Dangerous Deputy (7 page)

“Shit.” It was a whisper, so low she almost didn’t hear him.

She dragged her gaze to his face. “What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

Nervousness drew over her. “Um, excuse me, but this isn’t the time for nothings. You are in the middle of sex, buried about as deep as possible inside me, and you curse? I don’t think so.”

His smile was hard to decipher. “I never expected this.”

“And again, excuse me? You started it earlier downstairs.”

“Oh, no, we’re exactly where I intended to be after the movie. I just didn’t expect you to be you when I asked you to stay with me this weekend.”

Confusion riddled her thoughts. She didn’t understand. “You didn’t expect me to—” She shook her head. “You are confusing the hell out of me, you know.”

“I know. I’m sorry. Can you try to just forget it for now?”

Julia sighed. She should be used to men and their strangeness. Even through all this, the man hadn’t lost his erection. She could still feel him pulsing inside her.

She shook her head. “You do know we are going to have to talk about this eventually, right?”

“I know. I know. Just not right now.”

“And you men say women are confusing.”

He smiled, again, mischievously. “Oh, trust me, babe, you’re in for it when it comes to me.”

“Great. That’s all I need. A man with more baggage than I have.”

“I don’t know.” He thrust deep with his hips. She groaned as the tip of his cock brushed against her back wall. “Big baggage can make up for a lot.”

“I said a lot, not big.” She laughed.

He slid out and thrust in again forcefully. “Big, a lot. Same difference.”

Her laughter quickly turned into gasps as he sped up his movements. She sucked in her breath. “Damn. Nothing distracts you, does it?”

“Not for long. At least not when it’s this fun.”

Julia gave up complaining. He was right. It was fun. And she was tired of talking. It was time to get down to business.

Chapter Five

Julia sat on the back porch drinking her coffee, enjoying the late-morning sun. She hadn’t realized until this weekend how much she had missed the normal peace and quiet she used to enjoy when she lived alone. With three kids, Carrie’s house was never quiet, and although Julia loved them all, the silence was heavenly.

She took a last sip and went inside. They’d already had breakfast—after having sex on the kitchen table—and then Dennis had let her shower first. She’d gotten her things together and was only waiting for him to finish his own shower before she said good-bye. It stung that saying good-bye was the last thing she wanted. She’d enjoyed the weekend immensely, and not only the sex. Just being with Dennis had been fun. Talking with him, taking walks, watching movies, even grocery shopping had been enjoyable. She’d missed the kind of camaraderie that one had with a very good friend or lover.

The phone rang, startling her with its shrill sound. Dennis, like Carrie and Jim, lived in the middle of nowhere, and cell phone reception was spotty at best. Landlines were much more common out here than they were in the city.

The answering machine picked it up. “
Hey, Dennis. It’s Jim
.” Julia froze at her brother-in-law’s voice. “
Just calling to check how the weekend was. How things with Julia went. I appreciate you doing this, buddy. We’re about to start back now. We’ll be home in a couple hours. Don’t bother calling me back. I’ll be in the car with Carrie and the kids and won’t be able to talk. You can tell me all about it at work tonight
.” The click of a hang-up signaled the end of the call, and the machine reset itself. Silence overtook the room. She stood there for what seemed like forever before reminding herself to move. She’d already brought her bag downstairs, so she grabbed it and headed for the front door.

“Julia! Did I hear the phone?” Dennis’s voice rolled down the stairs.

She didn’t bother answering. She slammed the door and headed out.

Julia climbed into the car, tossing her bag into the backseat with more force than necessary. She heard the bag rip but paid it no mind as she turned the car on and pulled out of Dennis’s driveway as fast as she could.

She drove for what seemed like hours without any conscious thought but knew it couldn’t have been longer than about ten or fifteen minutes before she pulled over. She was just outside town but didn’t remember getting there. There were no tree limbs or animal parts sticking to the car, so she assumed she had done perfectly well on autopilot.

First things first, she reached for her phone to text her sister that she would be home later that night, after Jim had left for work. She was not in the mood to see him, and knew she would regret whatever it was she ended up saying to him.

