Page 18 of Christmas Eve Cowboy

His big hand was just under her firm little breast, feeling the increasing acceleration of her heartbeat. He felt her fingers tangling in his thick hair. He’d never thought that his hair was sensitive to touch, but pleasure pulsed through him like a shot of rum when she did that. His breath caught and he lifted his head.

She looked into his dark, curious eyes, trying to make her mind work. “French fries,” she murmured as her eyes lowered to his firm, chiseled mouth.

“French fries?”

She nodded. “You can’t eat just one.”

He chuckled softly. “When you get my age, you can,” he teased.

She made a face. “Spoilsport.”

He shifted her a little closer and bent to her mouth again. He loved the way she curled into him, the uninhibited way she responded to him. She wasn’t coy or teasing. She loved what he was doing to her, and it showed.

“Sometimes honesty can cause problems,” he murmured against her soft mouth.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

He studied her face. Flushed cheeks, swollen mouth, sleepy, hungry eyes. “Everything you feel is right there on your face, honey. You couldn’t hide it if you tried.”

She laughed softly and sighed. “Why bother?” she wanted to know. “You told me you had to study body language. Was it when you went through the Academy?”

“I studied a lot of things,” he agreed. He smoothed back her disheveled blond hair. “But I learned body language doing interrogation.”

“Can you really tell if somebody’s thinking about committing a crime by the way they sit or stand?”

His dark eyes twinkled. “Depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“If they’re holding a gun at the time.”

She laughed. Her eyes sparkled. “I like to watch TV shows about real police work.”

He traced her straight little nose. “They can’t show you most of real police work,” he murmured. “It’s not clean enough for family viewing.”

“I worked in the emergency room for six months while I was training,” she said. “It was pretty rough.”

He nodded. “Pretty messy, too. I’ve been in firefights.” He chuckled. “When I was a rookie cop, we had a call about a gang shooting. Two cars of us went screeching up to the scene of the crime. No people around anywhere, and one of the others heard a noise that he thought was an automatic being cocked. He started shooting.”

“Was it a gun?”

“It was a washing machine switching cycles in a nearby apartment with the window open,” he continued. “He killed the car that belonged to the family with the washing machine.”

“Ouch!” she said.

“The department had to buy the family a new car. And theirs was a really new car that the rookie killed. Expensively new.”

“What did they do to the policeman?”

“He went back to his former profession.”

“Which was . . . ?”

“Selling car insurance.”

She almost doubled up laughing. “We get all kinds who think they’re perfect for police work, but it takes a special mindset.”

“And guts,” she added quietly. She studied his face. There were lines there that a man of thirty-six shouldn’t have. She drew her fingers down his hard cheek. “We had a policeman from Catelow shot late one afternoon. He stopped a speeding car, and it was driven by a man who was running from a murder charge. He shot the officer through the stomach.” She curled closer to him and rested her cheek against his chest. “It took him several days to die. His wife said she’d lived with the fear of his being killed their whole married lives. She was in her sixties, and they’d been married for thirty-five years. He was about to retire, but he never made it.” She drew in a long breath, inhaling a spicy, sexy cologne that clung to his warm skin. “She said a lot of women couldn’t live with that day-to-day fear, which was why the divorce rate was so high in her husband’s department. She was a sweet lady. I felt so sorry for her.”

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