For a moment, Ben thought he might have talked his way out of this fiasco. They might have gone for it, but then the mayor spoke.
“Oh, we’re here now,” the man said. “Let’s just do it. I haven’t gotten to see a practice session, and Jill’s the one who insisted on being the dummy. No pun intended.” He laughed at his own joke.
Ben liked the shape of Jill’s face, but he’d overlooked the strength of her jaw until he saw her eyes narrow and jaw clench. There was no love lost between her and the mayor. Ben was curious, but he didn’t have a chance to do more than wonder.
“Let’s do it.” Jill yanked the suit out of his hands.
Ben grudgingly lowered the tailgate of the Blazer so she could lean against it to tug on the equipment.
Czar looked up but didn’t move.
The actual dressing took a good ten minutes with Jill’s constant inquiry about what went where and why things were the way they were. She reminded Ben of his nephew. Only she smelled better. A lot better. There was the smell of fresh air in her hair and a light perfume laced with citrus.
Before rolling up the extra-long sleeves, she made them flap in the air. “Are you sure these don’t tie around the back until the guys in the white suits show up?”
“We all know you’re crazy, Jill. Just look where you work,” Mosely said, pulling a telephoto lens from the camera pack around his waist. He was a tall, lanky man who seemed to move even while standing still. His hair was cropped close to his head and a small gold hoop glittered in the lobe of his left ear.
“Too true, dear. Too true.” She used the endearment casually, but Ben noticed a gold band on Mosely’s ring finger and none on hers.
She put on the heavily padded gloves then turned to face Ben. “Is there a helmet?”
He dug it out of the bag. When he was squarely in front of her, close enough to smell the mint flavor on her breath, he gave her his most serious, I-mean-business look. “Don’t move.”
“I’m not,” she replied, giving him a look that seemed to hold a slightly flirtatious challenge. Ben felt a familiar tingle surf across his nerve endings; it happened sometimes when he was involved in a dangerous situation. He called it his sixth sense, his early-warning alert.
“When he gets you down, don’t move.”
Her lips quivered as if they were going to break into a smile, but she managed to resist and gave him an equally serious look. “Okay.” She made it sound like two words.
He stifled a sigh, knowing it was useless to try to explain to someone who has never been tackled by an eighty-five pound missile with teeth just how scary an experience it is.
As he fastened the last of the buckles, he noticed how still she was when his hands were touching her. She seemed to stop breathing. He wondered if she was intimidated by him or reacting to him as a man. He hoped the former; he had no room in his life at the moment for a romantic interest, even one as interesting as the inimitable Jill Martin.
“Okay.” He put his hands on either side of her padded shoulders and turned her around to face the wide-open expanse of green. Part of what Ben liked most about Bullion was its clean, well-tended parks. So far, unmarred by graffiti and drug transactions.
“Run straight out. No fancy stuff. Don’t look back and don’t resist when he grabs you. Don’t fight. Don’t move. You got it?”
Her murmured affirmation was barely audible through the mask. He gave her a gentle shove, and she stumbled forward, getting used to the feel of the cumbersome gear. Ben often played the bite dummy because he felt comfortable working with the dogs in the training situation, where, unfortunately, most injuries occurred. Roll the wrong way and a dog’s muscle could tear or discs become compromised.
He wasn’t worried about Czar’s well-being this time. Even if Jill Martin lost her head and put up a fight, she didn’t have the upper-body strength to toss Czar. She might roll on him, but Czar was faster than most dogs.
Resembling a mummy, she toddled away in plodding steps. Ben almost smiled. Almost. After taking a deep breath, he ordered Czar to his side. He checked to be sure there were no innocent bystanders who might distract Czar or try to get into the picture. Mosely was perched in the wooden jungle gym not far from where Jill was trotting about. The mayor and Sergeant Simms waited off to one side, out of the line of contact.
“Czar,” Ben said, his heart speeding up. He pointed in Jill’s direction and gave the command. “Forward.”
