Falling for You

The man was apparently a “security specialist” for pity’s sake. Everyone knew that was just code for ex-military or ex-secret agent. Really, once spies retired, what else could they do?

Hargrove Security Systems was a relatively new business, so what had Augustus Hargrove been up to before that?

The guy’s background had been whitewashed. Very nice job. The problem was that it was too nice. It didn’t fit a man who could look so threatening in a church.

Barry dug around some more. Any story he uncovered that was connected with this wedding was playing by the rules as far as he was concerned. The managing editor couldn’t expect him to just ignore a hunch, could he?

How had Little Miss Party Girl hooked up with the guy?

Barry started in on Sally Shipley’s movements for the past year, oblivious to when the wedding rehearsal began, coming up for air only when people passed him on their way out of the church.

Great. He’d pay for that later. But right now, he wanted to ask the groom some questions. So where was the groom? He hadn’t been with the bride and her friends as they’d passed by. Barry packed up his laptop and strode toward the front of the church.

He was supposed to be concentrating on the bride, her bridesmaids and this afternoon’s trip to the spa. Barry didn’t want to miss the trip to the spa. That’s where most of the society reporters went wrong. The gossip factor was incredible once women got together with mud, or whatever it was, on their faces. Although he would never admit it, Barry booked manicures for himself to gain entry. Usually just a nail buffing, but being around had paid off big-time more than once.

However, today, he was more interested in the groom. Too bad he couldn’t be in two places at the same time.

In the church foyer, he spotted a cluster of men listening to Paula give them some kind of instructions. Though Augustus Hargrove wasn’t among them, Barry edged toward the men. As soon as Paula turned her attention to the bridesmaids, Barry began his usual interview patter along with the ceremonial flashing of the ID.

“Barry Sutton, Dallas Press. Do you have time to answer a few questions?” He spoke to the group at large and waited for someone to answer him.

Someone did. “Tee time is in a half hour, man.”

“This won’t take long.” Barry took down their names and learned that they were all related to the bride. “And where is the groom?” Barry kept his smile casual and friendly.

“Gus is out front.”

Okay. Paula began herding everyone outside, so Barry followed. Two stretch limos waited next to the curb. Barry knew one of the drivers, but not the other. Quickly introducing himself, he made a note of the new guy’s name while the bridal party headed toward the white limo and the groom’s party piled into the black stretch Lincoln Navigator—an SUV on steroids.

And behind that was an unmarked white van, prickling with antenna. Augustus stood next to it and as Barry watched, a man who might have been Gus’s twin in the cold, remote department emerged.

“Oh, man, is he in trouble now,” said someone from inside the limo.

Still watching the groom and the other man, Barry bent down. “Who’s that?”

“Derek. He’s the best man.”

Okay. Now things were cooking. Barry straightened and intended to approach the two men, but their body language stopped him. The groom was not happy—understandable, but the best man wasn’t looking any too thrilled, either.

And that van. Barry swallowed a snicker. Why didn’t they just paint a big sign on the side that said Surveillance Van? Anybody who watched any cop show on TV would know what the best man was driving.

That was one tense conversation going on beside the van. Barry took a couple of steps back and tried to melt into the giggling bridesmaids who were taking pictures of themselves by their limo, but kept an eye on the men.

Shaking his head, Gus strode toward the Navigator limo.

“Hey!” The best man—Derek—grabbed his arm and Gus promptly shook it off. “A few hours max.”

“I’m getting married,” Gus called back.

“Not until tomorrow,” Derek said.

Their eyes locked.

Barry tried to extricate himself from the bridesmaids, but they’d asked him to take a group photo. It took a few seconds, but in that time, Derek must have convinced Gus to do whatever it was he wanted him to do because when Barry handed back the camera and looked toward the other limo, the two men were walking together toward the pin-cushion van.

Barry made a note of the license-plate number, then watched as the best man and the groom got into the van and the limos pulled away without them.

