Caitlin wasn’t entirely sure nice was the right word to describe Alejandro Cruz. Overwhelming, maybe, oh yeah. Intimidating, certainly. But nice?
Caitlin stepped forward, feeling with each step as if she were moving into a force field. A power greater than her own. If she’d been convinced her studies had taught her how to deal with the male of her species, she had to think again. This was an entirely different order of magnitude from dealing with a fellow graduate student or an associate professor or even—God!—the dean.
This was raw, unadulterated male power, backed up by the weight of the entire U.S. government—not to mention a gun—and she couldn’t possibly match it in any way.
But she’d promised Ray, so she walked forward slowly, as if through a sea of molasses. Caitlin stopped at Lieutenant Cruz’s desk. Solid, uncompromising, enduring, a little scarred—just like the man behind it. She glanced at the chair in front of the desk and started to sit just as he said, “Please have a seat.” His voice held faint tones of irony.
“Thank you.” Caitlin hated the touch of breathlessness in her voice, but she couldn’t help it. This was going to be much, much harder than she’d imagined. She sat down, raised her eyes to his and tried to still her wild heartbeat.
“So.” Lieutenant Cruz had a deep voice, slightly raspy, as if he didn’t use it much. He probably didn’t have to. One look from him and underlings would scurry to do his bidding. She felt like doing a little scurrying herself.
The lieutenant tapped Ray Avery’s letter with a blunt fingertip. “It seems we have a problem here.” His face was as cold as his voice.
Caitlin clasped her hands together. Not to stop them from trembling. Of course not. Just to have something to do with them. She didn’t dare show shaking hands or allow her voice to tremble. She didn’t dare allow herself any show of weakness at all.
Studies had shown that hyenas can smell blood ten miles away. This was a man who could smell weakness at a thousand paces. He held all the power and she was here asking for a favor. Conditions didn’t get more lopsided than that. It was true that she had a secret weapon, maybe. But it might also be a weapon that would blow up in her hands.
Caitlin drew in a deep breath, wondering if the lieutenant noticed that it hitched slightly. She opened her mouth to speak, hoping she could keep her voice firm, then turned in gratitude as someone came in through the door of Lieutenant Cruz’s office without knocking, bearing two steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee.
A woman in uniform. She had dark, curly hair and a round, lined face. Caitlin sent up thanks for the presence of a member of her gender in the room, to counteract the pure male pheromones Lt. Cruz was emitting by the ton.
“Hi,” the woman said, slipping a cup in front of her with a friendly smile. “Sergeant Kathy Martello, hear you’re a friend of Captain Avery’s. Pleased to meet you.” She put down the second cup in front of the lieutenant hard enough for some of the coffee to slosh over. “We like the captain a lot, so anyone he sends us is very welcome here. Isn’t that right, Loot?” She gave the lieutenant A Look and walked out.
“Loot” took a long gulp of his coffee, though Caitlin could see steam coming off the cup. Maybe one developed a calloused gullet the farther one rose in law enforcement hierarchy? Her own cup was steaming too, and smelled awful—of dishrags dipped in turpentine.
Still, Sergeant Martello had made the effort, so Caitlin gingerly brought the cup to her mouth, hoping it hadn’t been recycled. Budget cuts were everywhere. She sipped the hot, bitter brew and nearly gagged. It was one of the worst cups of coffee she’d ever tasted. Worse even than the Sociology Department cafeteria coffee. She remembered Ray commenting on that.
Whoa.
Maybe there could be a paper in this.
Bad coffee, Good Policing: A Causal Link. The journal of her professional society published several satirical articles a year and this would make a good one. Maybe she could get a lab to make analyses of the coffee in, say, all the police stations in the tri-county area, and correlate the organoleptic data with arrest figures—
Caitlin struggled to bring her mind back to the moment. Her mind wandered at the best of times, which often got her into trouble. Now, with Lieutenant Cruz watching her out of cold, dark, steely eyes was no time to be wool gathering.