Czar sprang forward like a panther on the loose. He barely worked up to full stride before he was on her. Ben was running by then, too. For some reason his heart was beating out of sync and his throat was too tight to swallow.
His gaze was glued to the scene, and he didn’t like what he was seeing. Czar had her down and wouldn’t release. As soon as he’d start to back off, she would move, then he’d pounce again. Why is she moving? Was she dazed by the fall?
By the time Ben reached her, Jill was curled into a defensive ball, still enough to have been dead. Barking, Czar circled her, the hair on his back honed to a razor’s edge. Ben snapped his fingers and the dog relaxed his guard, running to his master’s side.
“Good boy,” he praised the animal for a job well done. The exercise was textbook—except for the choice of dummy; if she was hurt, it was her own fault for moving. Don’t let her be hurt.
Simms reached her before Ben could; she sat up, a bit wobbly. He knelt in front of her to remove the headgear. When it was off, she shook her head as if checking to see if it was still attached to her body.
“Wow, what a rush. My heart was going through my skull. I could hear him behind me, even with this stupid head thing on. My God, he’s unbelievable.” She looked at Czar with true awe, then glanced up at Ben.
Suddenly, he wanted to shake her. She had no business being excited by this. She should have been scared—worried about whether or not she’d wet her pants. “You moved.” He heard the accusing tone, like a little boy whose friend had broken one of his toys.
“Did I move, Jamal?”
“Like a fresh maggot.”
She made a face. “You need help, Mosely. Professional help. How does that sweet little wife of yours put up with you?”
Ben ignored the banter. He was getting madder by the second. She wasn’t taking this seriously. She was joking about something he wanted the citizens of this community to understand and respect. If she wrote as flippantly as she acted, he was screwed.
“Are you okay, Jill?” Simms extended a hand to help her rise.
“Yes, fine. Except for my tongue.” She stuck out her tongue looking cross-eyed at the deeply pink appendage. “I bit it when I fell.”
Ben had to bite his own tongue to keep from putting his foot in his mouth. This was the worst thing about the press; you couldn’t say anything without it being used against you. The police had to read a suspect his Miranda rights before they could question him. The press had no such rules governing their actions. Just journalistic ethics, which everyone knew was an oxymoron.
“It would help if you took this a bit more seriously,” Ben said, fighting to keep his anger from getting the better of his common sense.
“I am serious. My tongue hurts. Honest.” She was grinning. She didn’t look serious or penitent; she looked like a bright flower in a weed patch, and Ben wanted to reach out and pluck her.
Amos steadied her as she patted herself in a couple of spots. “I bet I hurt tomorrow. I’d better write this story while I can still move.”
Mosely joined them, tapping his camera. “Got some good ones, Jill. Looked damn scary. I wouldn’t want that dog after me.”
“Then you’d better give up that side job of yours, sweetie.” She looked at Ben and whispered theatrically, “Designer drugs. Very fashionable.”
“Ha. Ha. Very funny,” Mosely said, giving Jill a dirty look. Then he looked at Ben. “She’s kidding. She does that a lot.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
Jill seemed to pick up on the seriousness in
Ben’s tone because she faced him and said, “I take my writing seriously, Officer Jacobs. If you’re worried this will come off as a fluff piece, don’t be. I’m glad you and Czar are here. Bullion needs to play catch-up with the rest of the state’s law enforcement agencies, and I think you two will advance that cause. I plan to write about the who and the why of the program, but I want potential criminals—there are so many of them who take the paper, you know—to understand Czar is a force to be reckoned with. Are we together on this?”
Ben found himself fascinated by this side of her. She had more colors than a chameleon, and he wasn’t sure which was the true Jill Martin. For the first time in a long time, he felt interested enough to investigate.
“May I read the story before it’s released?”
“Sure…if you tie me down and torture my computer password out of me.” She grinned and wiggled her light-reddish eyebrows. “I have to warn you, though, I’ll never give it up. But it might be interesting to try.”
Mosely groaned. “A simple no would have sufficed, Jill. You always go for the theatrical. Why is that?”
