Victoria Dahl - Flirting with Disaster

“Tell me why you don’t want kids.”

That shut him up, and Isabelle was free to watch him work for the next five minutes until he left with a warning about locking the door. And with no goodbye kiss.

But that was okay. She could wait. He’d give in before long. And in the meantime, she could fantasize about exactly how it would happen.

* * *

DAMN. TOM WAS in deep trouble. He hadn’t meant to kiss her. It would’ve been a bad idea even without the extra complication that he was looking into her on the side. He had Veronica Chandler to protect, and he couldn’t mess around with Isabelle when he was on duty.

More than that was the trouble of Isabelle herself. Tom had been thirty-one before he’d realized he couldn’t trust himself with women. Not because he had a roaming eye or a callous heart or a cruel streak, but because he didn’t. He’d been a sucker for the damsel in distress. The soft girl who couldn’t quite figure life out. He’d been smart enough not to fall for any hard cases, but that had only made it worse. When a girl was hot and helpless and nice, it was really hard to break things off when you finally realized you needed to.

Isabelle wasn’t like that, of course. He’d finally aged out of those immature attractions. Isabelle was capable and tough and smart as hell. But she was still in some sort of trouble. He couldn’t add sex to the mix, especially when he could tell just how good it was going to be. He couldn’t do that when he was still checking into her past.

“Damn it,” he growled as he drove carefully down her snow-packed driveway and eased onto the road.

All he wanted to do was turn around, bang on her door and spend the next few hours in her bed. But he couldn’t.

Despite his misgivings, he might not have had the willpower to make it out of there, but then she’d said she liked his honesty. When the only reason he’d asked her to stay close in her house was so he could probe her about her past.

He should drop it, but he couldn’t. What if she was in danger? Worse yet, what if she was a criminal and he didn’t do his job because he would rather have sex with her?

He shook his head. Dropping it wasn’t an option. He couldn’t ignore his gut at this point. The most he could do was keep his suspicions quiet until he found out the truth.

You didn’t just ignore trouble. He’d learned that the hard way at a young age. Those were the kind of lessons you got when your older brother was a drug addict. When the choice came down to honesty or tricking someone into getting help, you dropped honesty every time.

If Isabelle needed help, she’d never admit it. And if she’d done something wrong, he couldn’t ignore it.

Simple enough, but he felt like biting someone’s head off by the time he got out of the car and stalked toward the judge’s house. He wanted to slam the door open and yell at everyone in sight, but it wasn’t his home, and his people hadn’t done anything wrong.

Mary was waiting for him as soon as he hit the basement stairs. “Did you really approve this night out for Veronica?” she snapped.

“Yes.”

“Why?” Her tone suggested he’d lost his mind, and she was about to help him find it.

“Veronica didn’t have to come here. We can’t keep her prisoner. And it’s not like she wants to go to the state fair. It’s a private residence within shouting distance of our base. It shouldn’t be difficult.”

Mary was about to argue with him. He could see that as clearly as if she’d said it, but eventually she closed her mouth and nodded. “Okay. Fine. Who are you sending over?”

“You.”

“Me?” she screeched.

“I’m going, too.”

“What the hell, Tom? We’ve got twelve additional people here now, and this is a job for a first-year deputy.”

He couldn’t tell her that the real reason was that he wanted to spy on Isabelle. He also couldn’t tell Mary that he wanted her to meet Jill. She’d dig in her heels and tell him to mind his own business. She was always telling him to mind his own business; he never did. “Those guys need all their attention on the courthouse. We know how to pace ourselves. You can sleep in the next day if you need to.”

“I don’t need to sleep in!” she growled before stomping up the stairs. That was the end of the discussion. Good.

They’d debriefed in the meeting room after court had adjourned, but that didn’t mean there weren’t twenty emails waiting for him. So far there’d been no activity at the judge’s place, and Stevenson hadn’t been spotted in Jackson or Boise or anywhere in between.

Tom wrote an update for his chief, laying out his plan to feed only the smallest bits of information to the press so as not to inspire any of the defendant’s sympathizers. Then he sent an email to his team with a few more specifics about tomorrow’s detail, requested an expedited review of the letter from the consulting psychiatrist and was finally ready to turn in at eleven.

But he had something else to look into.

He’d considered taking a long-range photo of Isabelle and feeding it into a reverse image search, but if she’d kept a low profile for the past fourteen years, it probably wouldn’t pan out. No point stepping that far over the line into invading her privacy. He’d also considered that he could’ve lifted some small piece of garbage from her trash to get her fingerprints, but that felt even more wrong. He really wanted to leave a moral pathway open to sleeping with her.

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