Hot Stuff (4 page)

“Katie-cat, you’re on an actual date?” She squealed, craning her neck to scan a look at Dallas supervising the tire change outside. “Not bad,” she growled, giving me a thumbs-up. “Where did you find him?”

“He’s a cop,” I whispered, hoping she’d take the clue to lower her voice. Thankfully, no other customers were at the register, and at the hour, only one or two at the back of the store.

She gave me a fish eye. “So, did you break a law to get his attention?”

“You might say Evan introduced us.

Molly rolled her eyes and laughed heartily. She remembered Evan’s obsessions. “Any port in a storm, girl. Could this be serious?”

“It’s our first date, Moll. Ask me tomorrow.”

Shoving a roll of breath mints at me, she prescribed I take two. “And freshen your lipstick. You must have chewed it off.”

I saluted
and licked my lips. “Actually, it wasn’t my doing. Well, maybe I was a little complicit.” I grinned, nodding my head toward the scene outside.

“You go, girl!” She squealed, giving me a high-five.

An attendant was tightening the bolts on the spare tire when I carried my cardboard tray of goodies to the car.

“The tire was beyond repair,” Dallas said, taking the cup I offered. “We had to toss it.”

Suddenly, I remembered the spare came from the trunk. Suspicion might have driven him to look in the plastic bag, but he had no reason to suspect I was harboring stolen goods in a garbage bag. I took a sip of hot coffee that burned my tongue and tried to clear the sobering “what ifs” racing through my beer-clouded mind.

He got into the car, and I thanked him for changing the tire. “I am grateful, and I do owe you for the cost.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, winking. “Let’s go somewhere quiet to talk.”

He wanted to
talk—
maybe
code for
confess?
I sipped more coffee in silence until arriving at Mill Pond Park near the falls. Since it was half-past midnight, we did have a quiet spot to ourselves, not counting the splash and rumble of a waterfall. We found a picnic table near the bank and sat to finish our coffee and cookies.

“These taste like your grandmother’s,” he said, after a big bite.

“They are. She bakes them for a few convenience stores and shares the profit. I help out with her biggest orders.”

He moved a little closer. “You know how to bake these?”

I nodded. “Mrs. Fields has nothing on Granny Sanders’ Snickerdoodles.”

He laughed. “You got a lot going for you, Peaches. Sure there are no suitors in that pond?” He rubbed his hand on the back of my neck and could probably feel the heat surge. “I like that about you. Sass and blush.” His fingers moved over my cheek. “Soft as peach fuzz.”

I choked back the urge to giggle, along with too much cookie in my own mouth, and coughed. An unladylike hacking cough that made my eyes water. He thumped me on the back until I discreetly sprayed a few dry cookie crumbs, recovering enough to daintily dab my eyes and mouth with my forefinger.

“You gonna be okay?” The moonlight reflected a white glow of teeth.

Ducking my head to brush crumbs off my skirt, I nodded. “I…I always thought peach fuzz described the face of an adolescent boy.”

He leaned into me, whispering, “I’d hardly mistake you for a boy. I meant that as a compliment.”

“I’m not used to compliments.” I whispered back.

“Now that’s surely hard to believe, Peaches.”

With a shaky hand, I overshot a gulp of hot coffee that dribbled down my chin and into my cleavage. The lid of my cup popped off as I leapt to my feet, and what was left in the cup splashed onto his shirt.

Caught by surprise, he yelped, “hot damn” and failed to steady his own cup. Watching his coffee run rivers over the tabletop, we swore “hot damn” in unison and laughed. He pulled off his shirt and, after balling it up, blotted my chin.

“Your dress…I hope your peaches aren’t stained.” He lowered his aim to blot my chest then stopped in mid-air when the comment sank in, and we laughed again.

Hazelnut coffee mixed with cinnamon cookies and the scent of beer on a moonlit night by the falls was a head-tripping mix. Add a gorgeous man with bare-chested credentials dabbing at your chest with his T-shirt, and my dress was the last thing on my mind. I may have even said, “Who cares” before his mouth found mine, and we kissed…until I was sure the heat radiating from inside would surely dry my dress on the outside.

