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He’s good. He’s real good.

  “Well?” Chase says when he turns back to face me, and I’m sure it’s because we were in the middle of something, but that was a bad idea. I have a better idea now, so I maintain a three-foot distance between us and avoid gazing directly into his eyes.

  “I do admit that I might have misjudged you,” I concede, leaning against the bookshelf, my hands tucked behind my back.

  He raises a brow. “Because I’m a guy, and I know who Frances Elizabeth Willard is?”

  “Because you’re a guy who supports your local library.” I can’t help myself—I meet his eyes. His goddamn twinkling eyes.

  He grins, slowly, and I know that he knows he’s got me.

  He leans against the opposite shelf. “Dinner tomorrow. Six o’clock.”

  “Seven.” He’s got me, but he doesn’t have me that easily. “I work before that.”

  “Tell me where to pick you up.”

  “Tell me where to meet you. I’ll drive myself.” No way am I going out with him without an escape plan.

  He considers. “I haven’t decided yet. I’ll text you.”

  “I haven’t given you my number.”

  “Then give me your number.”

  There’s no way for me to have the last word on this one and win. There’s either I give it or I don’t, and if I don’t, this is done.

  And I don’t want it to be done.

  I give him my number.

  Because maybe there’s something to what Megan said earlier after all—you don’t get anything good without risk.

  Well, I’ve decided there’s something that I want. Something I’m willing to take a risk for after all.

  And if I get it, I have a feeling it’s going to be real good.

  4

  Chase

  When I settle into my patrol car the next morning, I decide that nothing can touch my good mood. Nope. Nothing, because tonight Officer Kelly has a date with the sexy librarian. And if I thought those leggings would give me carpal tunnel from all the stroking off they inspired, then I’m going to have something much worse than carpal tunnel after seeing her in that pencil skirt and tight no-nonsense bun yesterday. How do teenage boys even handle her being their librarian? I’d be terrified to shine a black light in the men’s restroom at the Corinth Branch.

  Note to self, see if Livia is willing to play Sexy Librarian after we play Find the Nightstick.

  So the normal rounds of criminals, liars, and people who yell at me for giving them tickets don’t bring me down.

  The dirt bag who tries to lie about slashing his ex-girlfriend’s tires the night before doesn’t bring me down.

  The irate doctor who accuses me of discriminating against people who drive nice cars in order to boost ticket revenues doesn’t bring me down.

  Even the white lady who yells at me after I write her a ticket for causing an accident doesn’t upset me.

  “Failure to avoid collision?” she reads off the ticket. “How the fuck am I supposed to avoid a collision when the car in front of me stops without warning?”

  “They were stopping for a red light. In general we would consider the red light a warning that cars ahead of you will be stopping,” I say, aware that I’m being snarky, but keeping my voice bland and pleasant. It’s easy to stay pleasant when I know I’ll be pressed against Livia later tonight. “I also have three independent eyewitnesses saying you were tailgating that car and visibly texting on your phone. If you’d been following at a safe distance, you wouldn’t have hit them.”

  “You can’t know I wouldn’t have hit them,” she hisses wildly.

  “Actually,” I say cheerfully, “I can know that. Given the incredibly short skidmarks and given that the coefficient of friction for dry asphalt is generally between a .7 and .9, I’d say you would have only needed an extra six or seven feet between you to have avoided the accident. Less than a single car length.”

  She blinks at me.

  I flip over her accident report form and start writing out the formula for her. “So the mass of the vehicle is irrelevant here, and without a drag tire I don’t know the exact coefficient of friction, but we’ll be generous and say it’s .7, and so if f equals force…”

  She’s now staring at me incredulously.

  “It’s physics?” I offer.

  “Fuck physics,” she snaps. “You’ll be hearing a complaint from me, Officer Kelly. You’ve been nothing but unprofessional. And those eyewitnesses are bullshit—no one can prove I was texting!”

