did.

“What’s his name?” she asked when I didn’t comment on her ‘one’ comment.

“Detective Schultz of the Paris Police Department,” I answered, giving her everything that I knew.

The card he’d given me had been noted as Detective W. Schultz, Paris Police Department, and then a phone number.

But I hadn’t given her the phone number.

I wasn’t sure if it was a department issued one or not, so I’d let her do her digging.

“Oh, he’s hot as hell,” Beckham mused.

I remembered back to yesterday, when I’d seen him walking across the parking lot toward me.

Toot… no, Beau, I corrected myself. I refused to call him by that stupid name. Beau had been attractive, but quite a bit shorter than me. Shorter than me by at least six inches.

But Detective Schultz had been tall. He’d towered over his partner, who appeared to be around the same height as me.

His long, wavy black hair had been the second thing I’d seen. The waves were longer than I’d seen any man wear lately, almost as if he could give less than a shit about what he looked like. As long as it was comfortable to him, and under department protocol.

I loved hair with some body to it.

I’d always wanted it when I was younger. In fact, I’d gone to great lengths to get curly hair. I’d gotten a perm. I’d bought the most expensive curlers.

But my stick-straight black hair had too much volume, and it was so damn heavy that the moment I got a curl into it, it faded. Not even the best of the best hair spray could hold those suckers in.

But damn, did Detective Schultz have some to-die-for hair.

And his eyes.

My God, his blue eyes had been the bluest of blue. Like the sky on a cloudless day. Or the bright ‘blue’ crayon straight out of a crayon box.

“Are you even listening to me?” Beckham chirped, bringing me away from contemplating the detective’s eyes and back to the problem at hand.

“I’m sorry, I was daydreaming about eyes,” I admitted.

Beckham snorted. “He does have some pretty ones. Pairing them with that wavy black hair and dimple? I’ll bet he had you tongue-tied when he spoke to you.”

I scoffed. “I don’t get tongue-tied around men.”

That was a lie, too.

I didn’t used to get tongue-tied around men.

Now, I was lucky to be around them without having a downright panic attack.

That was one of my ‘side effects’ of my kidnapping/trafficking.

I didn’t do well in public without someone I trusted at my side, and that could come in the form of a man—my best friends’ husbands counted—or a woman. I wasn’t picky, as long as I had someone.

I also didn’t grocery shop anymore.

That had been when I was taken—while grocery shopping. I’d actually gone out for a present for Troup and Beckham and realized I needed a few things for dinner.

I’d been minding my own business, loading my groceries into the car, and I’d been snatched from behind into a white panel van.

I don’t know what the hell I’d been thinking.

I mean, everyone and their brother knew damn well and good not to load and unload next to a white panel van.

Yet, that day, my mind had been on other things—i.e., marriage to a man that I loved, at the time, with all of my heart. It turned out that he wasn’t the man I thought he was.

I’d been on cloud nine.

I’d never seen it coming.

“You get flustered around men,” she corrected. “You get… weird.”

“Well, I didn’t get weird around this one,” I admitted. “He made me feel… safe.”

She scoffed.

“He looks a lot like Henry Cavill with that almost curly black hair and the chin dimple,” Beckham mused.

That’s when I snapped my fingers.

I’d been trying to put my finger on it for damn well ten hours. But I couldn’t figure out why he looked so familiar to me.

And then that hair and chin dimple finally clicked into place with her words. He did look like Henry Cavill. Only a hell of a lot more attractive one, which I hadn’t realized was possible.

“He was wearing a pair of dark blue jeans and a button-down Wrangler khaki shirt,” I admitted. “I’ve never, ever in my life found a man wearing cowboy clothes attractive, but the detective was…”

“Hot,” she mused. “He lives on a ranch. That explains the cowboy clothes.”

Over the next ten minutes, she gave me everything that she could find on him in a short amount of time.