Chapter Eight

We were both breathless when the kiss ended. If I hadn’t been in his tight embrace, I might have dropped to my wobbly knees like a caravan camel. I slipped out of my sandals, hoping closer contact with hard ground would stabilize my legs.

He slipped out of his boots as well.

After another breathless repeat of the lip lock that turned my legs to rubber, I suggested we cool off with a wade in the pond. Taking my arm, he helped me navigate the rocks down the bank until we were ankle deep in cold water, being refreshed by a gentle mist from the falls. The sound of rushing water made talking impossible, but holding hands again, I could feel some kind of communication surge between us. Electricity. Could the falls generate such a thing—like heat from a campfire if you inched too close to the flame?

The last time I remembered being at the base of the falls was over ten years ago. I was saving Evan from the sheet of water that swept away the collectible stones he was washing. Gran screamed from the bank amid several spectators as Evan slipped under the falls, briefly. A cop with big hands rescued us, and Evan was handed up through a line of good Samaritans, whining like any wet eight-year-old kid about his lost rocks. We got off that time with a big lecture after I took the blame for being much older—and supposedly
wiser.

In the hands of another cop, I had the same mixed feelings about being in any danger, and feeling once again that I had to take the blame for Evan. Would Dallas understand if I opened the trunk and confessed all? If he turned a blind eye to the theft of a young man with Asperger’s, would his new job be in jeopardy?

My sudden attraction to Hot Stuff was threatening my comfort zone—and every other zone in my body. All my life, I had happily sacrificed for my diminishing family, guarding my heart against anything that could separate us. Said heart was feeling as brittle as a stale candy heart.

We hung around the park for another hour or so, walking barefoot in the cool grass, and then sitting atop a dry picnic table, talking about his family back home, the crime and politics in Dallas, and why he wanted to settle down in a cooler climate—and a safer place to someday raise a family. He knew what he wanted, a decisive man of integrity. And when I felt him take my hand to play with my fingers, I was torn between showing him what was in my trunk or visualizing a future with him. I couldn’t imagine one would lead to the other. He was just too good to be true, and if I learned he liked me as much as I liked him, I could blow it all by confessing my guilt.

Our clothes were dry by the time he drove me back home. Before we parted, he pointed out all the bells and whistles on his new Harley. “I always wanted one of these, never thought I’d find one in a boring little village like this.”

“Boring, huh?”

He pulled me close enough to show the moonlight gleam in his eyes. “Well, not everything here is boring.” He kissed me goodnight, pulling on my bottom lip and trailing kisses to a tender spot behind my ear.

I wished we were still in my beetle with the console jabbing into my back.

The putta-putta-putta of the cycle competed with the rev of my heart. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he promised, with a final, lazy grin before he veered off into the night.

Chapter Nine

Tomorrow
turned into several nail-biting days after I checked the trunk of my car and found Dutch boy missing! Only Dallas had access to my trunk, but when? And what could he have done with it? How could he kiss me like he did, thinking…? Well, I couldn’t be sure what he was thinking. Less sure about what he would do about it.

Gran and I were stunned when the evening news on WTMJ Tuesday night featured a drug bust in Menomonee Falls. The historic stone barn next to the Koster home was now famous for housing a meth lab in an old storeroom. Three handcuffed men trying to avert the TV cameras were being herded into a police van. We didn’t recognize any of the cops in the coverage, except for Police Chief Burzinski, who only commented the site had been under surveillance for some time, and a local tip led to the arrests. A local tip?

“Drug Bust in Menomonee Falls” made the front page of
The Milwaukee Journal
and the lead story in the village community paper, along with pictures of the old barn cordoned off with yellow police tape. Thomas Koster, the eighty-five-year-old widowed owner of the property, claimed he was unaware of the lab his nephews had been operating for five months.