  “That’s why I didn’t write you a ticket for texting, I wrote you a ticket for crashing into the back of another car.”

  She practically snarls, snatches her ticket out of my hand, and leaves. I finish the physics formula by myself for fun, get the answer I knew I would, and then finish up my report.

  Good mood undented, I spend the next hour running speed along one of our busiest roads, my phone wedged between my cheek and my ear as I hold the LIDAR gun steady and track cars as they drive by.

  “Do you think she prefers it if a guy dresses up or if he’s more casual?” I ask Megan. I called her to not-so-subtly investigate Livia before our date tonight; I am very, very invested in it going well. My dick is too.

  “Let me guess,” Megan says, “it’ll be the Kelly trio? Dinner, drinks—”

  “—handcuffs,” I finish for her. “And don’t knock the Kelly trio. It’s very popular in certain circles.”

  “You mean the circles of women aged twenty-three to twenty-seven who live within walking distance of a bar?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Face it, Chase, you have a type.”

  “Beautiful women?”

  We’re miles apart, but I can practically hear her eyes roll. “Shallow women. Badge bunnies. The kind that get off on playing ‘License and Insurance’ and then afterwards are more than happy to hop on to the next officer. Livia’s not like that, Chase. She’s not impressed by your badge or those dumb sunglasses—”

  “Hey!” I protest. “My sunglasses are not dumb!”

  “—and she’s definitely not shallow. She’s smart. And passionate. And determined. And she’s sworn off men, so I don’t know how you convinced her or hexed her into agreeing to a date with you, but it’s probably not because you’ve dazzled the panties off of her.”

  I think about that a minute, my good mood threatening to deflate the tiniest amount. Not because Megan told me Livia had sworn off men, since I’m pretty sure once I get her to myself she’ll decide to unswear off men...for at least two hours. Four if she has a hot tub.

  No, my good mood is wavering because my own sister is clearly wary of me dating her friend. “Megan, you know that I’m not like a total asshole right? I’m not planning on fucking it and trucking it. I’ll be a gentleman.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Don’t hmm at me,” I say indignantly. “Maybe I didn’t dazzle the panties off her, but she must have seen something in me she likes. Even if it’s just the promise of a fun night.”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of being just a fun night? Being just Officer Good Times?”

  The answer is so obvious that for a moment I think I misheard the question. “No, I don’t, baby sis. No, I don’t.”

  Again, I can hear her eyes roll. “I don’t believe you, dude.”

  I make a scoffing noise as I adjust the phone and aim my LIDAR at a Lexus barreling down the far lane. “You don’t have to believe me. But I will tell you, I definitely wouldn’t mind if I had more than one fun night with Livia. A few would be ideal. And do you think she’d wear those leggings if I asked her? I can’t stop thinking about what it would be like to tear them apart with my hands and—”

  “Oh my God. I’m hanging up.”

  “Fine. I have to pull over this car anyway. If the date goes badly, I’m blaming it on your poor intel.”

  Megan makes her own scoffing noise and then hangs up, and I drop the phone in the seat next to me and reach for my lights and sirens. But as I d
o, as I pull over the SUV and have yet another doctor accuse me of profiling expensive-looking cars, I wonder about what Megan said.

  Am I sick of being Officer Good Times?

  I mean, of course not.

  Right?

  But for the first time, I’m not sure if I believe myself either.

  I’m at the steakhouse fifteen minutes early, which is on time in Chase Kelly’s book. I’ve never been late for work or a date a single time in my life; in fact, I’ve always been early, which is a point of pride for me. And Livia walks in at seven on the dot, something that endears me to her immensely, although the moment I register that I, Officer Kelly, am charmed, my mind goes blank.

  Just blank.

  There is nothing but her.

  She walks in on heels that make her legs a mile long, her long hair down in a tumult of soft waves. The maître d' helps her take off her checkered wool coat, and then I.

  Am.

  Speechless.