With at least five hours to kill, Julia was at a loss for what to do. She knew she should calm down and think about what she had just learned, but she was too wound up for that. If she thought about the message Jim had left, she would just get angrier by the minute. She was in no mood to be rational.

Retail therapy usually helped her when she was down, but it gave her too much time to think. The more she thought about the situation, the angrier she would get. She needed to go somewhere she could keep her mind busy. The movies. A few hours of half-naked superheroes should take her mind off things—at least temporarily.

Chapter Six

“He did what?” Carrie nearly yelled the question at her.

“Shush. You’ll wake the kids.”

“To hell with that. They’re sound asleep. They barely got any rest all weekend and were too wound up to nap in the car. Nothing short of a nuclear explosion will wake them.”

Julia lay on the couch and wrapped herself in her sister’s handmade afghan. “Your beloved husband asked his friend to fuck me this weekend.”

Carrie sat down beside her and breathed a large sigh. “Okay, let’s start this from the beginning.”

Julia told her about the traffic stop, about Dennis’s supposed surprise at seeing her, and about pretty much everything else that had transpired over the weekend. Including how Julia had begun to feel about him.

“So, we don’t know Jim actually asked Dennis to take you home for the weekend.”

“No, we don’t. But Jim didn’t just ask about Friday night. He asked about the entire weekend. That means either A: Dennis told him at some point that I was there, or B: he’d fully expected Dennis and me to be together all weekend.”

“You know it could have just been the way Jim worded it.”

“He said
weekend
. He
knew
.”

“Okay.” Carrie sat there and bit her top lip, an annoying habit she’d had since they were kids. Whenever she had a problem to work out, she worked at her lip like that.

“So let’s break this down. What are you angry about?”

“I don’t know. Everything. Nothing. Shit.” Julia hugged herself tighter. She felt like she was fully justified in her anger but didn’t know exactly what she should be angry about.

Carrie stared at her for a second. “All right. So he stopped you on a made-up excuse Friday night.”

“Right.”

“So you are pissed about that.”

“He took advantage of it.”

Carrie waved Julia’s comment away. “We’ll get to that in a second.”

Julia glared at her sister but waited.

“You think he lied to you.”

“Hello? I
know
he lied to me.”
He had, hadn’t he?

Carrie sat back. “Okay, so you are mad at him because he stopped you under false pretenses.” At Julia’s nod, Carrie continued. “But you’re the one who started the sex.”

“Right.” Julia groaned inwardly. She’d never get over that.

“So you aren’t angry about that.”

“Yes. No.”
Shit
. Wouldn’t she ever learn?

Carrie sighed. “You can’t have it both ways, sis.”

Julia thought about it for a moment. Carrie was right. “Fine. I’m not angry about what happened in the woods. I’m angry at him lying to me about why he was stopping me. He took advantage of the situation.”

“How different is this from when a guy pretends he knows you at a bar? Or makes up some other dumb excuse to get to talk to you?”

“I don’t know. It just is.”

Carrie shook her head. “Okay, I personally disagree with you, but we’ll let that one go for now. Whose idea was it for you to go to his house?”

“His, of course.”

“And you really think Jim put him up to that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to think that, but it was so out of the blue. It just seems wrong. It seemed right at the time, but now, in retrospect it makes no sense at all. It’s not like we even knew each other. And then all his cryptic comments last night while we were having sex confuse me more. All I was planning was that one night. Hell, I wasn’t even planning it. It just kind of happened.”

“Couldn’t that be true about the whole weekend? It just happened?”

Julia wanted to believe that. She truly did. Especially given how she’d grown to feel about him. But Jim’s words continued to haunt her. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t suppose you want me to talk to Jim about it?”

Julia was sure the look she gave her sister could have burned a hole in the wall. “Don’t even think about it.”

* * * *

Julia debated the incident the entire week. She wanted to believe Dennis was better than what she feared, but she also couldn’t put it past Jim to ask him to do exactly what had happened. She could see him thinking that making her happy would make her easier to live with. Or even, if she got her heart broken, maybe she’d leave. She trusted Jim about as far as she could throw him.