When I saw the picture of the Dutch Boy with the clever caption: “Garden Gnome Unearths Crime,”
I sprayed the morning paper with the grape juice I’d been drinking. Thankfully, no mention was included of Evan or me, only that Dutch Boy was abetting the sale of drugs—by dispensing packets like a miniature vending machine. A well-hidden slot in the windmill received payment.

“Cripes, Gran, this whole operation couldn’t have been very productive if that’s the only way they sold drugs.” I finger-mopped a few beads of juice running down the newspaper. “How could these guys get rich with such a method? What prevented local users from just walking away with the stuff—or even with the Dutch boy like Evan did?”

“You’re thinking like a criminal.” Gran snorted as she rolled plum-sized balls of cookie dough between her palms, lining them up on cookie sheets. “I remember Koster’s wife, Lydia. She sold farm produce and fresh eggs for many years, right out of the stone barn. They didn’t have kids, but I remember their nephews helped on the farm. None of those boys seemed very bright to me.” After flattening the cookies and sprinkling them with cinnamon sugar, she shoved two sheets in the oven and wiped her hands on her apron. “I just hope old Tom wasn’t involved. Even knowing what was going on is as good as abetting the crime.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re preaching to the choir, Gran. We’ve been abetting Evan for years.”

“Well, that’s different.”

She gave me a head-tilting, condescending look that made me think of Dallas. I truly missed him, and wondered if his absence was his way of protecting us—or himself. Captain Billington might tweak a few rules and look away where Evan’s
“thefts”
were concerned, but a rookie cop had to prove himself trustworthy and able to uphold the law on a shorter leash. I took my cell phone and the stained newspaper out to the porch to read the whole story one more time.

When I heard the roar of a motorcycle, I felt my stomach lurch.

He set the kickstand and sauntered up our walk—in full uniform. Dark sunglasses hid his eyes, but his mouth was grim when he noticed me shrinking in the shadows of the porch. He leaned against a post, arms and legs crossed, surveying me.

With a deep sigh, I set aside the paper and rose to face him, chin up. “So, did you come to arrest me?” I didn’t even try to disguise my sarcastic tone.

His mouth twinged, but he unhooked the cuffs at his belt and clicked them over my wrists. “Yes, ma’am, I’ve come to finish the job.”

I couldn’t tell if he was serious. My laugh sounded like a seal barking. “And what is the charge?”

“Where do I start?” Frowning, he scratched his head. “Besides the obvious 10-99, on surveillance duty one night last week I answered a 10-14, which is a
prowler report
that turned into a 10-37, which means I followed a
suspicious vehicle,
which turned into a 10-80 for a
pursuit in progress.
”

I gaped, unable to read his eyes through the dark glasses. “That was you following me?”

“Yes, ma’am. I can read license plates. And there aren’t many pea green beetles in the Falls.”

I poked my tongue into my cheek. “So you led me on, took me on a date just to get to the…the evidence in my trunk.”

He rubbed his neck, looking away. “We knew what was in the Dutch boy. We didn’t know your brother took it until you showed up with it at the Fest.”

My throat was closing. I straightened my shoulders and swallowed hard. “I was
trying
to return it after Gran found it in Evan’s room. I didn’t know it had drugs inside until the night you followed me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He lowered his head to peer at me over the top of his sunglasses.

“Stop calling me that! Pulse throbbed in my temple as I fought back unwelcome tears. I snapped, “For God’s sake, you…we…kissed—more than once.” My voice rose. “You even called me
Peaches,
you…you smooth-talkin’ hoodwinker.” I slapped his face awkwardly, pinching my wrists from the confining handcuffs.

His laugh sounded hollow as he forced me back against the house, pinning my hands high above my head. “Assaulting an officer.” He clicked his tongue. “The charges are adding up.”

Widening his stance put his face inches from mine. We were both breathing hard, exchanging the same air, pungent with peppermint and grape juice. His blue eyes were intense, the irises flecked with green. I turned aside my head, blinking away the film. “I don’t care what you do with me. Just leave Evan out of all this.”