  My heart hammers up in my throat as the blood pools deep in my groin. She’s wearing a bright red dress—so fucking short that I’d be able to finger her easily if we were in a booth, which we tragically aren’t. The red sets off the warm undertones of her bronze skin, highlights the deep brown of her eyes. The lines of it hug the delectable curves of her tits, which are just small enough that she can get away without wearing a bra.

  My cock thickens as she begins walking toward me, and I can verify that she is definitely not wearing a bra. Oh God, what if she’s not wearing panties either?

  I bite back a groan and push back my chair to greet her as she comes to our table, tugging the hem of my sweater down in one smooth move as I unfold myself to help disguise the effect her presence has on me.

  As I step forward to greet her, I notice the color high in her cheeks and the way her teeth dig into the soft coral of her bottom lip.

  She looks nervous.

  That gives me pause. I don’t mind a woman meeting me cold or shy or overly eager, I don’t even mind a case of the first date jitters—since first dates are pretty much all I go on, I see a lot of those.

  But nervous—truly nervous—that bothers me a little. Do I make her feel unsafe? Is it my size? My job?

  In a split second, I change gears. I can be patient when it comes to the Kelly Trio, and I find that the idea of wooing my nervous little librarian on date after date doesn’t sound tiresome at all...it sounds delightful, actually. A challenge. A test to see if I’m worthy enough to remove all traces of trepidation from her face and fill her expression with eagerness and surrender instead.

  And get more time with this fierce, sweet bookworm all to myself.

  I lean in to kiss her cheek, careful to angle our bodies so that I don’t press against her with six feet, two hundred pounds of hungry cop. Instead, I anchor her with a firm hand at her elbow, pleased to feel the goose bumps that spread underneath my touch. And then I brush my lips against her cheek, making sure she can feel them, making sure she gets just the tiniest brush of my scruff as I accidentally-on-purpose slide my jaw against hers as I pull away.

  She shivers.

  I look down into her eyes as I straighten up, and I’m suddenly aware that I’m supporting a lot of weight in my hand, as if her knees are weak from my kiss.

  Well done, Officer Good Times!

  Her eyes are wide, the pupils so blown and her irises so dark that her eyes are just huge liquid wells of want, and I feel a familiar tug in my groin knowing that I put that look there.

  “I forget how big you are,” she murmurs, her head tilted up to look into my face.

  I give her my biggest grin and open my mouth, but she cuts me off before I can say it, shaking her head. “I know, I know. I walked right into that one.”

  But the ghost of a smile flits across her lips as I help her into her seat and push in her chair.

  When I sit across from her and we start looking at our menus, I notice the smile has vanished and the nervous look is back, along with a determined set to her shoulders. The combination of uneasiness and backbone intrigues and worries me at the same time.

  “I don’t know what Megan told you,” I say, “but I don’t bite.”

  She looks up from the menu, her teeth back to digging into the plump flesh of her bottom lip.

  “Well,” I amend, staring at her mouth, “sometimes I do bite. But only when I really, really want to.”

  The color high in her cheeks intensifies, and she angles her menu to hide her face from me. “You’re one cocky cop, I’ll give you that much.”

  I reach over and pluck the menu out of her hands so I can see her face. The blush still darkens her cheeks and—oh fuck me—her nipples have drawn into tight little furls underneath her dress. There’s a sharp pull of heat deep in my groin, my dick stirring to life as I think about what the ripe tips of her breasts would feel like on my tongue, how much they’d harden if I sucked them.

  Livia clearly has something else on her mind though. “I was looking at that!”

  I tap both menus on the table until they are lined up evenly and then put them on the edge of the table. “You’re not a vegetarian, right?”

  She looks confused. “Right.”

  “Are you from the Kansas City area originally? Raised eating Kansas City food?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’re set. This is a steakhouse, Livia. Order a steak.”

  She narrows her eyes at me. “You’re trying to boss me around.”

  “You were trying to hide from me.”

