EXACTLY 1:25 p.m. of what she was sure was about to be the first of the worst four days of her life, Laura placed her two suitcases on the floor of the lobby of her building and looked out the front window. No cowboy on a white stallion.
She let out a pent-up breath, angry at herself. “You are a complete idiot and a juvenile one at that. You weren’t even this bad when you had a crush on Kevin Beckins in seventh grade!” If she’d thought talking to herself would fix her unreasonable and unwanted crush on Clint Marshall, it didn’t work. She’d never been so humiliated in her entire life. She had a crush on the cowboy. A crush!
Deliberately she replayed his words in her mind: Trust me, the last thing I want to do is get my hands on Ms. Carter’s body. Us Texas boys don’t like frostbite.
He hadn’t even used her first name. He probably thought his tongue would freeze if he said her name out loud. He clearly considered her a stiff, prissy socialite.
She softly kicked one of her expensive suitcases with her even more expensive shoes. Sweetums whimpered in disagreement. “Baby, did I scare you? I’m sorry. Mummy was thinking about that nasty man we’re being forced to spend a very long weekend with and I was trying to work out my frustration.” She scooped the bundle of white fluff into her arms and adjusted the blue bow tied to the tiny dog’s collar. “How’s my little Sweetums?”
The dog squinted at her from under her long blond bangs and blinked. Laura kissed the top of the dog’s head, amazed she’d come to care as much as she did for the ridiculous dog. She scratched Sweetums behind her ears and continued her running monologue. Sweetums liked to hear the sound of human voices. “If you were a real dog you’d bark. Or growl, or make some kind of loud noise—anything more than those little whiny noises you make when you sleep. Try barking for Mummy. Bark,” Laura coaxed and then demonstrated by making a loud woofing sound. Sweetums looked at Laura curiously, opened her mouth and licked Laura’s face.
“Well at least somebody likes me,” she said ruefully and wished the cowboy’s words hadn’t hurt so much. Normally she liked her ice-princess routine. After all, she had spent years refining the image. She was very good at it. Because of it most men stayed far away.
Romantic involvements only confused most women’s lives. At present count her mother had been married five times and each husband had had his own horrible qualities. Her mother continued to sail blithely across extremely dangerous seas from man to man, never noticing how much of her fortune each husband cost her or even more importantly how they destroyed her emotionally.
But Laura had noticed. And when she caught herself repeating her mother’s pattern—completely changing herself to fit into her ex-fiancé’s life—she’d stopped. Brian Simpson had almost been the biggest mistake of her life, but she’d gotten smart. Like her mother, men were her weakness so she’d stopped dating. Joined the police force. Concentrated on her career. Exclusively.
She liked being a cop and she was good at it. She loved the challenge of figuring out a case: following obscure leads, interviewing witnesses until something clicked and she knew who had broken the law. She sympathized with Garrow’s frustration; he knew that Monroe Investments laundered Russian Mafia money but he didn’t have the evidence he needed to arrest Peter Monroe. When she’d first made detective, she and her partner had kept a case open for three years, working on it whenever they could squeeze in the time, until they’d finally made an arrest.
Once she’d proven she wasn’t just playing at being a police officer, her colleagues had assumed that she would request a transfer to a unit like Special Financial Investigations. But while she appreciated the work Agent Garrow did, Laura preferred being on the street, helping ordinary people.
Being a good cop was her only priority. No man had been able to even chisel an inch of permafrost off her carefully developed exterior.
Until Clint Marshall.
A red sports car pulled up in front of her building and Clint unfolded his tall form from within. She watched and waited as he smiled at her neighbor, Mrs. Schwarz, and then held open the lobby door for her. He tilted his cowboy hat to the elderly woman and Mrs. Schwarz giggled as she passed him.
Laura’s pulse quickened as she studied him from under her eyelashes. Clint was tall, well over six feet and since she was five-nine, he’d be the perfect height to kiss. He had broad shoulders and a well-muscled chest. She knew because he’d had his shirt ripped off once during a violent arrest and he’d spent ten glorious minutes in the squad room processing the paperwork before going to the locker room to change. She’d had to take a tight hold of her desk to stop herself from running her hands over his bronzed muscles.
Clint’s long strides had him next to her and she took a deep breath, inhaling the crisp masculine scent of Clint Marshall. She held Sweetums up to her face to mask her swirling emotions. Whenever she was around Clint, it always took a little longer for her to put on the face she showed the rest of the world.
“What in the blazes is that?” Clint demanded as he frowned at the bundle of white fluff in her arms.
“Her name is Sweetums.” She raised the dog to his eye level.
Clint scowled at Sweetums. “What is it?”
“She’s a dog.”
“Darlin’, I’ve got cats bigger than that and with a lot less fur.”
Laura knew perfectly well the picture she and the Lhasa apso made. She was dressed in a pale blue suit, cradling a poofy white dog that in turn wore a bow that matched the exact shade of her blue suit. The image they presented was both sweet and ridiculous and, as she planned, Clint was looking at her in puzzlement. What was most important to Laura, however, was that she did not look like a member of Chicago’s finest. Looking at Laura and her dog, people would assume she was a socialite with too much time on her hands rather than a hard-working police officer. Laura straightened the bow on her dog’s head. “Sweetums is a Lhasa apso. She’s not supposed to grow any bigger, which is a good thing, because she’s just perfect as she is.”
“Just big enough to fit into your pocketbook?”
She smiled sweetly and scratched Sweetums behind her ears. The dog panted and sighed. Ever since Sweetums’s first owner had passed away, the dog loved to be petted and fussed over. Clint shook his head, his lips twitching and stroked Sweetums’s head. The dog drooled. Of course, if Clint touched her like that, Laura reflected, she’d drool, too.
“The dog is named Sweetums?” Clint asked.
“Yes. Say hello to the nice man, Sweetums,” she cooed into the dog’s ear and waved one little doggy paw at Clint. Sweetums looked bored and yawned. “I guess she doesn’t know what to make of a cowboy.”
“I get that reaction a lot in Chicago. Although people are generally a little more polite.”
“Is that why you turn the Texas drawl on and off?”
He shot her a quick look with his steel colored eyes but said nothing. He picked up her two suitcases. “Is this everything?”
“Yes.” She patted Sweetums on the head and straightened the dog’s bow again so that she wouldn’t see Clint pick up her bags, see the rippling muscles in his arms or appreciate the view as he walked away from her. When she looked up she realized she was too late. Clint was already outside her building. She scrambled after him and caught up just as he put her two bags in the miniscule trunk of his convertible—his own bag was on the pretend excuse
