Love by Association

Maybe, if she got lucky, he’d even tell her what the matter was.

In the meantime, she’d gained an important piece of information for her case. The woman Julie had just mentioned—the one who’d appeared to have a similar problem, but didn’t—had to be Leslie Morrison. Surely there weren’t two kids with school projects that had been interpreted to mean trouble in their admittedly small circle.

That would be too much of a coincidence. And as a cop, Chantel didn’t put a lot of stock in coincidence.

CHAPTER EIGHT

WHILE JULIE’S SUSPICIONS had put a definite damper on the mood in the car that afternoon, Colin found that the changed atmosphere didn’t dim the flame of his desire to see Chantel again. As quickly as possible.

Because that was a first—him feeling driven from within to pursue something non–Julie related when his sister was obviously upset—the urge grew in intensity. That Chantel was attracted to him, too, wasn’t a huge surprise to him.

But even the possibility that she could be like most of the women who made their attraction to him obvious—after him for his money as much as anything else—didn’t put a damper on his fervency.

So he asked her to dinner. She accepted. And as he went on with his day, he had a smile on his face.

* * *

IN JEANS, a button-down shirt and over-the-ankle hiking boots, Chantel spent a couple of hours at the precinct Saturday afternoon. She checked in with Captain Reagan. Filled Wayne in on lunch. And told him that she’d be having dinner with Colin Fairbanks again that evening.

“Didn’t take you long to find an ‘in,’” Wayne said, studying her.

Chin up, Chantel withstood his visual interrogation without as much as a held breath. “I’m good at my job,” she told him. Married to it, was more like it.

“You are good at your job,” Wayne said, pulling out an empty chair at the table where she sat with a department-issue laptop in front of her. “Maybe too good.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You put the job above everything else.”

“Lots of guys do.” And she was one of the guys. They had one another’s backs.

He looked away. “And many of those who do also spend some of their off time in strip clubs.”

“You think I should go to strip clubs?”

“I think you’re a healthy, three-dimensional human being who is living a two-dimensional life. Eventually, that’s going to catch up with you. I just don’t want it to be now.”

She wanted to continue to pretend ignorance. Recognizing it as a weak ploy, she said, “You’re thinking that I might fall for Colin Fairbanks?”

“The thought has crossed my mind.”

“Because he’s rich?”

“Because you’re out of your element.” He was being a good friend, telling her what he thought she needed to hear, not what she wanted to hear. She took offense, anyway.

“You don’t think I’m up to running with the rich folks?” She was keeping her emotions in check. It was what she was trained to do. You had to when you were on the job.

“I’m more concerned with the part you’re playing,” Wayne said. “You’re hot as hell, Chantel. You play it down here—like now, your hair pulled back tight, no makeup, loose clothes and those hiking shoe things you seem to wear night and day, even at the company picnic in the middle of summer...”

He broke off, as though realizing what he was revealing—the fact that he’d not only noticed how she was dressed last summer at the picnic, and all the time, but that he remembered in such detail.

Still smarting from his insinuation that she wasn’t up to this assignment, Chantel let him swim in his own stew.

Leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, he seemed about to tell her something confidential. In a lowered voice, he said, “When I saw you the other day, in character...”

He’d just turned up the heat on his pot. Chantel smiled.

“Sounds to me like you’re the one with issues here, Wayne,” she told him. Because, after all, friends said what the other needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear. “Maybe you should be the one visiting a strip club.”

The statement was mean. She knew the second it hit its mark and felt bad. She and Wayne were such close friends because, when they’d been trainees together many years before, his wife, Maria, had caught him out in a bar with a stripper and Chantel had stepped in and helped saved his marriage.

“You get prickly when you’re feeling defensive.”

“That’s right. You had no business implying that I can’t do my job.”