His square jaw jutted out. “You stole my job, damn you.” His voice was hard and low.
Karen straightened. This was the heart of the problem. She knew she had to meet his accusation head-on. The best defence was the truth—at least as much of it as she was at liberty to share with him. “I got this job fair and square, Lieutenant. I didn’t even know there was a Tyler man who expected to get this position until after I’d accepted it. I felt a twinge of regret for your misfortune, but not enough to toss away my own career.” She met his eyes boldly. “In my position, what would you have done?”
Brick did not look away, but his voice was stripped of most of his earlier anger when he finally answered, “I would have come to Tyler.”
Karen nodded, then pressed on to her next point. “When I tossed you over that fence, Lieutenant, I was acting on pure instinct. It was dark, I was alone, and I’d been listening to a large man’s footsteps moving faster and faster. He seemed to be chasing me. I didn’t know a soul in town, so I knew he couldn’t be a friend. When he grabbed me before I could reach the house, I defended myself the way I’ve been trained.” She shivered as an old memory stabbed her. “That maneuver once saved my life, Bauer. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday it saves my life again.”
He grabbed a tissue from the sink and patted the blood on his chin, but his eyes were still on Karen.
“I’m sorry it had to be you. I’m sorry everybody had to be there to see it. But I couldn’t undo it, and I couldn’t risk looking weak by fussing over you. Even a simple apology was risky. Considering your response to the situation, you wouldn’t have listened if I’d gotten down on my knees. You were far too concerned with your own reputation to give a plugged nickel for mine.”
Brick tossed the bloody tissue into the wastebasket and readjusted his towel one more time. It was a big towel, but it seemed to be causing him a great deal of trouble. It didn’t seem to cover quite as much of him as it had before.
“As to our first encounter in the squad room, you openly defied me within my first hour on the job. If you’d expressed your opinions privately, I could have heard you out, even if I disagreed. I might even have been able to compromise. But under the circumstances, the need to establish my authority outweighed my concern for your personal feelings.” This issue went beyond her pride and position. The safety of her men was on the line. “Someday we’re going to have a police crisis on our hands, Bauer. I’ll have to bark out orders. If the men waffle—if they ignore me and look to you—it could be a disaster. It could cost lives.”
She took a step forward then, so close that she could almost touch his powerful chest. Suddenly Karen realized that she wasn’t wearing a thing beneath her bright pink bathrobe, and every female inch of her was aware of it. “Lieutenant, I don’t doubt that you could do my job admirably. Nobody in Tyler doubts it, either. But at this moment in space and time, I have authority over you. That’s not good or bad, fair or rotten. It’s just the way it is. Cops have to accept bad luck all the time.”
“Cops don’t have to accept orders from women.”
She stared at him for a full minute, then said coldly, “The cops in Tyler do.”
Brick swore under his breath. His gaze swiveled to the wall.
“It would help us all if you could just think of me as a fellow officer instead of a woman. On the job, we all have to be sexless.”
His head jerked up. “Do we have to be sexless in our private bathroom, too?”
To Karen’s surprise, a slow blush flamed along her neck. She felt her cheeks go hot.
She could have admitted that she was acutely aware that he was a man—a naked man—and she was a naked woman in her bathrobe. But somehow it didn’t fit into their conversation. Her purpose had been to break the ice as fellow officers, not to open up new vistas of trouble.
“I didn’t mean to invade your privacy, Lieutenant,” she managed to utter.
“Well, you did! I don’t generally shave or shower with a woman unless I’ve specifically invited her to spend the night.”
Karen’s cheeks grew hotter as she fought a sudden vision of this powerful hunk of manhood with a woman in his arms...a woman with her face. Desperately she wished she’d started this conversation when they were both in uniform. She was accustomed to dealing with half-dressed men, but they never affected her the way this one did.
A terrible voice within her warned, Face it, Karen, this man alerts your female instincts even when he’s fully dressed. She was reasonably safe when he was angry. She knew that trouble lay ahead now that he’d calmed down.
“Obviously your sexual habits do not apply to our unique domestic arrangement, Lieutenant,” she declared crisply, sorely regretting the fact that they never would. “I am far more concerned with our situation at the station house. Have we cleared up any...misunderstandings?”
Brick eyed her carefully; she had the feeling it was a struggle for him to keep his gaze on her face. Did he realize that she was also bare beneath her robe?
Suddenly Karen felt hot and foolish. Utterly unarmed. To her astonishment, her nipples peaked, and she prayed that the thick pink fabric would conceal the hint of surrender from his view.
“Captain, I’m not sure if we’ve straightened anything out,” Brick said carefully, “but I have to admit that I’m not as mad as I was before. I thought you had it in for me. I didn’t realize that you were simply...scared.”
“Scared?” The word came out in a squeak. Surely he didn’t sense that he’d unwittingly aroused her!
“You’re scared to death you can’t do this job. You’re afraid the men will never obey you.”
The truth hurt more than Karen had ever expected it to. Worse yet was her terror that if Brick Bauer knew the truth, the rest of the men might know it, too.
“Bauer, I’d have to be run over by a locomotive to step down from this job,” she told him fiercely. It was the naked truth.
Slowly, he nodded. Karen thought she saw a glimmer of respect in his eyes.
“I didn’t say you were a quitter, Captain. I just said you were scared to death to be swimming upstream.”
“I’ll do what I came here to do, Bauer. With or without you.” And I won’t yield to these sexual feelings, not now, not ever.
This time he shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ll tell you this, Captain. If you need me to shore you up, you’re not fit to command.”
“I don’t need you for anything, Bauer,” she insisted, desperately hoping that it was true.
And then he smiled, that lazy dimpled smile that had touched her so profoundly once before. “That remains to be seen, Captain. But I’ll make you a promise. I’m going to do my job the way I would if any other outsider was brought in here to run my station. I won’t go out of my way to keep you afloat, but I won’t stab you in the back, either.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant. I can’t expect any more than that.”
“You can’t expect any less, either,” he answered resolutely. “I’m not doing it for you, Captain. I owe it to the badge.”
There didn’t seem to be anything left to say after that. But as Brick took a step toward the door, Karen heard him chuckle.
“Lieutenant,” she demanded tartly, certain he was laughing at her expense, “you want to let me in on the joke?”
He laughed out loud, really beside himself now. “Do you do jokes, Captain? I wouldn’t think there was a place for them in the manual.”