“I don’t know, Jamal. I think it’s because we moved around a lot when I was a kid and I never got to be in the class play. What do you think?”
The two shuffled off toward the Blazer, bantering like a couple of good friends who knew how to kid each other. Ben watched them go and felt a strange emptiness tug at his belly. Lately, he’d been feeling that gnawing sensation quite often. At first, he’d assumed he was hungry and had stopped at fast-food restaurants, but the feeling hadn’t gone away. Nope. The emptiness was deeper and more basic. And he didn’t like it.
“Well, sir,” he said, turning to face the mayor and his commander, “I guess the rest is in her hands.”
“Damn shame she didn’t fall and break her neck,” the mayor muttered as he walked away.
Simms watched him a few seconds then spoke in a low voice, “Watch your back, son. Jill’s the least of our worries. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but nothing’s as lethal as a politician with a hidden agenda.”
Ben reached down and stroked Czar’s back. Warmed by the afternoon sun, the silky texture was comforting. In the distance, Jill Martin was sitting on the tailgate of the Blazer stripping off the protective clothing. The sun glinted off her hair, creating a halo effect. Ben snickered at the incongruent symbol. Czar would watch for the demons at Ben’s back, but who would protect him from the angels in his face?
CHAPTER TWO
NO DORRY.
Jill’s heart pounded turbulently inside her rib cage; sweat tingled under her arms. She leaned one shoulder against the cool marble wall outside the office of the County Recorder trying to make sense of this development. Ten-thirty on a Friday morning and Dorry Fishbank, Employee of the Century, wasn’t at work. And, her irritated supervisor had added, Dorry hadn’t called in sick and no one answered at her house.
Where are you, Dorry?
A trillion answers—none of them good—cascaded into Jill’s mind, courtesy of her fruitful imagination. Land Barons’s new development was worth millions—Jill knew that because Peter had been bragging about it back when they were still married. Big business didn’t like nosy reporters—especially reporters with an ax to grind—screwing around with its projects. What would stop someone from plugging leaks—particularly when the main leak was a lowly records clerk.
Jill took a deep breath to stifle her thoughts. She could practically hear her mother tsking. “The world doesn’t revolve around you alone, Jillian,” Mattie had often told her.
Just because Dorry’s taking her first day off in seventeen years doesn’t mean I’m to blame, she thought, pushing off from the wall. But as she walked down the near-empty hall, her legs felt shaky, and the gunshot snap of her pumps on the marble floor unnerved her.
Her initial impulse was to tell somebody, but whom?
Her editor, Will Ogden?
A shiver coursed through her. It didn’t take a meteorologist to figure out which way the wind was blowing inside the Bullion Sentinel. The paper was pro-growth, pro-government. Will’s effusive opinion pieces favoring the new development had swayed the public from hesitation to enthusiasm. While Jill’s truthful article on the mayor had earned her a humiliating dressing-down from Sentinel publisher Everett Davenport and landed her at the obit desk.
If anybody finds out about this investigation, I’ll probably wind up taking calls in classifieds, she thought.
Besides, there was something about Will that made her anxious to avoid scrutiny. Despite his nifty goatee and single status, Jill had once commented to Penny that she’d sooner date Stephen King—whose books scared the pants off her—than go out with Will Ogden.
Trotting down the wide marble steps to the first floor as fast as her footwear allowed, Jill considered another option.
The cops.
One, in particular, came to mind—which wasn’t surprising since he’d been hovering around the surface of her consciousness ever since their Wednesday-afternoon bite-suit escapade.
But if something had happened to scare Dorry off, Jill would call Amos Simms, not Bullion’s newest enigmatic, drop-dead-handsome cop.
“Keep your fingers on your pencil, girl,” Penny had advised when Jill had called her from work after the interview. “You need to get over Peter before you get involved with someone else.”
This decree had come after Jill mentioned how her fingers had itched to brush off Ben Jacobs’s K-9 Patrol cap to see if his ebony hair was as wavy as the one or two stray locks suggested.
