“You can take the car if you need it,” Wyatt said, “then come back for me. Though I don’t imagine driving is going to improve the selection.”
“Probably not,” he agreed as they exited the car. No need to drive in a town no bigger than his fist. “I’ll walk. If I’m not back by the time you’re done, give me a call.”
Before he left, Dean glanced at his watch. Five thirty. Screw it. He loosened his tie, tugged it free, and tossed it into the car, then unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt. He’d lose the jacket, too, if he didn’t have his sidearm strapped to his hip.
Wyatt did not follow suit, which didn’t surprise Dean. Wyatt would wear the whole damn FBI ensemble, head to toe, until he closed the door of his hotel room for the night.
Not Dean. Despite the hour, the heat remained monstrous, and he was ready for relief. He even found himself wondering if the no-tell motel had a pool. And if there was any chance in hell that pool didn’t contain rare, disease-causing bacteria.
Heading across the street toward the center of town, he noted the quickest way into and out of the parking lot, the access to it from the woods beyond. He estimated the distance to the sheriff’s office, and the number of intersections along the way. He might have been half joking with that serial-killer-in-a-small-town crack, but the thought had been in the back of his mind from the moment the sheriff had ID’d the victim.
The two-inch-wide strip of creamy, soft skin around the sheriff’s middle had been on his mind, too.
Ever since she’d stood and stretched her arms above her head back in her office, he’d been unable to shake Stacey Rhodes’s image from his brain. God knew the scenario had been all wrong to think about how attractive she was. Yet even the reason for his presence here hadn’t been enough to stop him from appreciating that combination of strength and softness evident in every move she made. He found the stubborn jut of her jaw as attractive as the femininity of that loose strand of hair. He’d wanted to see her handle the Glock she wore so comfortably on her hip as much as he’d wanted to taste the slight sheen of sweat shining on her throat in her hot office.
“Man, you need to get laid,” he muttered as he turned a corner and headed down the block. Going without sex since his divorce had been a bad idea. Celibacy was making women he had no business thinking about look way too good to him.
He needed the kind of woman who wouldn’t care about his last name the next morning, nor he about hers. A bar hookup was the required response for any recently divorced guy whose wife had remarried. At least, so his twice-divorced brother said.
Stacey Rhodes was no bar tramp. The prickly yet soft small-town woman probably knew not only any potential lover’s last name, but the names of his parents and grandparents, too.
Tugging his thoughts off the sheriff and back onto his job, where they belonged, he continued to scope out Hope Valley. It took ten minutes to traverse the ten or so square blocks of it. On foot. Meaning if someone were driving through and looked down to squirt ketchup on a carryout burger, they’d probably miss it.
The town had a few small restaurants-bars serving burgers, and an Internet café. But he opted for the diner. He didn’t choose the place because of its proximity to the sheriff’s office, or his curiosity about whether she ever stopped in for a bite after her shift ended. At least, that was what he told himself.
Once he stepped inside, however, his gaze shifted to the right, and his stare locked on the woman sitting at the first booth. The strawberry blond woman with the moist lips and the moist throat, and the look of almost guilty surprise on her face. And he knew that even if their hotel had been four-star, with room service, he would have come here, on the off chance that she would, too.
“Sheriff Rhodes,” he said, his voice low, for his ears only.
She heard anyway. “Special Agent Taggert.”
She’d come here on purpose. He wasn’t a profiler, didn’t do any behavioral analysis stuff. But he knew that as surely as he knew the sound of his son’s voice.
“I’ve been wondering when you’d show up,” she said, admitting as much.
Any other woman he knew would have danced around that admission all night. Or avoided making it altogether. Not this one. She was in-your-face truth and nothing but. He shouldn’t have expected anything else.
Knowing the empty seat opposite her was for him, he took it without an invitation. “If we’re going to do this, you might as well call me Dean.”
She nibbled her lip, that full lower lip that had trembled the tiniest bit earlier today when she’d first seen those pictures. “Going to do what?”
Any number of possibilities flashed across his brain, but he settled for the most basic. “Have a drink together. Work together.” Do anything else two unattached adults who are attracted to each other do together.
Suddenly realizing he’d made a huge assumption, he cast a quick glance toward her left hand. Because he had no idea whether Sheriff Rhodes was unattached or not. He’d just wanted her to be, so he hadn’t even considered the alternative.
He saw no ring. And suddenly his heart started beating again. Dean might be a lot of things, but a home wrecker he wasn’t.
“Okay. And I’m Stacey.” She glanced past him. “Where’s your boss?”
“Making some calls back at the hotel.”
“You get settled in okay?”
He grunted. “I didn’t stop to introduce myself to the bedbugs.”
Her lips might have twitched the tiniest bit. “Sorry. The closest chain hotel is several miles away. There is a very nice B and B a mile outside of town, but I know they have a wedding scheduled there for this weekend and every room is booked.”
“Think I could pass for the best man?”
“Unlike your boss, you don’t look like the tux type.” She actually smiled, visibly relaxing for the first time since they’d met. Her wide mouth seemed made for smiling, and her green eyes twinkled, negating the tiny lines of worry on her brow.
She’d been incredibly attractive before. Now she was damn near beautiful.
“You’re right,” he admitted. “Wyatt’s the Dom Péri gnon of our team. I guess I’m the Mad Dog 20/20.”
Laughter spilled across her lips, husky and soft all at once, so natural it could never have been forced. Hearing it gave Dean the first real flash of pleasure he’d had all day.
“I know the inn looks bad from the outside, but I promise the place is very clean. The owners can’t afford to renovate, but they make sure the rooms are spick-and-span.”
His hopes rose. But he still intended to reserve judgment until he actually had a chance to check out the inside of his room for himself.
About to tell her that, he was startled by the sound of glass breaking nearby. He and Stacey both jerked their heads reflexively, though he imagined they’d see nothing more than a waitress standing in the middle of diner plate wreckage.
Instead, he saw a man, pale and wiry, standing in the midst of the broken dishes on the floor. No waitress was in sight, and the glass and plate, complete with half-eaten sandwich, seemed to have slipped off his own table.
“Oh, great,” Stacey muttered, her voice soaked in dislike.
That tone, accompanied by the flash of anger that appeared in the stranger’s eyes when he met Dean’s, made him wonder if the dishes had slipped after all. When the man cast a glare of barely disguised anger at Stacey, he wondered even more. “Problem?”
“Not on my part.”
Dean sat up straighter, assessing the dish-killing stranger.With curly, dingy brown hair, and his tall, skinny, pale form, he most resembled a used Q-tip. The man, realizing Dean was staring, finally tugged his attention off Stacey. Grabbing some cash out of his pocket, he thrust it at the waitress, who’d come running to clean up. Then he stalked across the broken glass, beelining toward the door, not casting another look in their direction.