“So,” he said again. “I take it—”
“Hey, boss.” The face that peeped into the door of the office was arrestingly ugly. Sparse red hair straggled back from a long, narrow freckled face with broad features. A wide, gap-toothed mouth smiled at her seraphically. He looked like an aging, goofy Howdy Doody on Quaaludes.
The man stared at her for a minute then shouted over his shoulder, “She’s okay!”
“That’s it!” Lieutenant Cruz slammed both hands down on his desk, got up and circled it. He stood framed in the doorway, a tall, broad-shouldered figure, and looked out at the squad room. Caitlin leaned a little to the right so she could see beyond him. Everyone in the squad room was frozen, as if caught in a game of “red light, green light”.
“Okay, you jokers,” Lieutenant Cruz growled. His voice wasn’t loud but it carried. “If one more person comes through this door, there’s going to be hell to pay. And you know I mean it.” Caitlin watched the back of his head as he slowly quartered the room. Wherever he looked, people’s eyes dropped. The only sounds were the rustling of papers and tapping of computer keyboards as the officers ostentatiously got back to work. “I trust I’ve made myself clear,” he added icily.
She heard soft coughs and phones ringing in the distance. The lieutenant lingered in the doorway a moment longer then closed the door of his office just hard enough to make a point. Caitlin’s heart jumped at the sound of the sharp snick of the door.
They were alone in the room.
Lieutenant Cruz made his way back to his desk, his tread as soft and dangerous as a panther’s. He settled back smoothly into his chair and looked at her for a long, nerve-racking moment.
“Okay. Let’s get down to business here.” His deep voice was vibrant with frustration as he eyed her across his steepled fingers. “Precisely what is it that you want from me?”
“I don’t want—” Caitlin began, then bit her lip. She’d argued with Ray Avery for three days running over this but he had finally convinced her that she should visit the station house, so now it was her decision to be here and she had to take responsibility for it. She looked into the lieutenant’s eyes and immediately realized her mistake. They were dark, mesmerizing, hostile. She felt like a titmouse facing a cobra, paralyzed. What would the titmouse do?
Distract the cobra.
“Do you know, Lieutenant, I did some research on the history of the police force in Baylorville. This is a far cry from the very first police station,” she said, looking around his neat, austere office. His office was utterly different from the cheerful clutter she’d observed on the other officers’ desks. There was nothing in Lieutenant Cruz’s office which even remotely hinted at anything personal. Besides his neat, uncluttered desk and the chair he was sitting on, the room had a computer workstation next to his desk and bookshelves filled with law textbooks and California police yearbooks, arranged in chronological order. No photographs, no bulletin board with notices tacked up, no wanted posters, nothing.
“The first station was built in 1858 where Willard’s Department Store is now, at the Horace Street entrance. They called it the lockup. There were three police officers, only they were called constables then. Part of their duties was to ensure that every woman who attended a public dance was wearing a corset. It was written in the contract.”
He blinked. “Oh yeah?”
She had distracted the lieutenant, she could see that. Maybe even thrown him off his stride. His annoyed look faded.
“Well, that’s very int—” He caught himself and scowled again. “Look, Miss…ah, Ms. Summers. To come back to the matter at hand, I don’t know what Ray told you, but we do not run training courses for students at this station.”
/> Well, what a stupid notion.
“No, of course not,” she said earnestly. “I certainly don’t expect a full-blown course. That would be ridiculous and probably illegal. Good heavens, you have enough to do and I wouldn’t think of taking staff away from their duties. And anyway, I don’t need a course because I’m something of an expert on law enforcement myself.”
He looked absolutely blank for a moment, his jaw hanging open slightly, before closing his mouth with a snap. His eyes narrowed until only the pupils showed, gleaming blackly under the harsh overhead neon like a sword in moonlight. “You’re an expert on what?”
“Law enforcement.” Caitlin watched, fascinated, as the muscles in his jaw worked and the cords in his neck stood out even more. It looked as if each muscle in his body—and he had a lot of them—tensed. She was so vividly aware of him that she hardly had a sense of herself. This was ridiculous. She had to get herself under control and stop allowing him to distract her so. She needed him to take her seriously, but he wouldn’t if she simply sat there like a ninny, fascinated by his muscles.
