Capturing the Cop. Michele Dunaway

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СКАЧАТЬ Mr. B. Right at 4 M. Drives.”

      A movement outside on the sidewalk caught Chrissy’s attention, and she paused for a moment. “Whoa! I don’t believe it. That’s really him. Too bad nature’s calling. But you’re about to get lucky. See that guy out there?”

      Olivia glanced out the Monitor’s large storefront window. She saw the subject of Chrissy’s focus immediately.

      The man standing just outside the glass doorway was gorgeous. Under the dark blue T-shirt he wore, well-toned muscles rippled and the golden hair dusting his arms glistened in that late-afternoon sunlight. He stood at least six foot three, and even his faded red Cardinals baseball cap added to his allure.

      Olivia swallowed. What would it be like to touch a man like that? Unlike Chrissy, who had more skeletons in her closet than were in a graveyard, Olivia had never been bad enough to know. Her wimpy ex-fiancés had been physically small men whose presence wouldn’t intimidate a flea.

      She fisted her hands, then stretched her fingers one by one in order to relax. The man seemed familiar, but Olivia couldn’t place him. “Chrissy,” she hissed as the man began to pull open the door to the office. “What are you talking about? You know him?”

      “The calendar in the file drawer. He’s one of the ‘months.’ Oh, too bad it’s against the rules to get his autograph or hang it up.” Chrissy paused for one last peek before hurrying away.

      Whoever the man was, he was now inside the office, and Olivia couldn’t help but gape as he approached the service counter.

      Never had a man so filled the room with his presence. His dark blue Levi’s fit tightly and he wore boots. Olivia stood rooted to the floor as he approached, her only movements those of her fingers as they twisted the strand of cultured pearls her father had given her for her twenty-fifth birthday. Brad Pitt, Dennis Quaid and Robert Redford combined wouldn’t hold a candle to the Adonis before her. He must have come to place an ad, Olivia decided as she regrouped. Maybe he was selling his truck or something—although the Mound City Monitor really didn’t handle many of those kind of classified ads.

      Yes, Olivia fantasized, he would be the type to own a big truck.

      He was wearing Levi’s and boots and Olivia could picture him riding on the range, roping some cattle, coming home to his woman and making love to her on soft flannel sheets in front of the fire. He was the stuff of romance novels, the ultimate lover—which meant not her type. Besides, how could she handle a man like him? She wasn’t even bad enough to find something bad to do. After leaving work and playing hooky, the only “bad” thing she could think of to do was shopping. Her one last ditch attempt at badness before heading home to a freezer full of microwavable dinners and bad television shows had been to visit Chrissy. All in all, not a great start at becoming a bad girl.

      “I need to place a personal ad.”

      His warm baritone voice jerked Olivia into the present and her gaze connected with his. Since only a forty-inch counter and some Plexiglas stood between them, she could see that his eyes were a mesmerizing shade of blue.

      Olivia had never understood what people meant when they said “time stood still,” but at this moment she swore it was happening. Her heart seemed frozen, although she could feel it beating and could hear it pounding in her ears.

      “A personal ad,” he repeated, obviously irritated at her incompetence.

      He drummed his fingers on the counter, the staccato sound forcing Olivia to regain her senses.

      “Yes, of course. I’d be happy to help,” she somehow managed to say. She couldn’t have anyone complaining to the bosses about Chrissy.

      “This is the ad I wish to run.” He slid a wadded piece of paper into the metal channel and underneath the Plexiglas. “Can you take care of it?”

      If she were a bad girl, she’d take care of him in any way he needed. Be a bad girl, something unfamiliar inside her whispered.

      She smoothed out the paper and turned her attention to reading his ad. She glanced up sharply. “You need a date?”

      His blue eyes gleamed, and she swallowed. Just the power of his look held her attention. “I apologize. That was quite unprofessional of me.”

      He didn’t agree or disagree; he just watched her. Years of PR training came in handy as she hid her trembling and presented a poised appearance. She reached for an advertising form and a pen.

      “So. How long do you want your ad to run? Our best value, which I suggest, is five days at five dollars a day. If not you can—”

      He cut her off. “That’s fine.”

      Olivia’s forehead wrinkled and her headband itched. Something wasn’t right in Mound City. Her extensive PR experience had also taught her a lot about body language.

      For someone placing a personal ad, the man standing in front of her wasn’t keen on the idea.

      He came across like a man sitting in a dentist’s chair, waiting for a tooth extraction. But whatever his problem, she had an ad to sell. “We have three retrieval services, depending on what type of response you’d like,” she said, warming to her sales pitch. She and Chrissy had held a contest to see who could say it faster. “You can place a voice-mail ad, meaning the person calls a special phone number and presses your mailbox number. You receive a code to retrieve the messages. For an additional fee, we can set up a temporary e-mail account for you, meaning we act as your firewall. You can also go with the traditional snail-mail option, which—”

      “Which one gets this over with the fastest?”

      His blunt query had Olivia losing her train of thought and flubbing her sales spiel. “The phone messages,” she said as she recovered. “The people interested in you dial a nine-hundred number—you retrieve the messages using an eight-hundred number.”

      “Fine,” he said with a curt nod that caused a lock of blond hair to fall into his face. “That’s what I want for the shortest period you offer.”

      “One week.”

      He didn’t smile. “Perfect.”

      She pushed the contract under the glass. “I’ll need your contact information. If you could please fill this out…”

      As he put pen to paper, Olivia couldn’t help but watch him, observing the way his muscles flexed even when he did something so simple as write. He’d barely finished printing his first name in the required block letters when he glanced up at her.

      “Is something wrong?”

      “Yes,” Olivia said, the words escaping her lips before she could even think to stop them. “Why does a gorgeous man like you need to place an ad?”

      His blond eyebrows arched. “For the same reason a grown-up woman like you dresses like a Catholic schoolgirl.”

      “Fashion,” Olivia retorted.

      His unexpectedly wide smile undid her. It crooked into two dimples, lighting up his whole face. She gripped the countertop.

      “No, the obvious,” he said. “Because like everyone else who places these personal ads, I need a СКАЧАТЬ