The groomsmen were headed to the Water Oaks Country Club for an afternoon of golf. The van was following their limo, but Barry didn’t know if Gus and Derek were going to the country club or not. He suspected not.

The white limo pulled away and Barry stared after it, torn. According to Paula’s schedule, the girls were going to spend the afternoon at the Alabaster Day Spa. Another top-notch place, a favorite of old Dallas society. He got on his cell phone and wheedled a nail-buffing appointment in an hour and a half with a nail-tech intern, and counted himself lucky to get it. He should have called a lot earlier and would have done so if the groom situation hadn’t distracted him.

Well, he had an hour and a half to wait. For a nanosecond, Barry wrestled between following his reporter’s intuition and doing the job he was supposed to be doing, before getting into his own car and gently rolling out of the parking lot. Burning rubber was for teenagers.

It didn’t take him long to catch up with the limo and the van. Barry rode along for a couple of blocks, almost convinced that they were all going to the golf course and Gus was riding with Derek just to have a private conversation when the van suddenly turned onto a side street. No signal, no nothing. Barry was caught off guard. That turn was something else. Barry had a split second to continue following the limo, or deliberately follow the van. It wasn’t as though he were driving a nondescript car, so they’d know he was behind them, but the two men couldn’t know he suspected them of…well, something.

Before he could decide what to do, his hands, all by themselves, turned the wheel of his car. He was following the groom.

And he did a bang-up job, considering they went faster and faster and red lights became more suggestions than actual rules. This wasn’t good. Barry didn’t like traffic tickets. And he didn’t want to antagonize the cops, since they’d proven to be a good source of material in the past and he was still trying to mend fences there. And yet, as the speedometer inched past the speed limit—then galloped past it—he kept up with the van.

Ah, the adrenaline rush of a breaking story. He missed this.

And then the van pulled a maneuver straight out of the Action Movie Stunt Guide for Beginners. Maybe Intermediates. It ran up onto the median, pulled a U-turn against a red light and entered traffic on the other side.

There was no way Barry was taking his car over the curb. He couldn’t believe the van had made it. Swiveling around, he watched the van slip through a strip-center parking lot and down a service alley behind the stores until honking cars alerted him that the light had changed. By the time Barry managed to get his car over to the other side of the street, he’d lost the van.

Lost the van. Lost a big, solid white van that gleamed in the afternoon sunlight. Man, was he rusty.

Barry parked his car. Okay, now what? There was something going on. He knew it. And he wanted to find out what. Needed to find out what.

He’d been a good boy and had taken his punishment for months, which was how long it had been since he’d sunk his teeth into a story meatier than caterers jacking up prices when it was too late to book anyone else.

He stared at the van’s license-plate number and tapped his notebook. What was with the best man? No one seemed to know him—they barely knew the groom. Barry checked the wedding info he’d been given for a last name. There it was. Best Man: Derek Stafford.

It would be interesting to find out about those two, and it was his job to write about the wedding party. Details, his new editor was constantly carping.

So she wanted details. Barry checked his Palm. Who in the police department could run the license plate for him? Stephanie? No. They’d dated and it had ended badly. Didn’t it always? Gina? Maybe. Barry had maintained his contacts as best he could, but even he had to admit that the atmosphere in the police department was chilly these days.

His last story had been an incredible piece of detective work. It had just been published too early, that’s all. But nobody held a grudge like a cop.

Barry mentally sussed out the Dallas squad room, eliminating the men—he’d taken enough guff from them over the society reporting—and settled on Megan. There had always been an unacknowledged something between them. The question of who was going to acknowledge it first and when added a nice zing to their dealings.

Barry had to admit that he missed seeing Megan at briefings more than he missed the briefings. In the cynical world of journalism, she’d been a beacon of honesty. She’d made him believe when he hadn’t wanted to. How corny was that?

Way too corny. He had to push the zing aside and snap out of it. The point was that Megan was his best bet to run the plate. He sent her a quick e-mail.

