4
Brody
There were times I had risen above my baser nature as a man to give laser-like focus to a crucial topic or situation at hand. Like the time I managed to talk Billy Jessup down from cutting his girlfriend’s throat in the parking lot of the Taco Tub when I was off duty but still had my sidearm. My baser nature wanted to shoot the miserable bastard in the knees and kick him as I walked off to take his victim to safety. But I had utilized my training, acted as cool and efficient as a silver screen action hero in the moment.
The same could not be said for my interview with Laura Vance. I tried my damnedest to pay attention, to check off the questions I had set forth for all the applicants. But the minute I laid eyes on her, I was screwed. Her strawberry blonde hair had grown darker, closer to auburn now. Her eyes were just as sharp and expressive, missing nothing but showing exactly how ridiculous she thought I was for calling her Ms. Vance.
I’d never paid the girl much attention. When she left for college, she was nothing but a gangly kid, my best bud’s baby sister, and I was a married man. I remembered her stubbornness, her smart mouth, how she was damn near fearless. That had been what I knew about her when we were growing up. I remembered the day Damon told me he had a baby sister, disgust in his voice as we sat outside the second-grade classroom before the bell rang. He’d been hoping for a brother to take fishing, not a ruffled and whining girl. Neither one of us knew at the time that not all boys fished and not all girls wore ruffles, or that whining wasn’t confined to either. And we didn’t expect the force of nature that Laura Sue Vance turned out to be. Skinned knees, loud mouth, and always running with her sloppy ponytail streaming behind her. She’d never missed a dare that I knew of, and by the time she was in fifth grade and we were graduating, she was legendary in Rockford Falls as a daredevil as likely to ride her bike through your granny’s flowerbed as she was to climb a too-tall tree and save the same granny’s kitten.
Now she was fit and strong, curvy in the right places. Her laugh was big and joyful, and when she shook my hand, the spark of her touch seemed to go straight to my cock. I had been glad to retreat behind my desk. Because her husky voice and her straightforward answers, the full pink lip she bit when she mentioned my marriage—all of it tugged at the hard length in my jeans. I wasn’t a man who got hard when a waitress smiled at me or when I saw a pretty woman on the street. In fact, I didn’t get turned on that easily any longer. From the time Missy got sick, that part of me just seemed to recede. Not to say I hadn’t been with a couple of women for a night, since my wife died a few years ago, but it wasn’t an urge I felt that often anymore. Definitely not out of nowhere and while I was at work. Lust surged through me, and I scolded myself.
No. Absolutely fucking no. Or rather, absolutely no fucking. Not with her. Not with Damon’s little sister. Not with my newest officer. No way. My body was going to have to calm down. I could master a stray jolt of attraction, I told myself. It was a fluke. Phase of the moon or something in her perfume or whatever that I reacted to. It wasn’t her. Because that was impossible.
I had forced myself to listen and to review her impressive credentials. I tried not to sound like a backwater hick when I spoke to her. Even though she was a hometown girl, she was more than that, too. A decorated and award-winning city officer, one that department had been devastated to lose. She could be our gain, if I could keep my dick in my pants. That had never been a problem for me. I had been loyal to my wife, had been loyal to her memory. I didn’t give my heart and had rarely given my body either.
Laura was going to be a capable and welcome addition to the RFPD. We needed her, her experience and expertise. And she had answered all my concerns readily. She was here to stay. The job was the right fit for her. I just had to put up a wall between my consciousness and the driving impulse to see if I fit inside her like she was mine. The thought shook me, made sweat come out on my palms. She was the first person I’d felt a stirring of anything for since Missy died. But she was going to work for me, and she was Damon’s sister. I scrubbed my hands over my face and told myself to snap out of it.