Jill Shalvis - Serving Up Trouble

Came face-to-face with a police officer who didn’t look nearly as happy to see her as she was to see him.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Oh, Officer, great.” She sent him a megawatt smile, both because he’d scared the living day lights out of her, and because she was relieved it was a cop who had managed to sneak up on her, not a bad guy. “I was just going to call you.”

“Really. What a coincidence.”

“Yes. I have reason to believe that the owner of this car is a wanted man.”

“Wanted for what?”

“What’s going on here?” A man stepped out. Not the suspect, but the tall, elegantly dressed one, and he looked more than a touch annoyed. “This is my car.”

The officer looked at Angie.

Angie sighed. “I thought the other guy owned the car, the one who came with this man.”

The man shook his head. “I’m alone.”

“But I saw him. He was standing right next to you in the alley.”

“There was never anyone with me this morning.”

It was the officer’s turn to sigh. “It’s too early for this.”

“I’ll say.” The owner brushed past her, inspected the door for scratches, then gestured for Angie to move out of his way so he could get in.

“You’re going to let him go?” Angie asked the officer.

“I’m going to let you go.”

“Yeah.” She supposed she’d have to start the rest of her life tomorrow.

She went to see Sam in his lion’s den-er, his office. She refrained from making any cracks about the condition of his office, but it wasn’t easy.

And given the vaguely amused way he watched her as she entered, he knew it.

“You should know,” she said right off, wanting to just spit it out. “I had a little chat with a very nice policeman today in the alley where I was at tempting to take fingerprints off a car I thought was your suspect’s.”

He blinked, shook his head, blinked again and still didn’t appear to be able to speak.

“I know you’re going to say I shouldn’t have interfered, but it’s done. And no, I didn’t get the prints. Turns out I’m not quite as adept as I thought I was.”

He rose out of his chair and came to stand in front of her. He slowly reached out, cupped her jaw and stared into her face. “First of all, are you hurt?”

His fingers on her skin sent an electrical charge through her body, not that she could concentrate on that through her confusion. She’d been so certain he’d be furious. Why wasn’t he furious? “Um…no. I’m not hurt. Not at all.”

“Well, thank God for small favors. Now tell me what happened.”

“I saw two men by the car. One was your suspect. I had looked down for just a minute but assumed he’d gotten out of the same car and-”

“And he didn’t, I take it.”

“No. And then the other guy thought I was some sort of a loon, so the policeman wasn’t happy with me. I realized after I left that I didn’t even get the car’s license plate number.” She bit her lower lip, waited for his annoyance. His frustration.

Instead, his thumb continued to stroke her jaw, his gaze following the motion in tensely.

She almost wished he wouldn’t, because she was looking at him, feeling him, seeing an almost…tender side she hadn’t realized existed.

She was a sucker for tender. “Sam?”

With a sigh, his eyes cleared. He dropped his hand. “You terrify me, you know that?”

“Why?”

“What if the other guy had come back and found you alone in the alley?”

“Well, I thought they were together, you see, and the first man, the owner of the car, was talking into his cell phone and he said he’d be a half an hour, so I thought…”

“You thought you were safe,” he finished grimly, and shoved his fingers through his hair. “Promise me you won’t do anything like that again.”

She looked into his eyes, saw his intensity, his worry for her. She really wanted to be able to make the promise, she really did. She wanted a whole heck of a lot, she was discovering, when it came to him. “Sam, I can help you on this case.”

He closed his eyes and sighed again. And when he opened them back up, she saw another heart-stopping flash of that tenderness.

“Angie, I know you felt helpless at the bank holdup. I know you felt weak and defenseless, when you’re none of those things. But making up for it by catching a different bad guy isn’t the answer. I want you to promise me you won’t do anything like this again.”

“I can promise you I won’t get hurt,” she said softly, begging him with her eyes to understand. To let her help.

But he shook his head and turned away, staring blindly out the window. “That’s a promise you can’t keep, so let’s not even go there.”

The end of the week came. The entire seven days had been one big exercise in frustration for Sam. The holdup. Angie. The consequential news pa per extravaganza. Angie. The calls. The paperwork.

Angie.

She just wouldn’t go away, and yet she confused the hell out of him because even as she wanted to be in his life to solve his case-which still bugged him-she didn’t want to be in his life.