2

MEGAN ESTERBROOK STARED at her computer screen. The nerve! Her squeak of outrage alerted Gina, a fellow policewoman whose desk faced hers.

In answer to Gina’s arched eyebrow, Megan opened and closed her mouth inarticulately, then pointed a finger at her computer monitor.

“What?”

Megan stared at the return e-mail address and felt her hands sweat and her heart pound. How intensely annoying. Not trusting herself to speak, she jabbed her finger at the computer screen again.

From where she sat, Gina couldn’t see Megan’s screen. After walking around the desks, she stood next to Megan’s chair. “Barry.”

“Yes!” Megan hissed. “He e-mailed me!”

“So I see.”

Gina apparently failed to understand the depth of Barry’s perfidy.

“How can Barry Sutton just expect me to ignore the fact that he’s the reason I’ve been banished to a desk for months?”

“Hit the delete key. Problem solved.”

Yes, that would be the logical thing to do. Megan could pretend she never got it. E-mails went astray all the time. And yet just the appearance of Barry’s name made her heart pound harder than it ever did with her police work. Maybe that’s because she was trained for police work. Nothing had trained her for Barry.

“Megan?” Gina prompted. “We’ve talked about this.”

“I know.”

“Deep breaths.”

“I know.”

“Now hit delete.”

She made it sound so easy. “I—”

Gina leaned over, her finger headed for Megan’s delete key. Megan grabbed her wrist.

“Megan!”

“I know he’s only e-mailing me because he wants something.” And not because he’d suddenly developed a grand passion for her, she didn’t say aloud. And from Gina’s expression, Megan figured she didn’t have to.

“And you know what happens when Barry asks for favors?”

“I give them to him. And bad things happen,” Megan recited in a monotone.

“Very good. Delete the e-mail.”

Megan stared at Barry’s name. “How can he make me feel guilty when he’s the one asking for a favor?”

“Because that’s what he does.” Gina spoke in slow, measured tones—her “talk them off the ledge” voice. “He is an expert. He’s like a legit con man. You’ve studied them. You know how they read and manipulate people.”

Megan nodded, her eyes never leaving the “Barry Sutton” on the e-mail. “You know he has different smiles?”

“Most of us—”

“Not like Barry. I know he’s practiced them and cataloged them. I’ve watched him watching other people. Then he’ll paste a smile on his face and approach them. You see, he always smiles first. He decides how he’s going to appear. He can make himself have dimples, or not. He regulates how much of his teeth he shows. It’s never spontaneous. And once you respond to him, that’s the smile you always get. You know what mine is?”

Gina carefully shook her head. Her eyes had widened slightly, as though she thought she was dealing with a crazy person. Maybe she was.

Megan continued anyway. “I get the single-dimple smile with the slightly lowered brow. A pseudo-private smile, as though there’s something between us that no one else knows about. Then, after I helplessly blab everything he wants to know, he takes one side of his mouth down a notch and flashes the other dimple. And then he winks. I hate winking. Hate it. But he’s always turned away by then. Once I told not to wink at me and he just gave me a double-dimpled smile and said he knew I loved it.”

Gina stared at her. “Have you been practicing your Barry aversion therapy?”

“Sort of.” It just made Megan think of him more.

“Now would be a good time.”

She was really lucky Gina was being so patient with her. Megan felt so gullible and so stupid and so silly and so weak when it came to Barry. But Gina said everyone had weaknesses. She, herself, couldn’t speak in public. Appearing on camera the way Megan had—before her reassignment—made Gina freeze up. Megan had seen Gina in action, or nonaction, so she knew it was true. It was Gina, who had studied psychology, who’d helped her devise the Barry aversion therapy.

Megan slid open her desk drawer and withdrew a set of lined index cards. On each was written one of Barry’s transgressions.

“Read one aloud,” Gina instructed.

Megan drew a breath. “He smiles at me even though he knows it makes my face go all red.”

“What is it with you and the smiling?”

“People will think there’s something going on between us!” Megan defended herself.

