Depends On Who's Asking (SWAT Generation 2.0 12)

“You, too, Dad,” I said cordially. “’Night.”

Us Nicholsons didn’t say ‘love you.’ We also didn’t do mushy.

So, I didn’t bother to say any terms of endearment, nor did I do anything other than hang up the phone.

And, as I looked at the eighteen stitches in my arm as I reached for a gallon of milk out of my fridge, I wondered if I needed to move again. This time to somewhere much smaller where people wouldn’t know me.

For sure I would have to do it after he won.

Everyone around me would know who I was after that.CHAPTER 1Due to personal reasons, I’ll be drinking again this weekend.-Caro’s secret thoughtsCAROLINA“And then he started to laugh.” Brielle wiped her eyes. “I didn’t know what to do.”

I’d met Brielle through a grapevine of friends, and for some weird fucking reason, she’d latched on to me.

I wasn’t sure why, or how, I’d somehow become her keeper, but I didn’t like her.

Not at all.

She was petty and fake, and she was also not a person that I would normally spend time with.

I especially didn’t like how she treated people.

I looked down at my corn dog and wondered, idly, how long I had to wait to take another bite.

I mean, she was really crying here. Like, big, fat drops.

I looked at my watch and realized that regardless of whether Brielle was crying or not, I had shit to do, and listening to her cry about some man that didn’t return her attentions wasn’t one of them.

“I gotta go,” I said to her. “I’m due back in court in fifteen minutes. I haven’t even gotten to eat my lunch yet.”

Brielle wiped her eyes and shoved her lunch away with a ferocious scowl.

I stood up and wondered if I should address her attitude, but decided that I didn’t have time for that, either.

Honestly, I really wasn’t quite sure what the hell was going on with me.

I shouldn’t have agreed to this lunch date in the first place, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself when it came to her. I felt bad for her.

She truly was a mean person. But when I met her a few months ago when I got home, she’d somehow gotten me my new job… and I couldn’t blow her off after she’d done something so great for me.

“Fine. But you’re paying. I paid last time.” Brielle stood up and left her trash on the table.

“Are you going to throw all of that away?” I asked curiously, not bothering to argue with her ‘I paid last time’ comment. She was wrong. I’d paid last time, too. At some point, I was going to have to stop being grateful that she’d found me a job.

She looked at the table, then the trash can only a few feet away.

“No,” she said. “That’s not my job to do, it’s theirs.”

I nearly rolled my eyes but chose to pick her trash up instead. Mine, I packed back into my bag and rolled it up before tucking it into my purse.

Just as I was about to push out of the hospital lunchroom door, Brielle caught my attention once again.

“You have toilet paper on your shoe.”

I looked down and, sure enough, I did have toilet paper on my shoe.

And something brown was on it.

Gross.

I kicked my leg and attempted to flick the tissue off.

I stepped out of the way as I tried to get the stupid toilet paper off without touching it as the door at my back was pushed open and an amused man said, “Need help?”

I looked up into the piercing green eyes—eyes that practically glowed with enjoyment—of Saint Nicholson, and froze.

His chestnut-colored hair was curly and beautiful, and I practically itched to sink my fingers into the locks. To wind a couple of those curls around my fingers. And holy God, he had a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses hanging from his shirt collar. Where had those come from?

“I’ll make it,” I grumbled, trying not to allow my eyes to slide down the length of his body like I wanted to.

But it was inevitable.

The man was hot as fuck.

He was tall, way taller—by at least a foot—than my five-foot-three. He was bigger around, too.

Where I had curves, he had lean hardness.

Where I had fat, he had nothing but muscle.

And the uniform he was wearing only added to his sexiness.

I had a thing for cops.

I’d dated three in my life.

None seriously or anything. A couple of months each.

But none of them had been as drop-dead gorgeous as the man currently grinning at me.

He moved forward, pressing his body close to mine, and then stepped onto the toilet paper with his booted foot.

His big, booted foot.

Like, way bigger than my size sevens.

Just as quickly as his body touched mine, he was away from me, and the toilet paper was no longer clinging to my foot.