CHAPTER 11
“Are you okay?” he repeated.
“I . . . uh, yes, I’m okay . . . I just . . . I . . .” I stuttered over my words and could feel my face break out into a strange smile that I couldn’t control. He looked at me; I could see he was confused by my clearly erratic behavior. Hell, I was confused. What had just come over me? An instant teenage crush on a policeman. How clichéd of me. How horrifically banal of me. But no amount of mental scolding was going to change the fact that this man was utterly gorgeous and I was feeling utterly weak in the ligaments.
“Ma’am,” he said again.
Ma’am . . . ? Would he call me that in bed?Shit, what was I thinking? I placed my hands over my mouth, even though I hadn’t said it out loud. He looked at me very strangely. Clearly I wasn’t having the same effect on him as he was having on me, despite the fact that I was flashing my private parts at him. I tried not to perceive that as a blow to my ego.
“You do know this is private property?” he repeated, slowly and purposefully, dialing up his authoritative tone a bit. Was that the onlyprivatehe was concerned or aware of?
This time, I couldn’t lie to him. It was very inconvenient that I wasn’t a more seasoned, sociopathic liar. “Yes. I know it’s private,” I admitted flatly.
“Well, then, the question is, why are you trying to climb the fence?” His tone of voice told me that he already knew the answer to the question. Not that one needed to be a brain surgeon to figure this one out. I’d been caught red-handed, in the act of breaking and entering.
“Good question,” I said, trying to shuffle walk, my hands once again firmly between my legs. God, I hoped this didn’t also constitute lewd public behavior, walking around like this, as if I was touching myself. I hoped he didn’t think I was some strange pervert, jumping over a fence for God knows what.What the hell did he think of me?
“I’m a writer,” I blurted out, without thinking. I hadn’t meant to say that at all. “I was researching. For writing.”
He looked at me, skepticism etched into his face . . .his bloody gorgeous face.The face that heldthoseeyes. My God, what color were they? A brilliant green, almost emerald. Dark and shimmery and penetrating and stormy and swirly and—
“What’s it about?” He broke my emerald train of thought.
“What’s what about?” I asked.
“The thing you’re writing. You’re a writer,” he said.
“Right, I’m a writer,” I said, my own rather plain eyes drifting down to his mouth. “I’m writing a book. A sort of thrillery, mystery thingy,” I said, examining the curves of his full mouth. He had the perfect lip shape. God, women drew that on with a pencil and pumped toxins into themselves with needles just to achieve something vaguely similar, and there he was, genetically blessed with the perfect pout.
“And what’s it about?” he pressed.
“Well, um, the book revolves around a private investigator,” I said, making shit up as I went. “I was just seeing how hard it was to climb a fence like this, because, in the book, she needs to break into a property, and I wanted to know how it would feel to . . . you know.”
“Break and enter?” He finished my thought.
“Well, technically, I wasn’t on the other side of the fence, so you can’t really call it ‘entering’ and I certainly didn’t break anything either. It’s not like I had bolt cutters with me, so perhaps that statement is not entirely accurate in describing my actions.” I smiled at him.
“Why would you mention bolt cutters?” He took a step closer to me. “Do you have bolt cutters on you?”
“What? No.” I burst out laughing, while my eyes drifted over his other perfect features and came to rest on the one imperfect thing on his face. A scar cut his eyebrow in half, giving it a distinctly arched appearance. My eyes followed the scar up to his forehead, where a small white line radiated outwards from the eyebrow with such perfection and precision that it looked like it might have been drawn on. It wasn’t a messy scar; on the contrary, it was the most perfect scar I’d ever seen. God, even his imperfections were perfect. He’d probably gotten this from saving a starving kitten from a tree, or diving in front of oncoming traffic to save a toddler who ran across the road after her little pink ball, or maybe—
“So, when you reached the top, you were going to come straight back down?” Once again, he put a full stop to my inner monologue, which I admit was starting to run away with me a bit.
I nodded my head. “Sure. Straight back down. In fact, before you came, I’d just realized how next to impossible it is to climb a fence like this, and I was about to come down and think of another way for my character to break in.”
“You were, were you?” He looked totally unconvinced, and I couldn’t really blame him.
“Yes, I was thinking that maybe the character could use—oh, I don’t know—maybe some kind of explosives? But I’d have to do more research into explosives, wouldn’t want to hurt anyone, or myself. Maybe you know about them?” His reaction to this statement was immediate and I realized very quickly that my mouth had just gotten me into a world of trouble.
“Sorry?” He took a step forward. “Are you asking me whether explosives could be used to break into this property?”
“What? NO! No.” I started laughing, a little too frantically, really, and then I stopped abruptly and looked at him again. “I mean . . . could they?”
He looked over his shoulder, as if he was searching for my hidden accomplices, or looking for clues, or he was scared. He glanced at my car and then slowly turned his head back in my direction. “Who did you say you were again?”
“A writer.”
He raised that scarred brow at me. God, it was sexy. It was so Khal Drogo-ish, but without all the facial hair, and clearly I didn’t have a dragon, because, if I had, I wouldn’t be climbing over a fence, now, would I?