  She sputters. “I don’t hide. I’m not a hider. I’m very confident and outspoken, and I’m never shy—”

  Her cheeks keep reddening as she talks, her fingers twisting in the tablecloth, and I lean back in my chair and study her.

  “—and just...you flustered me, is all, and I wanted some space to think without you being so...so...you know.” She gestures helplessly at me.

  Uh. What does that mean?

  “I’m so...what?” I ask cautiously. I’m back to being worried that she feels unsafe around me.

  “Well, I can’t say it,” she whispers furiously.

  I keep my posture casual and my voice calm, speaking in my easiest, most non-threatening voice. “Livia, I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable or unsafe with me. I understand that it’s not enough for you to know my sister or know that I’m a police officer, so I’m going to give you a promise and I hope that my words are enough. This is just dinner. If you don’t like me or it, or anything, you can walk out that door and I promise I won’t follow you or try to contact you again. If you do like it—and me, which I hope you will—then it can still be just dinner, and we can try it again another time. But I won’t pressure you, or try to wheedle you into something you don’t want to do. I want you to have a safe and fun evening, however that looks for you.”

  She stares at me, chewing on her lip. “And what do you want to have, Chase?”

  What do I want to have? I want to have this librarian with her legs around my waist while I drive deep into her; I want to bury my face in her neck as I fill a condom; I want to taste her cunt and leave stubble-burn on the insides of her thighs.

  But I don’t know if telling her that will make her less skittish. In fact, probably not. Especially because she’s now staring hard at me, as if this is some kind of test.

  “I can’t promise commitment,” I finally say, a little reluctantly. I never have to have this talk with the badge bunnies, and I’m a little out of practice. “If that’s why you’re asking me. But I can promise that I’ll be a perfect gentleman until you ask me not to be.”

  “And then what will you be?” she asks in a low voice.

  I lean forward, letting my eyes burn and my voice edge into a growl. “Greedy.”

  Her breath catches. There’s a moment when the noise around us seems to fade away, when the gentle lights of the restaurant cover us in a soft glow, and she seems to bloom open. Her eyelashes flutter and her body curves toward me.

&n
bsp; “I think I’d like to see you greedy,” she says, her tongue running along her bottom lip.

  I feel her words everywhere: my bones, my skin, my throbbing erection.

  “Your wish is my command, kitten.” I lean forward over the table, my eyes hot on her sweet face. “Are you wearing a bra tonight?”

  She licks her lips again, her breathing now quick and shallow. “No,” she admits in a whisper. “The dress has a low back, and I…” She trails off, looking at me with something between helplessness and defiance. It makes my cock harder than it already is.

  “Panties?”

  I can see the pulse hammering in her neck now. She gives me a quick jerk of her head from side to side.

  No panties.

  I’m fully hard now, imagining her soft cunt exposed to the air so close to me, imagining it growing wet and needy as we sit here.

  “Would you like to show me?” I ask.

  There’s a sharp intake of breath from her, her lips wet and parted, her large eyes blinking fast. “Show...you…?” she repeats slowly, as if she isn’t sure she heard me correctly.

  “Yes, Livia. Would you like to show me what your cunt looks like?”

  The flush is now creeping up her neck, and she takes a small drink of water, as if to buy herself time. But when her eyes meet mine again, I can tell her hesitation isn’t because she doesn’t want to show me.

  It’s because she does.

  “If I...wanted to...how would I show you?” she asks, the faintest quiver in her lower lip.

  God, I still can’t fucking breathe. She’s so much right now, so quivery and so big-eyed and so flushed. Her nipples are still so hard—what must be achingly hard—through her dress, and she keeps smoothing this one curl over and over again around her finger. All I want to do is dive under this table and press my face between her legs, tongue her until she can’t remember the difference between a filet mignon and a Kansas City Strip, between rare and well-done.

  “Well,” I say, once I can remember how to speak again, “you’d spread your legs under the table. I’d pretend to drop something. And then I’d duck under the tablecloth and see if you’re telling me the truth about wearing panties.”