Suzanne Ellison - Blazing Star

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.”

“Dammit, Bauer!” she burst out. “Can’t you just—”

“Lighten up?” Again he laughed.

For no good reason, Karen started to chuckle, too. It was a brief moment of good feeling, but a shared one.

“Tell me,” she pressed. “God knows, after yesterday, I need a good laugh.”

“Forgive me, Captain,” he apologized, still smothering a fetching grin. “I was just trying to imagine if you’d be any good in a towel fight. It’s one of our favorite activities in the locker room. And then I had a sudden vision of your face if I whipped off this towel...” He stopped as a sudden flush darkened his neck.

Karen sobered, acutely aware of his gender. The look in his eyes warned her that he was acutely aware of the difference in their genders, too. “I, uh, have seen a naked man before, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah, I bet you have,” Bauer drawled in a tone so richly laced with innuendo that it would have required a reprimand if he hadn’t taken that moment to march through the door to his room.

Karen drew a deep breath of relief and ordered her sizzling body to cool down. But before she could lock the bathroom door behind him, Brick opened it a crack and tossed her his towel.

“Hang it up, would you, bunkie?” he asked with a fresh chuckle in his voice. Once more he dazzled her with his dimpled smile.

Suddenly Karen saw the rest of him—every manly inch—in her female imagination. It didn’t seem to make much difference that his body was completely hidden by the door.

BRICK MANAGED to beat Karen to the station house, but Sergeant Steve Fletcher poked his head out of the locker room and motioned him inside the moment he arrived. About Brick’s age and one of his closest friends on the force, Steve had been divorced for years and had two children. At the moment he was living with a pretty young woman in nearby Belton and trying to decide if he was ready to take the plunge again.

Steve was not alone in the locker room. Every man on the day shift was waiting for Brick, plus two guys from the night shift about to go home.

Some of them looked angry. Some of them looked shell-shocked. Orson Clayton, who was overweight and had trouble keeping his uniform buttoned, wore a pathetic frown. Brick remembered only too well Karen’s scathing comments the day before about Clayton’s appearance—delivered in front of the other men.

“You’ve gotta do something about Captain Curvaceous, Brick,” was Steve’s blunt greeting. “We’ve been talking it over, and we’re just not going to last. It’d be bad enough to take this kind of abuse from a man, even if we deserved it. But from a looker like that...”

“If I didn’t have another baby on the way, I’d quit right now,” vowed Clayton. “I’m a damn good cop, Brick. You know I’ve never shirked my duty, never run from a fight, never protested when you or Paul asked me to put in overtime. But I’ll be damned if I’ll take fashion lessons from a female!”

Each one of the men had a specific complaint to air. Some of them objected to writing meticulous reports; some objected to being told to shine their shoes. All of them objected to having to put the word Captain in front of a woman’s name. And all of them looked to Brick to make Karen vanish so everything would be the way it used to be.

Brick himself was torn. Up until this morning, he’d been quite certain that Karen Keppler was the enemy, a vicious-hearted woman who had no redeeming human features despite her tantalizing beauty. But during their latest sparring session, he’d glimpsed something in Karen he hadn’t seen before. A reason for her toughness...and a powerful longing for respect.

She wasn’t at all the cold fish he’d first expected. There was a genuine person inside that protective shell...an intelligent woman with hopes and fears and maybe even a sense of humor. Karen was determined to do her duty, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed being disliked. Brick was quite certain that his own resentment had truly wounded her.

After promising not to stab her in the back, he now felt a curious obligation to defend her from this communal onslaught. “Look, guys,” he said carefully, “we’ve got a difficult situation here. At the moment, this woman is the boss. Paul can’t help us anymore. I think our best bet is to try to play the game her way, at least until we get the lay of the land.”

“Why doesn’t somebody lay her instead?” one of the men joked.

“Well, hell, Brick’s got the best shot at it. He’s sleeping right next door to her.”

Brick battled with a sudden memory of the morning’s tango in the bathroom...Karen in her robe, he in his towel. He was rarely uneasy with women, but this morning he’d felt positively disconnected...and, to his absolute fury, he’d also felt aroused. He didn’t know what she’d been wearing underneath her robe and that magnificent black mane, but he knew it wasn’t a uniform. And he also knew, though he hated like hell to admit it, that he’d spent entirely too much time imagining what she looked like in the altogether.