The more he got to know her, the more he became invested in ensuring she never had a reason to use the lessons he was teaching her. A good self-defense program was all about self-protection, after all. In between physical demonstrations, he taught her how to read body language, defuse situations, and increase her psychological awareness.
And he did it all while hiding an erection that would’ve had Grace running for the door if she had any idea how she affected him.
He tried to keep it professional. Tried. It was damn difficult, though, when all he thought about when he was showing her how to move her body was how badly he wanted that body under him.
Shaking his head, shaking off his lust, Rick reached for his zipper and was just zipping his coat closed when another voice filled the wide room. It was high-pitched and cheery and could only belong to one person.
“Ricky! There you are! Is it just me or have you been so crazy difficult to track down lately?”
Rick stiffened. He hadn’t gone by that nickname since well before he enlisted. He let his old friends—Willie, Maria De Angelis, Dave—get away with it because they knew him way back then.
And that person? Didn’t.
Natalie Newton. She was all bundled up from the recent cold, with an extra coat over her deputy jacket. The ends of her long, blonde hair peeked out from beneath the black cap she tugged over her ears. The tip of her nose was red, her cheeks ruddy from the wind.
A tiny little thing, she barely came up to his chest. That didn’t stop her from marching across the station house, pausing when she was in front of him. In order to get a look at his face, she had to tilt her head back. There was an edge in her usually soft green eyes that warned that she was back on the hunt.
Rick didn’t like the feel of being chased. It was another reason why, despite the fact that Natalie was both pretty and strong-willed—basically kryptonite to him—that he never even thought for a second about taking her up on her unsaid offer.
Plus, she was a kid. She’d make some other man very, very happy. It just wouldn’t be him.
Rick shrugged. He was always careful not to lead her on and chose his words deliberately. “It ain’t hard to find me.”
“Really? Seems like it. We’re always scheduled opposite shifts—”
“That’s my fault, sug,” said Willie. She was wrapping a muffler around her neck, pulling her big leopard print coat on right after it. “Ethan needed to cut back some hours after he got in the middle of another one of Jerry and Christopher’s battles over on the mountainside. Chris whacked him upside the head with the stems of the roses he clipped off Jerry’s bush. Sheriff said to rearrange schedules until he’s back a hundred percent.”
“Right. Sheriff Collins might’ve told me about that,” Natalie admitted. “One of his scratches got infected. His mom had to take him to the county hospital since we don’t have a doc of our own anymore.”
Rick grunted. “Those two coots have an argument every couple of weeks over the damn rose bushes. Maybe now Ethan will remember to page Chris’s wife instead of getting involved. She usually calms them down before we have to throw one of them into the cells.”
“Yeah, but it was nice to have the company.” Willie shrugged. “What? When the sheriff told Chris he had to come down to the station until he cooled off, Margie left him to stew overnight. I had someone to talk to the next morning. Did you know he was a Lloyd Webber fan?”
Shaking her head, Natalie said, “You and your musicals, Willie.”
Willie sniffed. “Not gonna apologize for having taste.” Tugging her muffler so that she entirely covered, she peered through her glasses up at Rick. “You gonna walk me to my car?”
“Yeah. Let’s go. Night. Have a good rest of shift.”
He was fooling himself if he thought he’d make his escape that easily.
“Ricky, wait. I wasn’t kidding before. I’ve been to Thirsty’s a bunch of times this past week. No one’s seen you.”
True. If he wasn’t on duty or at Ophelia with Grace, he was at home, plotting his next lesson. Now that Grace had gotten some of the basics down, their meetings had turned into discussing advanced techniques and running some real-life scenarios in between discussing what she learned from the book he gave her. Because he was a glutton for punishment, he already had two more books waiting for her. In case they got through the first guide quickly, he already had a built-in excuse to keep the lessons going.
He wasn’t about to tell Natalie that, though.
“I haven’t felt like a drink,” he said instead. That, he realized with a bit of a start, was also true. “I’ll talk to you later, Nat. Have a good night. Ready, Wil?”
“Whenever you are, sug.”
After he walked Willie to her car, he got inside of his truck and started to drive—but he didn’t go home. And, at first, Rick didn’t know why.
Then his truck took him to Ophelia. Pulling up in front of the bed and breakfast, stubbornly resisting the real reason why he was there, he climbed out of the cab and paused with his boots resting on the edge of the curb.
With the words I was in the neighborhood on the tip of his tongue, Rick stuck his hands in his pockets and, bowing his head against the rushing wind that sent his too-long hair flying in front of his eyes, started for the walkway. He was almost at the steps when he heard a sound—a soft thump—and he froze.
Close to a decade as a Marine had left him with senses that were way more astute than a civilian’s. He stayed still, unmoving, straining his ears as he listened for another clue that something was out of place. Hamlet was quiet, especially once night fell, and that thump was different.