But should she be painting Dennis with the same brush just because they worked together?

By Thursday she didn’t know what to think. Dennis hadn’t called her, although she hadn’t tried calling him either. Of course, he didn’t have her cell phone number. But then he could have called the house. She knew his schedule could sometimes be erratic. According to Carrie, this week he was working nights, which meant he went in at six and didn’t get home until six in the morning. Even if he wanted to talk to her, there wasn’t any time between her schedule and his. But then again, not wanting to talk to her would explain it just as well.

“Well, I’ll be honest. I couldn’t find much wrong with her.”

Julia looked up at the mechanic she’d left her car with last week. “Really? I was kind of worried, with it getting so old.”

The man shook his head. “Changed the oil, ran it through the computer, did visual checks. Like you knew, brakes needed new pads, but the hoses looked okay. You’ll probably need new tires in a few months, depending if it’s city or highway miles you put on it. Other than that, nothing really wrong with it.”

Wow. An honest mechanic
. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever encountered one before. And he seemed like a nice guy to boot. When she’d dropped the car off last week, he’d listened to everything she’d had to say about it and promised to get right on it.

“Wonderful. How much do I owe you?” She’d agreed for him to keep the car for the week, as he was a friend of Carrie’s and said he’d do most of the work after the shop closed, keeping as much as he could off the books.

He leaned back, giving her space. “Well, other than the oil, filter, and brakes, we are mostly looking at just my time.” He looked at the paper in front of him. “My itemized bill says one-fifty, but I have a special going on.”

“Yes?” She had a feeling she knew what was coming.

“I give a discount to personal friends of mine. So how about I call it fifty dollars, and you go out to dinner with me?” Saving a hundred bucks sounded great to her but almost too good to be true. Even if he was asking her out to dinner.

“Dinner?” She was willing to go out with the guy, but the last thing she needed was another entanglement. Her record with men wasn’t getting any better.

His smile brightened up his face. “Just dinner. No strings.”

She read his name tag. “Howard? How about one hundred and we split dinner?”

“Hundred. And dinner is on me. And I won’t take no for an answer.” Before she could say anything, he continued. “And if it makes you feel any better, you can meet me at the restaurant. No expectations.”

“I’ll be frank. I really don’t want anything other than friendship right now. “ She hadn’t with Dennis, either, and look where that had gotten her. Already a week of heartache, and they hadn’t had anything more than two nights of sex.

He shook his head. His voice got low, less happy than it had been seconds before. “Don’t worry. Neither am I. My wife passed away from cancer just over a year ago, and to be completely honest, I’m not over it yet.”

“I’m so sorry.” She put a hand on his. She pulled it back and asked, “But, then, why?”

“Why am I going out? Because my daughter has been pushing me for the last few months. I figure I can at least tell her I tried. If you’re willing?” The look on his face melted her heart just a little.

“You don’t have to bribe me with my bill, you know.”

He smiled. He really was a good-looking man. “I know, but this way I can convince myself I’m doing you a favor at the same time you’re helping me out.”

She could understand why Carrie had described him as a teddy bear. “Tomorrow okay with you?”

“Perfect. You want to meet me, or should I pick you up?”

He already knew she lived with Carrie. And he really didn’t strike her as dangerous. And if Carrie didn’t think it was a good idea, Julia could always cancel. “You can pick me up. What time?”

They set their plans, and she paid her bill before leaving, more positive than she had been a few minutes before.

No matter what happened, she had a feeling she’d end up with a new friend at the very least.

* * * *

The date went surprisingly well, but she’d been right in her initial assessment. Their chemistry was more of a pair of friends than anything else. She enjoyed his company, but his heart was still with his late wife, and she knew that maybe not her heart but definitely her thoughts were already taken by Dennis.

When they pulled up to Carrie’s house after dinner, their good-byes were short and sweet. Howard’s cell phone went off before he could even get out of the car to walk her to the porch. His daughter was texting to ask how the date was going.