Caitlin bent down to rummage in her book bag for the copy of her paper in The Law Enforcement Review. She was proud of that paper. It was a great paper. It held some original and truly groundbreaking research and had taken her two and a half years to write. Once the lieutenant read it, he would see that she knew what she was talking about. “Here,” she said eagerly, thrusting the copy across his desk.
The lieutenant reached out with a frown. “What’s this?”
His hand closed over hers, hard, warm, so incredibly, powerfully male. Caitlin jumped as if an electric prod had touched her. She jerked her hand away and knocked over his coffee cup—dumping the steaming contents straight into his lap.
There was a tense silence, broken only by the steady drip of coffee from the lieutenant’s trousers onto her paper, which had fluttered to the floor in the terrible slow motion of disasters.
“Oh. My. God!” Caitlin breathed. There was a fierce internal battle inside her, as an intense desire to flee combated an equally intense desire to laugh. She clapped her hand over her mouth and stared at him, horrified.
He stood up, holding his sodden trousers away from his skin. Caitlin realized that the boiling coffee must have burnt him.
“Oh!” She completely forgot her intimidation as she rushed to his side, kneeling, pulling her book bag behind her. She’d once burnt herself with boiling water and could still remember the stinging pain. She had a small hand towel in her bag and as she pulled it hastily out to sponge away the worst of the mess, her 2008 hardback edition of Theories of Policing in Western Societies—all one thousand, forty-seven heavy, glossy pages of it—spilled out and landed squarely, heavily on the lieutenant’s shiny black lace-up shoe.
“Ow!” This time he cried out and instantly his office door opened. Sergeant Martello stuck her head in and frowned at the sight of the two of them, the lieutenant slapping his thighs and Caitlin kneeling at his feet, doing…something to him.
“What’s going on here?” A sharp indrawn breath of outrage. “Lieutenant Cruz, you should be ashamed of yourself! Why, that poor child—”
“This poor child,” he said between clenched teeth, “is doing her best to kill me, and she’s doing a very good job of it. Now if you’ll just leave, Sergeant, we can let Ms. Summers finish me off in peace.”
Caitlin looked up at the lieutenant in surprise.
He has a sense of humor? Apparently, he did. Heavy-handed humor, it was true, but it was a minor miracle he had it at all—she’d been expecting a burst of rage. Instead, though his face was drawn into long lines of pain, his eyes, those dark, fascinating eyes, had something in them which in a lesser man might be called a twinkle.
It was probably an effect of the light.
“I’m really, really sorry, Lieutenant,” Caitlin said humbly, sitting back on her heels. She wrung out her little hand towel over the wastepaper basket and watched the brown sludge drip down. Maybe the coffee would taste better now that it had been filtered through Lieutenant Alejandro Cruz’s pants and her towel.
“Yes, I can see that you are.” His voice was unexpectedly gentle as he put a hard hand under her elbow and lifted her effortlessly to her feet. “Nonetheless, I’d be really grateful if you would just sit down over there while we finish our conversation and don’t move.”
Caitlin sat down and folded her hands in her lap, totally unnerved at the thought of what she’d done. She got very clumsy when she was nervous, so she tightened her hands in her lap and resolved to remain calm and focused. And to breathe from the diaphragm the way her yoga instructor had taught her.
“So.” As if unconsciously echoing her, he put his own clasped hands on the desk in front of him. Caitlin stared at his hands. Large, long-fingered, powerful, graceful. Short black hairs on the backs. Nails trimmed, unbuffed. There was a small white scar on the back of his right hand, like a lightning bolt in the flesh. Was that a tattoo on his wrist? She jerked her head up.
“I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?” He had said something and she had been lost in contemplation of his hands.
“I said,” he repeated patiently, “would you please explain to me exactly what it is that you want?”
To study you, Caitlin wanted to say, but couldn’t, much as she’d like to. Lieutenant Cruz was a walking, talking display of dominance. She’d give her eyeteeth to be able to film him for a year. They’d give her the Nobel. Certainly she’d make her name in academia. She’d get tenure immediately. Probably at Harvard.
