“Are you trying, in your Neanderthal way, to make a point?” she asked sweetly. “If so, you’re going to have to spell it out. I’m just a silly little ol’ woman, after all.”
“Keeping in mind there’s a witness,” Waters said softly, surprising her.
Palmer frowned. But even he seemed to realize if he came right out and said what he was thinking it could boomerang on him.
“Yeah, right. Well, I don’t have to say a thing. We all know.” He slid Waters a sideways look, as if uncertain if he should include him in his generalization.
“Don’t you have some missing persons to look for?” Colin asked, knowing there had been several reports recently.
“Yeah, yeah,” Palmer muttered. Apparently deciding he was better off abandoning this particular ship, he turned and walked away, leaving them in the deserted hallway.
Darien felt a queasiness in her stomach that she fought not to show. She flicked a glance at Waters, who was watching her, his expression unreadable.
“So that’s what everybody thinks?”
“That’s what Palmer thinks,” Waters said. “I’d say you’d have to ask to find out what everybody else thinks.”
“No, thanks. I don’t care.” She took two steps, then stopped. She looked back at him. “No, maybe I do. If it’s what you think.”
He studied her for a long, silent moment. “I may not be sure why you’re here, but no, I don’t think you slept your way into this job.”
“Why?”
He seemed surprised at the question. “Almost ten years of being a cop teaches you to read people. If you’re paying attention.”
“Oh.” Then, as she realized she probably should, she said, “Thank you.”
“Don’t bother.” As if it were an afterthought he added, “Why did it matter what I thought?”
“Because it would be very hard for me to work with someone who thought I sold myself and my soul for the job,” she said bluntly.
This time she’d only gone those same two steps when he called her.
“ Wilson?”
She turned to look over her shoulder at him.
“You handled him just right.”
A slow smile curved her mouth. “Thanks.”
Those simple words warmed her much more than they should have. And she thought that she could come to like Colin Waters, even if he was the resident division hunk.
They walked past Joshua Benton’s cubicle and Waters joked that he was likely locked up in the lab with Maggie Sutter, working miracles. She laughed in agreement; she’d seen the lab, but what went on there was as incredible to her as her expertise with computers was to technophobes.
An hour later, she realized she’d been mistaken. Not about feeling she could like Colin Waters, but about the height of his hunk status. Now, in close quarters with him-she’d been given a desk in the same cubicle in the open office area-she was aware of just how much attention he got from most of the females in the entire building. They were always stopping by on some pretext or other, hand delivering a phone message, a copy of a report, anything, all of which could have been sent through normal delivery channels. She felt a faint distaste growing as the parade continued. And the fact that Waters apparently saw nothing unusual about it told her how often it happened.
She wasn’t spared herself; the close and not very subtle inspection she got from the women told her that word of her assignment as his partner had spread rapidly. She couldn’t fault their taste-Colin was a very attractive man-but their methods made her feel a little bit ashamed to be female just now. Even if she had been interested, which of course she wasn’t, she would never try those kinds of maneuvers.
They’d agreed to divide up the reports on their initial interviews, and she’d been secretly relieved not to have simply been told to do it all, being the female, the rookie, and thus the most likely secretarial material available.
Once they were done, almost simultaneously, they filed the reports and headed back out to the parking lot. She’d retrieved her car when they’d returned to the apartment to find out about the missing tape. They had just reached it when her cell phone rang.
“Hi, babe, it’s me.”
“Hi, Tony. What’s up?”
“Getting ready to leave for the Yucatán, so I wanted to check in.”
“Check out, you mean,” she teased.
“That, too,” he said cheerfully. “Everything okay, fuzz lady?”
“Just busy. Have a good trip. Send me a postcard.”
“Don’t I always?”
“Unless you forget,” she said.
“Love ya,” Tony said.
“Love you, too. Be careful.”
“Always.”
She disconnected, then slid the phone back into her coat pocket. And became aware that Waters hadn’t walked on to his own car but was still here watching her.
“Boyfriend?”
It wasn’t any of his business, really, but she found herself answering him anyway, just to see what he’d say. “No. Ex-husband.”
That got you, she thought, hiding a smile at his startled look.
“Ex?” he asked after a moment. “Didn’t sound ex to me.”
“How do you talk to yours?” She knew from office gossip that he’d been married and divorced.
“I don’t,” he said flatly.
“That’s too bad.”
She thought she’d kept her voice fairly even, but he turned on her anyway. “You think all divorces should be…what’s that stupid word, amicable?”
She shrugged. “I just know mine was. Tony and I are still good friends.”
“Friends,” he muttered, still in that sour tone.
“We were friends before we got married, and should have stayed just friends. We were too young to understand what marriage was really all about.”
“Don’t tell me you were high-school sweethearts.”
“No. I was twenty, he was twenty-one, but we were still too young. It worked at first, but after about three years he got to thinking about how he hadn’t played enough.”
“So he cheated on you?”
“Tony? Good grief no. He would never do that. I didn’t mean that kind of playing. I meant literal play. Ski, bike, climb, you name it.”
“And you didn’t?”
“I enjoyed fun as much as anyone, but I also wanted to have kids. That was the break point for him. And it’s just as well. He wasn’t mature enough to raise a child, and he knew it. I respect him for that.”
“So, Wilson, you married a playaholic?”
She ignored his sharp sarcasm, but she did wonder what kind of nerve she’d hit. “Tony is who he is. Above all he’s honest. And that saved us both a lot of pain. I’m glad he’s my friend. Besides, my parents like him and he’s good to them, and I wouldn’t want to ruin that.”
“Honest,” Waters muttered.
He lapsed into silence, which left Darien wondering why on earth that had come pouring out of her. It was true she wasn’t uncomfortable talking about Tony and her marriage, but she didn’t usually tell near strangers all that.
It was too late now to worry about, so she turned her thoughts to something else, something that had just struck her when he’d made that comment about Tony being a playaholic. He’d called her Wilson. Unlike Palmer.
…Waters and the lovely Miss Darien.
She’d noticed that most cops called each other by their last names unless they were personal friends. But they called women by their first names. She hadn’t thought much about it until Palmer had made that rude, suggestive comment. And suddenly she was seeing it as something more, some subtle symptom of a man’s world that had yet to completely accept the intrusion of females.
But Colin Waters called her by her last name, just as he did most others. That comforted her somehow.
Great, Colin thought as he rubbed at his eyes. So your new partner, besides being gorgeous enough to stop most men in their tracks, was on the kiddie track. Was friendly with her ex-husband. Kept her parents happy. The proverbial, perfect girl next door. Exactly the kind of woman I always avoid.