And yet in his experience, women wanted in. So what made Angie so different? Why couldn’t he put her out of his mind?

Because he was afraid she was going to get herself killed, that’s why. It was that simple. He had the incident in the alley as an example.

No doubt, she terrified him.

He just had no idea what to do about it. So he checked on her. Stopped by the café. Stopped by her apartment.

All in the name of duty.

Mostly.

Angie turned out to be a busy woman, not as easy to peg as he’d imagined. Which is how he found himself three mornings in a row sitting in the kitchen of the café, drinking the best coffee he’d ever had, bantering with Josephine and watching Angie when she wasn’t looking.

No doubt, she loved what she did. She made that clear with every smile, every laugh, every touch. She remembered orders without writing them down, and always had a kind word. It was amazing.

She was amazing.

She was also the sweetest, most giving, warmest woman he’d ever met. And completely guile less. If he’d harbored any doubt of her sincerity and naiveté, it’d vanished while watching her serve her customers those mornings.

God help him, there was some thing about the fanciful, joyous, wide-eyed and oddly vulnerable beauty that tugged at him, when he didn’t want to be tugged at.

“You could just ask her out, you know.”

Sam jerked his gaze off the opening through the kitchen doors, where he’d been staring like an idiot at Angie, and faced Josephine, who calmly filled up his mug with fresh coffee. “What?”

“I said, you could just ask her out-”

“Yeah. I mean no.”

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those.” Josephine plopped her considerable frame next to Sam, with a large bowl of fruit and a paring knife. “One of those uncommittable types.”

“It doesn’t matter what I am when it comes to Angie.”

“No?” Calmly Josephine started cutting fruit with the knife that looked sharp enough to cut through glass. “Why not? She not good enough for you?” She hefted the knife in her hand as she looked at him. “Maybe you ought to rethink that.”

Sam looked at the knife, at the way she was wielding it, and lifted a brow of his own. “You threatening a cop, Josephine?”

“I’m threatening a man.” Unapologetically, she reached for a cantaloupe. “Consider me a mother lion. Possessive and protective as hell.”

“Not asking Angie out has nothing to do with her not being good enough. She is. She’s…” Better than good enough, but he lifted his mug to his mouth to keep the thought to himself and burned his tongue for the effort.

“She’d go.” Josephine continued to slice up the fruit. “If you asked her.”

Sam sighed and put down the mug. Scalded tongue and all, he said, “I’m not interested in her that way.”

“Then why are you hanging around here every morning?” Josephine raised a brow. “My coffee isn’t that special.”

“Actually, it is. And…” He risked one more look at Angie through the kitchen door, who was smiling at a man who had to be ninety years old.

“That’s Eddie. He’s been coming here for fifty years, through eight different owners, he’s told me. He’s nearly deaf and has arthritis pretty bad, but he’s got all his faculties together. Watch. She’ll keep talking to him and cut up his food at the same time so he doesn’t have to work his fingers, and he’ll never know what hit him.”

Indeed, Angie shifted forward, set down a pot of coffee and, with a sleight of hand, she cut up the man’s food for him. All while smiling and chattering and keeping her eyes out for her other customers.

“She’s been hurt,” Josephine said into the silence. “By a man.”

Damn it. “I don’t want to know this.”

“He wanted to change her. Make her into something she wasn’t, and in the doing of that, took away most of her confidence. She’d deny it, of course, but it was the truth.”

“Look, I’m just here to make sure-”

“That she’s okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don’t want to know more, because you might realize the truth-”

“Josephine-”

“-that you care, too. That you know she’s not quite as strong as she pretends to be. That you could hurt her.”

“I am not going to hurt her. We’re not together. Not in that way.”

“Right. I forgot.” Josephine got up and took away both the pot of coffee and his mug.

Apparently he was done here.

Angie spent her free afternoons at the book store. There, in a lovely corner the owners had set up as a reading and study spot, she absorbed the books for her classes and day dreamed.

In between reading and fantasizing-which included far too much time spent on one Sam O’Brien-she chitchatted with the owners, George and Ellie Wilson. A couple in their mid-fifties, they’d put everything they had, including their retirement fund, into the store the year before, and were on pins and needles trying to work their way out of the red and into the black.