Truly, Madly, Briefly. Delores Fossen
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He didn’t seem amused by her comment. A second finger went up. “You’ve had a possible UFO sighting, and you want me to stand guard inside your house tonight.”
She shook her head.
He lifted a third finger. “Your cat’s stuck in a very big tree, and you want me to go to your house to see if I can coax it into coming down.”
Bobbie wrinkled up her nose. “You get a lot of complaints like that?”
“Loads.”
Sheez. And she thought she’d had a rough day, what with the vanishing underwear. “No, actually I’m here because a case of merchandise is missing from the warehouse.”
Aidan blinked, probably stunned at the possibility of a real crime. “And you want to report it?”
That didn’t seem to be a trick question. “Sure.”
None of the skepticism left his eyes. “What kind of merchandise?”
“Thong briefs.” She felt the blush make its way from her cheeks to her daffodil-gold toenail polish. After five years of managing Boxers or Briefs, she probably should have been more accustomed to discussing risqué Magic Magenta underwear with a man, but Bobbie had never quite gotten the hang of it.
His eyebrow rose.
It didn’t help because she figured that minor facial adjustment was a request for more information. When his other eyebrow slid up, Bobbie knew she was right.
She nodded. Shrugged. And shuffled her feet. “The design is called the, uh, Gigolo. It has a loose silk front with a nearly invisible, um, understring thingamajig.”
She had to give it to Aidan. Other than those raised eyebrows, he didn’t have a reaction. No smirking. No cough to cover up a snicker. He just sat there with his shoulders squared and a cop’s demeanor plastered all over his incredibly cute face.
“Any other identifying details regarding this merchandise?” he asked.
Bobbie gave him the stock number. What she wouldn’t mention was that the sales pitch for the Gigolo was a garment to insure easy access to your family jewels. Nope. She’d keep that little gem of advertising wisdom to herself.
“The case contains three dozen,” she added. “All in magenta. And, uh, all in size triple-X.”
Still no smirk. As if it were the most mundane crime of his entire career, Aidan extracted a form from the letter tray on his temporary desk, and grabbed a pen. He’d hardly gotten past the first line when the door flew open. The knob and the bell smacked against the wall, and the sudden rush of wind sent papers scattering.
“You have to come right away!” Maxine Varadore announced. She wriggled herself between Bobbie and Aidan but not before giving Bobbie a what-the-devil-are-you-doing-here? glare.
Bobbie glared back, but then she’d had a lot of practice glaring at Maxine, especially since she’d recently fired the woman from her seamstress job at the factory. Maxine had an uncanny knack for squeezing her size-fourteen butt into a pair of size-six jeans, but she’d been an absolute disaster at decorative stitching and boxer fly assembly.
“He’s busy doing a report,” Bobbie informed her.
Maxine flicked her off with an icy glance and a piqued lift of her makeup-slathered nose. “You’re not my boss anymore, so I don’t have to listen to you.” When she turned her attention back to Aidan, she tossed in a whimper and batted her mascara-gummed eyelashes for good measure. “My poor little kitty, Sue-Sue, is stuck in that big hackberry tree in my backyard. You need to get her to come down. I’ll warn you though, it might take a while.”
Aidan gathered up the scattered papers and dumped them onto the center of the desk. His gaze eased to Maxine. Then to Bobbie. There was a you-didn’t-believe-me-huh? look in his eyes. Bobbie conceded his point with a shrug. So, this is what he had to deal with on an hourly, perhaps minute-to-minute basis. She actually felt sorry for him.
“Miss Varadore,” Aidan said at the end of a sigh. He picked up his pen and got back to work on the report. “I don’t do kitty rescues. And at the moment, I’m attending to Miss Callahan’s situation.”
Maxine huffed. It was enough to extinguish candles on a birthday cake at the senior citizens’ home. “You might have won the lottery, Bobbie Fay Callahan, but you weren’t supposed to start hanging around him until tomorrow morning. That was the deal.”
“I didn’t agree to the deal,” Bobbie let her know. She tipped her head toward Aidan. “And neither did he. I’m here on official business.”
“Yeah, like I believe that. You don’t even own a cat.”
Aidan stood and dropped the pen onto the desk. “But she does have a situation that requires my official attention. So, if you’ll please excuse us…”
Bobbie would have seconded that, but her pager went off. While Aidan continued his explanation, and while Maxine continued to plead her case for a full-scale kitty rescue, Bobbie rifled through her purse, pushing aside the fist-full of travel brochures, to locate the vibrating flamingo-colored device. One look at the tiny screen, however, and she pressed the green button to stop the noise. She snapped her purse shut again.
“Jasper,” she mumbled under her breath. But she obviously didn’t mumble it softly enough because both Aidan and Maxine looked at her.
“Jasper Kershaw’s back in town?” Maxine asked, her voice filled with hope.
Bobbie nodded. “He got back a couple of hours ago.”
To be specific, it was two hours and fourteen minutes. Six people, excluding Jasper himself, had already phoned to tell her about the jilting fiancé’s return. Bobbie vowed to quit answering her phone. Too bad she couldn’t turn off her pager, but she was hoping for a call from the warehouse to say they had managed to locate the case of missing thongs.
“And you’re getting back together with Jasper?” Even more hope abounded in Maxine’s voice.
“No!” Bobbie answered so fast that she risked having her teeth fly out of her mouth. And her assertion was one-hundred-percent true. Too bad Jasper hadn’t quite figured that out yet. In the past two hours and fourteen minutes, he’d called or paged her seven times.
Maxine tsk-tsked. “You’ll get back with him. You always do. Of course, that’ll cancel out the lottery so we’ll just have to have another one to figure out who gets first dibs on Aidan. But this time you can bet your britches that I’ll be the one drawing that name from the Crock-Pot.”
“This is just a guess, but I don’t think the deputy wants a lottery,” Bobbie pointed out.
Bobbie’s pager went off again. She glanced into her purse and saw Jasper’s number highlighted on the screen. She smashed the button to stop it and shut her purse in a hurry.
Darn it.
The man was obviously aiming for a round three, which wouldn’t happen. After being left at the altar not once but twice, she’d learned her lesson regarding Jasper Kershaw.
“The report?” Aidan reminded Bobbie. It was no doubt also a reminder for Maxine to vamoose because he ignored her and got to work. He studied the form a moment. “Estimated value of the missing merchandise.”
“Four hundred and thirty-two dollars,” Bobbie gladly answered.
Maxine leaned over the desk, examined the form and rolled her eyes. “Gimme a break. You’re saying someone stole a case of triple-X Gigolos? Yeah, right. Nobody, but nobody in this town wears a size triple-X.”
Apparently realizing that she’d just given away a rather intimate detail of her not-so-private love life, Maxine hiked up her chin again. “I’ll be back,” she warned, casting another glare in Bobbie’s direction.
Bobbie would have breathed a lot easier