high-school diploma he’d needed to get into the police academy eleven years ago.
He rolled an imaginary crick from his neck and turned his attention back to the paperback he was reading at the corner table. It might take him all year long, but he was determined to get through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Only, Ents and elves and the scramble of letters he called Mordor kept getting sidetracked by sword-wielding women with pesky dogs and curvy hips and expressive eyes that shouldn’t be hidden away behind a pair of glasses.
He turned his page toward the light hanging on the wall beside him and tried to focus. The qeaçous … no, beacons of Gondor are alight, calling for aid.
But Trip’s thoughts weren’t in Middle Earth.
The swirling lights and sirens meant backup had arrived. They meant somebody else was here to convince her that he was one of the good guys. “They’re here to help.”
“Like you did?”
Trip’s gaze drifted to the blank margin at the bottom of the page. Where did Charlotte Mayweather get off, all but accusing him of making a horrible night even worse for her? He’d volunteered on his own time to check on the friend of a friend in need. The dead body and forced lock he’d found had put him on full-alert-combat mode. The woman was safe with him there. She didn’t need to be afraid or cry or go psycho on him.
She just needed to believe that he’d protect her—at any cost—because that was his job. It was who he was. It was what six feet, five inches of brawn, resourceful instincts and a talented set of hands was best suited for. He’d told her as much—had shown her—but she still didn’t believe he was one of the good guys.
And then she’d cried on him? The stitches in his arm and threat of a killer on the loose he could handle. But those tears trickling over her cheeks had twisted his stomach into a knot and made him useless to her.
And why was that stunned feeling of incompetence the memory that niggled his conscience two nights after the fact? Why wasn’t he analyzing the syrupy heat that had stirred in his veins when she’d halfway smiled at him for answering her tomboy whistle and plopping the dog in her lap?
Why was anything at all about Charlotte Mayweather still stuck in his head?
Trip closed his book and reached for his empty glass, tuning in to the other people in the bar. Captain Cutler sat at the end of the table, reading over the report from their performance-evaluation drill this afternoon. Alex Taylor sat directly across from him, on the phone with Audrey. Rafe Delgado was up at the bar, leaning in to stand nose-to-nose with their favorite bartender and adopted little sister, Josie Nichols.
Whatever that hushed argument was about, Josie was standing her ground, flipping her long dark ponytail behind her back and tilting her chin, despite the fatigue that was evident in her posture. For half a moment, Trip considered poking his nose in and warning Sergeant Delgado to back it up a step. Couldn’t he see how she braced her hands at the small of her back? The woman was dead on her feet, attending nursing school by day and working long hours at her uncle’s bar at night. She didn’t need whatever grief Rafe was giving her right now. But then Trip’s rescuing skills seemed to be a little on the fritz right now.
Still, Rafe seemed to be taking his overprotective-big-brother thing with Josie a little too far. Since she was the daughter of his first partner, who’d been killed in the line of duty, there was probably a stronger connection there. But it turned out there was no need to intervene. Josie flattened her hand in the middle of the sergeant’s chest and pushed him out of her space before spinning around and returning to her duties behind the bar.
Seemed like Charlotte Mayweather wasn’t the only woman who didn’t want SWAT Team One looking out for her.
“Here we go.” Randy Murdock, the newest member of the team, was driven and talented and female. Miranda, a feminine name that didn’t seem to fit either her personality or her deadly aim with a Remington sniper rifle, set a tray of beers on the table. The unwritten law was that the new guy bought the second round of drinks, since Josie Nichols seemed to always find an excuse to serve their first drinks on the house. “Everyone wanted a draft, right?”
“Works for me.” Trip reached across the table and picked up his second beer. He wouldn’t resort to getting drunk to get his frustration with a certain toffee-haired heiress out of his system, but getting his hands busy with something else might. “Thanks, newbie.”
Randy slid into the chair beside Trip’s, pulling a beer in front of her, too. “I don’t want you guys to think that just because I’m the only woman on the team that I’m going to be serving the drinks all the time. And don’t expect me to bake brownies or darn your socks.”
“Don’t expect me to darn yours, either,” Trip teased, appreciating the normal interaction with a woman.
“You can sew?” she countered.
“You can cook?”
The blonde’s cheeks blossomed with a blush that she quickly hid behind a swig of her beer.
“Down, you two.” Captain Cutler chided them like a stern father, setting the report down on the table and picking up a glass. His dark blue eyes zeroed in on Randy. “As long as you keep making a perfect score on the target range, you don’t have to bring me another beer.”
“I don’t mind doing that for you, sir.”
Michael Cutler grinned. “Relax, Murdock—I’m paying you a compliment. Team One’s score today was the highest ever recorded on the course. Captain Sanchez on Team Two owes me twenty bucks. And I intend to collect.”
“Congratulations, sir.”
“Congratulations to my team.” Cutler raised his glass and signaled to Sergeant Delgado to come over to the table and join their toast. “Now, you all perform that well on the street, and I can rest easy when I go home to my wife at night.”
Trip raised his glass and took a drink to honor his team’s performance on the mock-terrorist-attack drill this afternoon. Even during those lucky stretches of time when there was no real bomb threat or fugitive alert or hostage crisis that needed SWAT on the scene, they trained in weapons and strategy to keep their skills and instincts sharp. Today’s drill had gone by the book—full cooperation, each playing to his or her strength, no mistakes.
So why couldn’t he be savoring that victory instead of stewing over some eccentric kook …?
Trip’s gaze skidded to the neat shock of red hair on the man walking through the Shamrock’s front door. One thing about hanging out at a cop bar was that eventually, almost every cop in KCPD, active or retired, would stop by. Even the ones he didn’t particularly like. Trip barely knew Spencer Montgomery, but something about a detective relentlessly badgering a witness in an ambulance when it was plain to anybody who looked that she was about to lose it, put him on Trip’s don’t-turn-your-back-on-him-yet list.
Detective Montgomery must have felt Trip’s eyes on him because he paused before sitting and turned, trading nods of acknowledgment, if no smile of kinship, with him. Montgomery and his dark-haired partner had been assigned to the Rich Girl Killer investigation. A serial killer had already tortured and strangled two of Kansas City’s wealthiest beauties and was believed to be responsible for one or two more unsolved deaths. Just last year the killer had targeted Alex’s fiancée,