“I’m a graduate student at St. Mary’s over in Grant Falls and I’m writing my dissertation on…certain aspects of law enforcement,” she said finally.
“Dominance displays,” the lieutenant said dryly.
“Well…yes.” Caitlin coughed discreetly. Best to simply glide over that aspect. Couldn’t have the lieutenant thinking she would be studying him specifically, though now that she’d seen him, she couldn’t even imagine studying anyone else. “I’ve done most of the preliminary research, but Ray—Captain Avery—convinced me that my dissertation would profit from time spent actually observing firsthand the workings of a police force.”
“You said you were an expert but I don’t get it. How on earth can you be an expert on law enforcement if you aren’t a police officer?” he asked. He sounded genuinely puzzled.
Caitlin tried not to smile. How many times had academics in the social sciences came across this prejudice? You could explain to practitioners until you were blue in the face that professions needed a theoretical underpinning, but it never sank in. And yet, what academics did was important. They created a framework within which experience could be fitted. Without that framework, experience was lost, energy dissipated. “Easy. Most research on the subject is done by academics, not practitioners. It’s the same in most fields, you know. However, most academics research secondary sources. That’s why Captain Avery’s classes were so priceless,” she said earnestly, leaning forward in her eagerness. “They were incredibly popular. He gave us so many precious insights into the practice of policing. Just absolutely fascinating.”
Lieutenant Cruz straightened in his chair. “Captain Avery’s classes?”
“Why yes.” Caitlin stared at him. “Captain Avery taught a seminar at St. Mary’s, The History of Law Enforcement, during the spring semester. Didn’t you know?”
Alex froze and stared. So that was where Ray had gone off to? Off to teach nerds at some school? What was with that? What the fuck was he doing teaching instead of doing?
And yet, it explained a lot.
Ray’d been disappearing for weeks at a time over the past six months, leaving Alex in charge. Ray had had tons of accumulated leave to use up. Everyone knew he was retiring soon and no one had asked questions, least of all Alex. Ray had the right to do what he wanted, when he wanted, but still, Alex missed him something fierce.
He’d always bounced ideas off Ray, vented his frustrations with him. The day h
adn’t been complete without a cold beer with Ray at The Shamrock, an Irish pub run by a Singaporean-Irishman named Li O’Shannesy.
Everyone assumed Alex wanted to take Ray’s place as captain, but Alex didn’t. He’d rather have Ray remain as captain, and friend, than rise in rank.
“No,” he said slowly. “I didn’t know.”
Alex focused on the young woman in front of him. Messy ponytail. Pale, perfect, poreless skin. Straight little nose with delicately flared nostrils. Full, unpainted lips. Perfect oval face. Clothes ancient and shapeless. Take away the untidy externals and she was extraordinarily beautiful—and she looked about sixteen.
This was not good. When she’d been ineffectually patting his trousers with her small, pale hands to sop up the sludge known here as coffee, he’d felt the first stirrings of his cock in, fuck…way, way too long. He tried to think back to the last time he’d had sex and came up blank.
Jesus, maybe the last time he’d gotten laid had been with that gorgeous barracuda of a real estate agent he’d hooked up with…what? Around Christmas? Fuck, that long ago?
She’d been smart, beautiful and scary as hell. For just a moment, as he put his cock in her, he wondered if he’d ever get it back.
Had he had sex since? Nope, he decided, after a quick consult with his dick. And after that brief, unsatisfactory liaison, the hunt for Lopez had heated up and he’d been putting in sixteen-hour days at the cop shop.
He needed to get laid again, fast, if a student could turn him on. At work, no less. Alex believed strongly is keeping work separate from the rest of his life, and that included sex. Of course, lately, his entire life was work, with no time for anything else. There really wasn’t any rest of his life.
Only that would explain a semi-hard-on because Caitlin Summers’ hands had come perilously near his groin. She wasn’t his type at all. He liked women who knew the score. And though she said she was a graduate student, she looked so impossibly young…
“How old are you?” he asked abruptly.
Caitlin Summers blinked. “Twenty-eight. Why?”