“Penny, you are my oldest and truest friend—emphasis on old since you seem to have forgotten one key fact— Peter and I are divorced.”
“Pooh. We’re the same age. And you’re being obtuse. As long as you still have Peter’s physical crapola in your garage and his mental crapola in your head, you won’t be free to pursue someone else—world-class body or not. And if you were truly over Peter, you’d have told your mother about your divorce by now.”
In a way Penny was right. But Jill’s reluctance to inform her mother had less to do with love than failure. Mattie Jensen had a rule for everything. Rule Number Two: Never give up.
I gave up on my marriage, Mom.
Nope. Jill couldn’t picture herself saying those words to her mother. Fortunately, Mattie’s most recent postcard indicated she was still on a cruise in the Bahamas.
Jill put her shoulder to the revolving glass door with enough force to propel her into the bright sunlight and halfway down the sweeping approach. Blinking to refocus, she paused to dig for her sunglasses in her bulging leather backpack.
As she fretted over how to either find Dorry or confirm her disappearance, Jill tried to calm herself. “Don’t panic. Dorry’s probably just avoiding you…like everyone else.”
A deep woof—close enough to sound like cannon fire—made her jump sideways. Her sunglasses slipped out of her fingers and clattered to the tile replica of the Great Seal of California.
Ben Jacobs retrieved them in one swift, fluid motion and offered them to her in as courtly a manner as she’d ever seen. She gazed at Bullion’s newest cop in civvies. No stiff black uniform, reflective sunglasses and formal demeanor to keep her at arm’s length.
Peter would kill for those pecs, she thought, her gaze lingering on the well-defined contours emphasized by his smoke-gray turtleneck.
“Hello, again,” he said in an even, almost-friendly tone that made her still-sore tongue stick to the roof of her mouth.
Her gaze skimmed downward. Pressed denim jeans. An unadorned leather belt and cowboy boots—broken in but polished. There was something so neat and appealing about him, she almost forgot how to speak.
“Oh” was the only word her brain could come up with as she accepted the proffered eyewear.
A dog sound, sort of a cross between a growl and a whine, made her look down. If dogs could smile, this one was grinning. Jill suddenly realized that despite his reserved greeting, Ben
Jacobs’s dog was happier to see her than the man was. Low growling snatches of German and a stiff jerk on the dog’s harness said a mouthful.
“Good morning, Officer Jacobs. Hello, Czar, how are you today?”
Czar’s big cool nose checked out her fingers with intense attention to detail. The tickling sensation made her laugh. “Fancy meeting you here. A parking ticket already? Tsk. Tsk.”
Jill’s teasing words died on her lips when Ben turned to her. Since he wasn’t wearing his sunglasses, she got a good look at his eyes. Brown. Plain brown. Until a tiny twinkle of humor turned them to café mocha—a sure fix for a chocolate junky.
“Not a parking ticket. Property taxes.”
His voice revealed frustration and impatience. Jill had felt the same way after agreeing to buy Peter’s share of their home. She hadn’t known how much paperwork would be involved.
“Let me guess. Your first Supplemental Tax bill?”
“My first?” he barked.
She stepped close enough to see the mangled piece of paper he produced from the hip pocket of his jeans.
“Yup.” She recognized the print. “Been there, done that. Because of the lag time between the sale of a house and its yearly assessment, the tax collector sneaks these in to be sure the county gets its due.”
He frowned. “I thought this was taken care of through escrow.”
“I assumed my ex-husband had somehow managed to shaft me, and since he was long gone, I focused my rage on the tax collector.” She motioned toward the building behind them. “I blew in like Patton, but ended up lunching on crow.”
Jill shook her head, remembering the humiliation. “To make matters worse, they told me my mother had done the same thing twenty years earlier—only she took the tax collector to court.”
“Did she win?”
“You would have thought so. Mattie Jensen never backs down, but I guess she met her match that time.” Jill grinned. “Guess that explains why I never heard about it from her.”
Wonders Never Cease (Harlequin Super Romance) Page 3