“Oh, please. Get over yourself and give me that card.” Gina took it and tore it up. “There are plenty of other more serious consequences to dealing with Barry, and you know it.” She pointed to the stack of cards. “Write another one—write that his requests for special treatment disrupt your peace of mind and affect your work.”

“They don’t affect my work!”

“Have we not just spent ten minutes obsessing over Barry?”

“It’s not obsessing.”

Gina nodded toward the computer. “Delete the e-mail.”

Megan swallowed. “I…should read it first.”

Gina leveled her stern policewoman’s stare at Megan. “Deep breath. Read the next card.”

Megan inhaled and exhaled. “Barry called me in the middle of the night—”

“At your unlisted home number.”

Megan hoped that Gina wouldn’t ask how Barry got her unlisted home number. “He knew I would be asleep,” she continued, “and took advantage of my grogginess to trick me into giving him the mayor’s meeting schedule, which then confirmed that the mayor was meeting with out-of-state candidates for the new assistant police chief.” An echo of the anger she’d felt then calmed her pounding heart now. Hey, this aversion-therapy stuff might work.

“It was a dirty trick, but it was very clever,” Gina commented.

“I still should have been prepared.”

“He woke you up at one-thirty in the morning! On purpose!”

“He had a deadline.”

“You are not defending him.”

Megan stared at the card. She was defending him, drat it all. “Okay. You’re right. Thanks, Gina. I can handle things now.”

“You’re deleting the e-mail?”

“I’m going to write a refusal before I open and read it.”

“Megan—”

“Gina.” Megan stiffened her spine. “I have no business deleting e-mails unread. If I do, then he is affecting my work. I have to be able to deal with him when I’m department spokeswoman again. This is good practice.”

Gina gave her a look with just a touch of pity in it, then headed back to her own desk.

Pity, huh? Megan brought her fingers to the keyboard, mentally composing a polite, yet firm, very firm, refusal, when another e-mail from Barry popped up with the subject line Need urgent favor.

The sinking feeling she tried to ignore told her that she’d been hoping the first e-mail might be a let’s-get-together-for-coffee e-mail. Which would be a prelude to a dinner or a movie or a night of wild monkey sex.

No!

She did not think that way ever. Certainly not about Barry. Okay, she would not think that way about Barry ever again. Gritting her teeth, Megan tried to type a scathing reply to the as-yet unread message, but her hands had been sweating and SDeR B Atty was all she managed to type.

Oh, fine. Sighing, she opened the e-mails and discovered that he wanted her to run a license-plate number for him. He was interested in a name and whether that name dinged any police bells.

Although cops had been known to do so, accessing the Law Enforcement Information Network outside the performance of official duties was totally against the rules and Megan wasn’t in a position to break any rules. She typed back a naked No and hit Send, feeling strongly virtuous.

The feeling lasted for a couple of seconds before she realized she’d made a tactical error.

“Oh, no.”

“What?” Gina asked.

“I shouldn’t have answered him.”

“You answered him?”

“I said, ‘No.’” Megan’s e-mail was already chiming. “But now he knows I’m here.”

“What did he want?”

“For me to run a plate.”

Shaking her head, Gina pointedly looked at her monitor. “I didn’t hear that.”

“It’s okay that you heard it. I’m not going to do it.”

Gina didn’t meet her eyes.

“I’m not!” Megan had to raise her voice over the sound of the e-mail chime. She turned off the sound.

She tried very hard to concentrate on her very important work—yes, the world would be a better place once she finished inventorying the True Blue pencils that the community relations department passed out to school kids. She was about to make a huge decision: The navy-night color was no longer manufactured so Megan had been given the responsibility of choosing a new color for their next order. It was important. It was. Every time elementary school students used their pencils, they’d think of the police. The blue—and yes, it would stay blue—color had to be strong, but not intimidating. She had a call into the Dallas Cowboys organization to find out what their shade of blue was called so the police didn’t duplicate it. But the police had gold lettering and the Cowboys had silver, so Megan thought that was enough of a difference if their only choice was the Cowboys’ blue—well, the point was, she was busy making important decisions here. She had no time to pay attention to Barry and his incessant e-mails.

