Silence.
“Hello?” Dee frowned and slipped the pen into the pocket of her lab coat. “Is someone there?” she asked.
Nothing…until the distinct sound of a horn shattered the silence. She’d recalled a similar sound, but it only teased the fringes of her memory bank. A foghorn? she wondered, seconds before her heart slammed painfully into her ribs.
She pressed her hand over her exposed ear, shutting out the steady hum of the office machinery, listening as closely and carefully as possible for anything she might recognize—a sound, a voice, another blare of the foghorn. All she heard was the painful thud of her own heart and her blood racing through her veins as her endorphin levels skyrocketed.
Frantically she calculated the weeks since she’d last heard from her brother.
The foghorn sounded again, breaking the silence.
“Hello? Is someone there?” she asked again, unable to squelch the desperation from filtering into her voice. She knew it was Jared. Her pounding heart told her it was her brother.
She spun around to search the days on the big ninety-day calendar hanging on the far wall. It’d been late June, a little over eight weeks since the phone call with no one on the other end had woken her in the dead of night.
“Jared? Oh my God. Are you all right? Let me help—”
The line went dead. Dee let out a string of curses that would have had an entire ship of sailors blushing crimson if they’d heard her. She hung up the phone with a snap and balled her hands into fists. God, she wanted to scream from the frustration of it all.
She made a mental note to mark the day on the small calendar she kept in the drawer of her nightstand. A small red check mark next to the date as a reminder of the last time her brother had let her know he was still alive.
And still running for his life.
“YOU WANT ME TO TEACH WHAT?”
Chase glared when the defensive line coach, Charlie Harrison, snickered. “Senior sex,” Harrison blurted, then slapped his hand on the conference table and guffawed with the rest of the Cougar coaching staff.
Chase carefully set his pen on the table next to the yellow pad he’d been doodling on for the past hour. “No way,” he said, leaning back in the hard plastic chair, shifting his attention to the principal, Aaron Johnson. “Criminal justice and phys ed are all I’m qualified to teach. No way am I taking on a bunch of hormonal teenagers and talking about sex for forty-five minutes every day.”
The principal shot the coaches a look bordering on full-blown irritation. They’d been in the meeting for nearly an hour going over additional assignments. Chase being the new guy had definitely drawn the shortest, dirtiest straw. He knew a raw deal when he saw one and he’d just been dished up one hell of a stinker.
“We prefer Senior Health Issues, Mr. Bracken,” Principal Johnson said. His thick southern accent dripped with impatience that equaled the contempt for the coaching staff in his murky brown eyes. “Budget cutbacks have forced our faculty to double up their classload. It’s unfortunate that it extends to the coaching staff as well, but unless you want to see the football program completely shut down, then might I suggest you—”
“Bone up on sex,” Charlie Harrison interrupted.
“It won’t be so bad, Chase,” Walter Tompkins, the Cougars’ head coach told him, unsuccessfully hiding his grin at Charlie’s bad pun. “If it’s the only way we can afford to maintain our extracurricular programs without shortchanging the students, then we’ll just have to deal with it.”
“We all have to do it, Chase,” the offensive line coach, Sean Crawford added. “Consider yourself lucky. At least you didn’t get stuck with Home Ec.”
“Family and Consumer Studies, Mr. Crawford,” Johnson corrected.
“Yeah. Whatever.” Crawford rolled his eyes. “Look, Cole Harbor lives, eats and breathes football. They’d string up old Johnson here, along with the rest of the school board, in a hillbilly heartbeat if they dared cut the football program.”
“Damn straight,” added Coach Tompkins in his own thick southern drawl. He shot a threatening glance in the principal’s direction. “And I’d supply the rope.”
Johnson nervously shifted his attention to the schedule in front of him and wisely remained silent.
Chase glanced down at the class description then back at Johnson. “What do I know about Senior Health Issues?” he argued, not willing to give in to Johnson’s demands so readily. He knew two things and he knew them well—criminal justice and sports, primarily football. Even though he held a degree in criminal justice and a chipped hipbone from a bad hit to back up both claims, he still didn’t want to think about the strings the Bureau had pulled to land him this current undercover gig. No one, not even Johnson, knew Chase’s true identity or that teaching and coaching were the last items that should be listed on his curriculum vitae.
He couldn’t care less about the sexual habits of a bunch of oversexed teenagers. What he wanted to know was where in the hell Jared Romine was hiding.
His gut told him Dee Romine had the answer to that burning question, while his record-setting rise in testosterone levels told him the chances of him playing it out hard and fast to get that answer was good. Too good, he thought shifting uncomfortably in his chair. He knew without a doubt he’d definitely enjoy bending more than a few rules if it had the pretty lady doctor talking nice to him.
“You might want to contact Dr. Romine from the clinic,” Johnson continued, as if completely oblivious to Chase’s objections. “She’s come to speak to classes in the past about things like safe sex, condom application and other methods of birth control. All under proper parental consent of course.”
“Who?” he asked carefully, not certain he’d heard the principal correctly.
“Dr. Romine,” Johnson reiterated, then cleared his throat before looking at Chase, carefully avoiding the constant glare from the head coach. “Dr. Romine was extremely instrumental in the development of the curriculum two years ago. Mrs. Billings taught the class prior to her retirement and you’ll be our replacement.”
A grin tugged Chase’s lips. God, could this assignment get any easier? What could be more interesting than talking sex with Dee? Nothing, in his opinion, so long as she ended up telling him what he wanted to know about her brother.
He picked up the pen and wrote Dee’s name on the yellow pad, underlining it twice. Maybe teaching a course in Senior Health Issues wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all…especially if it gave him an excuse to get in closer contact with his prey.
Crawford elbowed Harrison in the ribs. “Uh-oh,” Crawford said, his voice laced with humor. “Looks like Bracken’s met the delectable Dr. Romine.”
Chase set the pen aside. “I’ve had the pleasure,” he answered carefully. Something in his chest tightened. Certainly not jealously for a lady he hardly knew. So why then did he have the sudden urge to give ol’ Charlie a poke in his large bulbous nose?
A wide grin split Charlie Harrison’s weathered face. Chase ground his teeth.
“You asked her out yet?” Harrison asked.
“What makes you think I’m interested?”
“Ain’t a man with a pulse in Cole Harbor who hasn’t been interested,” Harrison countered.
Forget the poke. A black eye would make him feel a whole lot better.
“Or shot down,” Crawford added.
That bit of knowledge gave Chase a surge of pleasure he didn’t dare examine too closely.
“Oh, yeah?” he mused unwisely, giving in to his overgrown