ooked gangly and thin beside the fellows around him, even with the shoulder pads on, but I recognized his face. I’d last seen him when he was about fourteen. Though his rather homely features had changed a bit, they seemed stronger, and more defined. There was no mistaking his dark, intelligent eyes.
I stuck my hands in the pockets of my old leather duster and waited, watching the field. I’d found the kid, and, absent any particular danger, I was in no particular hurry. There was no sense in charging into the middle of Irwin’s football practice and his life and disrupting everything. I’m just not that kind of guy.
Okay, well.
I try not to be.
“Seems to keep happening, though, doesn’t it,” I said to myself. “You show up on somebody’s radar, and things go to DEFCON 1 a few minutes later.”
“I’m sorry?” said a young woman’s voice.
* * *
“Ah,” said Officer Dean. “This is where the girl comes in.”
“Who said there was a girl?”
“There’s always a girl.”
“Well,” I said, “yes and no.”
* * *
She was blond, about five-foot-six, and my logical mind told me that every inch of her was a bad idea. The rest of me, especially my hindbrain, suggested that she would be an ideal mate. Preferably sooner rather than later.
There was nothing in particular about her that should have caused my hormones to rage. I mean, she was young and fit, and she had the body of the young and fit, and that’s hardly ever unpleasant to look at. She had eyes the color of cornflowers and rosy cheeks, and she was a couple of notches above cute, when it came to her face. She was wearing running shorts, and her legs were smooth and generally excellent.
Some women just have it. And no, I can’t tell you what “it” means because I don’t get it myself. It was something mindless, something chemical, and even as my metaphorically burned fingers were telling me to walk away, the rest of me was going through that male physiological response the science guys in the Netherlands have documented recently.
Not that one.
Well, maybe a little.
I’m talking about the response where when a pretty girl is around, it hits the male brain like a drug and temporarily impairs his cognitive function, literally dropping the male IQ.
And hey, how Freudian is it that the study was conducted in the Netherlands?
This girl dropped that IQ-nuke on my brain, and I was standing there staring a second later while she smiled uncertainly at me.
“Um, sorry?” I asked. “My mind was in the Netherlands.”
Her dimple deepened, and her eyes sparkled. She knew all about the brain nuke. “I just said that you sounded like a dangerous guy.” She winked at me. It was adorable. “I like those.”
“You’re, uh. You’re into bad boys, eh?”
“Maybe,” she said, lowering her voice and drawing the word out a little, as if it was a confession. She spoke with a very faint drawl. “Plus, I like meeting new people from all kinds of places, and you don’t exactly strike me as a local, darlin’.”
“You dig dangerous guys who are just passing through,” I said. “Do you ever watch those cop shows on TV?”
She tilted back her head and laughed. “Most boys don’t give me lip like that in the first few minutes of conversation.”
“I’m not a boy,” I said.
She gave me a once-over with those pretty eyes, taking a heartbeat longer about it than she really needed. “No,” she said. “No, you are not.”
My inner nonmoron kept on stubbornly ringing alarm bells, and the rest of me slowly became aware of them. My glands thought that I’d better keep playing along. It was the only way to find out what the girl might have been interested in, right? Right. I was absolutely not continuing the conversation because I had gone soft in the head.
“I hope that’s not a problem,” I said.