Defender. Diana Palmer
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police chief knew I was in law enforcement? How?” he wondered aloud, feeling insecure. He didn’t want his past widely known here.
She laughed softly. “Nobody knows how he finds out things. But he worked for the government once.” She glanced at him. “He was a high-level assassin.”
His eyes widened. “The police chief?” he exclaimed.
She nodded. “Then he was a Texas Ranger—that ended when he slugged the temporary captain and got fired. Afterward he worked for the DA in San Antonio and then he came here.”
He whistled. “Slugged the captain.” He chuckled. “He’s still a pretty tough customer, despite the gorgeous wife and two little kids.”
“That’s what everyone says. We’re pretty protective of him. Our late mayor—who was heavily into drug smuggling on the side—tried to fire Chief Grier, and the whole city police force and fire department, and all our city employees, said they’d quit on the spot if he did.”
“Obviously he wasn’t fired.”
She smiled. “Not hardly. It turns out that the state attorney general, Simon Hart, is Cash Grier’s cousin. He showed up, along with some reporters, at the hearing they had to discuss the firing of the chief’s patrol officers. They arrested a drunk politician and he told the mayor to fire them. The chief said over his dead body.”
“I’ve been here for years, and I heard gossip about it, but that’s the first time I’ve heard the whole story.”
“An amazing man, our chief.”
“Oh, yes.” He finished his coffee. “Nobody makes coffee like you do, Mandy. Never weak and pitiful, always strong and robust!”
“Yes, and the coffee usually comes out that way, too!” she said with a wicked grin.
He laughed as he got up from the table, and went back to work.
* * *
That night he was researching a story about an attempted Texas Thoroughbred kidnapping on the internet when Sari walked in the open door. He was perched on the bed in just his pajama bottoms with the laptop beside him. Sari had on a long blue cotton nightgown with a thick, ruffled matching housecoat buttoned way up to the throat. She jumped onto the bed with him, her long hair in a braid, her eyes twinkling as she crossed her legs under the voluminous garment.
“Do that when your dad comes home, and we’ll both be sitting on the front lawn with the door locked,” he teased.
“You know I never do it when he’s home. What are you looking up?”
“Remember that story last week about the so-called traveling horse groomer who turned up at the White Stables in Lexington, Kentucky, and walked off with a Thoroughbred in the middle of the night?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, just in case he headed south when he jumped bail, I’m checking out similar attempts. I found one in Texas that happened two weeks ago. So I’m reading about his possible MO.”
She frowned. “MO?”
“Modus operandi,” he said. “It’s Latin. It means…”
“Please,” she said. “I know Latin. It means method of operation.”
“Close enough,” he said with a gentle smile. His eyes went back to the computer screen. “Generally speaking, once a criminal finds a method that works, he uses it over and over until he’s caught. I want to make sure that he doesn’t sashay in here while your dad’s gone and make off with Grayling’s Pride.”
“Sashay?” she teased.
He wrinkled his nose. “You’re a bad influence on me,” he mused, his eyes still on the computer screen. “That’s one of your favorite words.”
“It’s just a useful one. Snit is my favorite one.”
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“And lately you’re in a snit more than you’re not,” she pointed out.
He managed a smile. “Bad memories. Anniversaries hit hard.”
She bit her tongue. She’d never discussed really personal things with him. She’d tried once and he’d closed up immediately. So she smiled impersonally. “So they say,” she said instead of posing the question she was dying to.
He admired her tact. He didn’t say so, of course. She couldn’t know the memories that tormented him, that had him up walking the floor late at night. She couldn’t know the guilt that ate at him night and day because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time when it really mattered.
“Are you okay?” she asked suddenly.
His dark eyebrows went up. “What?”
She shrugged. “You looked wounded just then.”
She was more perceptive than he’d realized. He scrolled down the story he was reading online. “Wounded. Odd choice of words there, Isabel.”
“You’re the only person who ever called me that.”
“What? Isabel?” He looked up, studying her softly rounded face, her lovely complexion, her blue, blue eyes. “You look like an Isabel.”
“Is that a compliment or something else?”
“Definitely a compliment.” He looked back at the computer screen. “I used to love to read about your namesake. She was queen of Spain in the fifteenth century. She and her husband led a crusade to push foreigners out of their country. They succeeded in 1492.”
Her lips parted. “Isabella la Catolica.”
His chiseled lips pursed. “My God. You know your history.”
She laughed softly. “I’m a history major,” she reminded him. “Also a Spanish scholar. I’m doing a semester of Spanish immersion. English isn’t spoken in the classroom, ever. And we read some of the classic novels in Spanish.”
He chuckled softly. “My favorite was Pio Baroja. He was Basque, something of a legend in the early twentieth century.”
“Mine was Sangre y Arena.”
“Blasco Ibáñez,” he shot back. “Blood and Sand. Bullfighting?” he added in a surprised tone.
She laughed. “Yes, well, I didn’t realize what the book would be about until I got into it, and then I couldn’t put it down.”
“They made a movie about it back in the forties, I think it was,” he told her. “It starred Tyrone Power and Rita Hayworth. Painful, bittersweet story. He ran around on his saintly wife with a woman who was little more than a prostitute.”
“I suppose saintly women weren’t much in demand in some circles in those days. And especially not today,” she added with a wistful little sigh. “Men want experienced women.”
“Not all of them,” he said, looking away from her.
“Really?”
He forced himself to keep his eyes on the computer screen. “Think about it. A man would have to be crazy to risk STDs or HIV for an hour’s pleasure with a woman who knew her way around bedrooms.”
She fought a blush and lost.
He saw it and laughed. “Honey, you aren’t worldly at all, are you?”
“I’m alternately backward or unliberated, to hear my classmates tell it. But mostly they tolerate my odd point of view. I think one of them actually feels sorry for me.”
“Twenty years down the road, they may wish they’d had your sterling morals,” he replied. He looked up, into her eyes, and for a few endless seconds, he didn’t look away. She felt her body glowing, burning with sensations she’d