“You used subterfuge then?”
“I suppose you want to know all the gory details?”
“Actually”—she flashed her dimples—“I had something else in mind. You want to go somewhere and make out?”
10
Dani raced me back to my house and beat me by a mile.
I’d always been impressed by her reflexes behind the wheel. If she had chosen a different path, Danielle Tate could have been a champion NASCAR driver.
Or a mixed-martial-arts fighter.
Dani held a black belt in Brazilian jiujitsu that wasn’t some phony honor handed out by a storefront sensei. She had recently tossed me onto the bed using something she called an uchi mata throw: a judo technique for which I had zero defense. Nor had I wanted one.
She might also have considered a career as an Olympic marksman.
During her last qualification, she had scored highest in her troop using the standard semiauto, the shotgun, and the AR-15.
Because of these achievements—or to diminish them—she had acquired the nickname of Bulldog, which she wore with sullen acquiescence. The name was meant as a friendly tribute to her tenaciousness, her male sergeant had told her. But Danielle Tate was a woman, and she understood what was really going on.
When I pulled into the driveway behind her, she was already standing beside her cruiser with a triumphant grin. She was still properly dressed in her trooper’s blue uniform, but she had left her Dudley Do-Right hat on the passenger seat and pulled off the scrunchie she used to secure her hair. The sunlight brought out the honey-gold streaks amid the darker blond.
The men who thought this self-confident, vivacious woman was a dog were blind as well as chauvinists.
“Took you long enough.”
“Keep in mind that my Scout doesn’t have a rocket under the hood.”
“As long as there’s a rocket in your pants.”
The last time I had blushed in the company of an attractive female was at a junior high school dance, but Dani’s aggressive sense of humor turned me red as a beet.
We were all over each other before we’d made it inside the mudroom door. Laughing, we unlaced our boots and kicked them across the dirty floor. Then she was in my arms. At five-four, she was one of the shortest women I had been with. Standing embraces were difficult for us. After a few seconds of fumbling, she decided “To hell with it” and leaped up and wrapped her strong legs around my waist.
I laid her down on the kitchen table and unbuckled her leather gun belt and draped it creaking over the back of a chair. I had to remove my badge, cuffs, and holstered weapon before she could yank my pants down, lest the loaded gun drop to the floor.
Like all police these days, she wore a ballistic vest under her shirt, which had definitely not been designed for afternoon romps. I needed her help to get it off. The woven Kevlar had flattened her pear-shaped breasts. Because of her daily sessions at the punching bag and weight bench, she had acquired a muscular back and shoulders. She would have resembled a professional gymnast from behind if not for the broadness of her hips.
She sat up, pulled the fleece over my head, and laughed with delight at the sight of my bare chest and abdomen. Then her gaze fell lower and she laughed again.
“I shouldn’t have worried about that rocket.”
An hour later, we were lying in bed, naked, but with the bunched covers down over our bare feet. Dani rested her head against my chest and kept one hand flat on my stomach, which was still rising and falling from the exertion of our second bout. She wasn’t even out of breath.
“How were you able to do that on no sleep?” I said in genuine amazement at her stamina.
“I’m younger than you.”
“What? I’m only three years older than you are.”
“Yeah, but you’re thirty and that’s officially middle-aged.”
“I hope not.”
She tickled my chest hair. “I’m starving.”
“Do you want me to get up and make something?”
“Not yet.”
“This is the third time we’ve been together in my bed and the third time you’ve passed on my cooking. Kathy told you I was a bad chef, didn’t she?”
I was referring to our mutual friend Sergeant Kathy Frost. Dani had begun her career in law enforcement as a game warden. She had taken over my Midcoast district after I had been transferred to the windswept barrens of Down East Maine. Kathy had been the field-training officer to each of us in turn, and we remained close, even after she had been medically retired because of a gunshot wound.
Dani neither confirmed nor denied what she’d heard about my culinary capabilities. “That’s not the reason I want you to stay in bed.”
“I think I might need a break before I can go again.”
She lowered her hand to my groin. “I’m not so sure about that.”
The moment didn’t last. She rolled off me and sat up, using a pillow to prop her back against the headboard. The expression on her face told me an intimate disclosure might be forthcoming.
“We’re having fun together, aren’t we, Mike?”
“God, yes.”
“The thing is—I need to know—is that all this is?”
Her question tied a knot in my tongue. “You know I care for you, Dani.”
“No offense, but that’s a bullshit answer.”
“I’m enjoying myself. I hope you are, too. Beyond that, I’m not trying to get ahead of things. I think you know why.”
Her gray eyes became granite. “I remember Stacey. The problem is, I care for you, too.”
“Can’t this be enough for a while?”
“I thought so at first. But I want more.”
“Oh.”
She’d shaken her own self-confidence. “This is the time when you say maybe we should take a break.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Dani.”
“It may be too late for that. One of the reasons I drove all the way over here was to have this conversation in person. That and the sex.” She smiled shyly as she lifted my hand off her arm. “I’m not asking you to lie to make me
