Cameron Kasten—Supervising Sergeant Cameron Kasten—was the star hostage negotiator for the Denver Police Department. His job was to manipulate, coerce, seduce and negotiate. And he was damn good at it. Everybody loved him. His friends, her friends, the whole darn police department. Paramedics, firefighters, district attorneys and any damn male of the species that Molly dared to date.
No one believed that he was ruining her life. He hadn’t been able to talk Molly into staying with him, so he’d talked every man since out of her life. It was creepy. Not to mention frustrating. Cameron was a giant whirlpool sucking all the sex out of her world.
Or maybe not all of it.
She thought again of Ben Lawson, of his familiar brown eyes and big hands and…oh, so much more. He would make a glorious end to this dry spell. She just had to keep Cameron as far away from Tumble Creek as possible.
“Satan, be gone,” she said to the phone as she purposefully turned it off.
Molly was back in Tumble Creek, Colorado, and she was ready to pick up just where she’d left off…with Ben Lawson naked and at her mercy.
Only this time she’d actually know what to do with him.
“CHIEF?”
Ben snapped awake from a quick doze in front of the computer. “Yeah?”
Brenda’s bangs brushed her thick eyebrows when she shook her head. “It’s 8:00 a.m. You need to go home and get some rest. You’ve got a whole twenty-four hours off.”
“Right.” He looked over the schedule for December once more before closing it. It was fairly straightforward. Winter made for slow work in Tumble Creek. No mountain biking, no rafting, and the pass to Aspen was snowed in until May. After the craziness of spring, summer and fall, it was a much-needed break.
And speaking of Aspen…Ben rubbed his eyes and glanced toward the ancient clock hanging in the hallway. Quinn Jennings had to be in his office by now. The man was obsessive when it came to his work.
A woman answered on the first ring. “Jennings Architecture.”
“Is Quinn available?”
“Good morning, Chief Lawson. Yes, he’s in. Please hold.”
Ben nodded as the phone clicked to silence. He’d tried friendly conversation with Quinn’s receptionist, but the woman was having none of it.
“Ben,” Quinn grumbled when he came on the line, absorbed as he always was in some design.
“Put the pen down and back away slowly.”
“Huh?”
Ben rolled his eyes. “I learned the last time I called not to have a conversation with you while you’re drawing. I sat in that damned hoity-toity bar until nine o’clock.”
“Right. Did I mention I was sorry about that? I honestly had no memory of the conversation.”
“That’s my point,” Ben grunted in answer. “So you never mentioned that your sister was moving back to town.”
“Oh, yeah. She seemed to make up her mind real quick about it. I only found out last week.”
“You sure about that?”
“Well, she claims to have mentioned it in September, but I’d swear she’s lying.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So is she there? Would you check on her for me? Mom’s worried.”
Ben shifted in his seat and ran a hand through his hair. “You want me to stop by her place?”
“Yeah, you know. Check out the security. Single woman with an obsessive mother.”
“She lived by herself in the big, bad city. I think she’ll be fine here.”
“Tell that to my mom. She’s convinced Molly will fire up the woodstove without opening the flue and die from smoke inhalation. Or was it carbon monoxide?”
Ben looked at the clock again. Eight-fifteen. Was she up yet? Dressed? Half-naked and heavy-eyed? “Okay, I’ll drop by.”
“Thanks.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Just a favor for a friend. “Hey, you guys must have found out what Molly does for a living by now, right?”
“Nope. All I know is she swears it’s legal.”
“So why won’t she say?” His mind began to churn through all sorts of unsavory possibilities.
“Who knows? I think she’s just stuck with the mystery of it now. It’d be damn anticlimactic to own up to being an IRS agent at this point. She’s fine and she’s healthy and I’ve finally convinced Mom to leave it at that.”
Shit. He’d already used Google to search her name and had come up with nothing. He didn’t like mysteries. Not many cops did.
Ben promised one more time to check on Molly—did she sleep in pajamas? Nothing at all?—said a quick goodbye to Quinn and grabbed his hat and coat.
Just a favor for a friend. It had nothing to do with Molly’s tight blue T-shirt or the glimpse he’d caught of her moving through her kitchen when he’d come back down the path yesterday. It had nothing to do with the wicked sparkle in her eyes when she’d smiled up at him at the store. It certainly didn’t matter that he’d spent a good part of his shift wondering if her ass was as perky as it had been ten years ago.
Damn, she’d driven him crazy that summer, always dropping by in little shorts and tank tops that he wasn’t supposed to notice on a sweet, innocent girl like Molly. So he’d forced himself not to notice. He’d known her since she was a baby. Her smooth, tanned legs didn’t exist for him. Neither did her firm breasts or round bottom. Nope. Nothing there.
And they didn’t exist now, either. She was just another citizen. A responsibility. A favor for a friend. One who was surely awake and fully dressed.
Ben had assumed his strictest police mien by the time he pulled his black SUV up to her house on Pine Road. Then he saw the car in her driveway and his jaw dropped.
His fist hit her door a little harder than he meant, but after two minutes there was still no answer. He knocked again, then made himself take a deep breath and count slowly to twenty. The door opened on nineteen.
“Tell me that is not your car.”
She hid her mouth behind a hand and yawned. “Hey, Ben.”
“You’ve got another vehicle in the garage, right?”
“The garage is full of boxes.”
“You can’t drive that up here in the winter.”
She leaned out a little to look past him toward the blue Mini Cooper. “I put snow tires on before I left Denver. It’s fine.”
“No. No, it’s not fine. First of all, I’m almost entirely certain they don’t make twelve-inch snow tires. Second, you’re going to get high-centered on the first rut of snow you drive over. Third, you will then be crushed by one of the three-hundred SUVs driven by the saner citizens of this town.”
She leaned against the door jamb and nodded sagely. “Mmm. Fascinating. Did my mother call you?”
“No, but she will call. And I don’t have the manpower to drive by your place every time it snows just to reassure her. And I definitely don’t have the manpower to rescue you from your own driveway twice a week.”
“I’ve already arranged with Love’s Garage to have it plowed.”