They were coming at the rate of one a minute now. What a jerk.

And then three minutes went by without one and Megan was lured into looking at them and their identical subject lines: I’m sorry. Please?

Megan slumped. Honestly, for all the mental energy she’d expended, she should just—No. This was a test and if she gave in now, she would never be able to take a stand against him again.

A thought occurred to her and she grabbed for her phone and activated the instant voice mail. He’d be calling any minute.

She wouldn’t be able to keep her voice mail set that way for long, but Barry wasn’t stupid. He’d get the message and leave her alone.

She waited, then went back online to search the Internet for pencils.

She had three solid minutes to compare pencil colors and quantity prices before her e-mail icon flashed. The subject line read You’re not answering your phone.

Megan sighed.

“You could block his e-mails,” Gina suggested.

“I hate myself,” Megan muttered. “He just…just…”

“Pushes all your buttons?”

“Oh, it’s worse than that. I have special buttons just for him.”

Chuckling, Gina leaned down and when she straightened, she handed Megan a handful of change across their desks. “I could use a Dr Pepper right now. You could, too.”

“Yes. Dr Pepper. Sugar. Caffeine.” Megan stood. “I’m on it.”

“Why, thank you, Megan.” Gina grinned and pointed to her dimples.

Megan’s e-mail chimed.

“I thought you turned that off.”

“It turns on after you access it.”

“Oh, Megan.”

“I’m going now.”

“Good idea.”

Megan used the walk to the break room to clear her mind of Barry Sutton and his e-mails. The squad room was packed with officers and detectives. Why did he pick on her?

Because she was a soft touch, Megan thought, answering her own question. She had no business being a soft touch. She was a police officer. She was competent and in control.

Megan shoved quarters into the soda machine and took a restorative swallow as soon as she opened the can. Okay. Technically, Barry was harassing her. Therefore, she would send him an e-mail explaining exactly what the consequences were if he didn’t cease and desist because if she received one more e-mail, she was turning him in. Strong. Competent. No nonsense.

When she got back to her desk, there were fifty-seven e-mails clogging her in-box and they were now arriving every few seconds.

Megan sent her cease-and-desist e-mail and then waited.

They stopped.

“Quitter,” she muttered, almost disappointed. Twenty minutes later, Barry strode across the squad room.

BARRY DID NOT HAVE time for this, but apparently Megan was the type to hold a grudge and would require a little face-to-face intervention.

Frankly, he was surprised. Usually, getting Megan to cooperate was a no-brainer. She was refreshingly eager to please, so honest she squeaked, and had both freckles and breasts. Barry had figured out that she liked the freckles and didn’t know what to do with the breasts. She was the type of woman who felt they got in the way. And he supposed they did. They sure spoiled the line of her uniform. And he meant that in a good way.

She was sun-kissed cute, the type of girl a guy would ask to fill in on a Saturday softball game. Barry didn’t play softball, but he could appreciate her type. He’d decided her type was the adolescent pal who suddenly developed a sexy little body that she ignored and none of her guy pals could. The way to her heart was to ignore her womanly charms and treat her like a kid sister—somebody else’s kid sister. See, that kind of subtlety was the key to Barry’s success. If he treated her like his kid sister, then the male-female thing was not there. Somebody else’s kid sister, and the male-female thing could be there. It was that whiff of possibility that he put into the smile he reserved just for her.

Yeah, Barry thought he had her pegged and yet she wouldn’t answer her phone or her e-mails. He figured maybe he hadn’t groveled enough. For a straight arrow like Megan, being reprimanded had clearly cut deep. He should have acknowledged that.

That was a mistake on his part. He’d apologized repeatedly in the e-mails, and he also had back when he’d heard she’d been reassigned, but he should have made more of an effort. Flowers, or something. Except she wasn’t the flowers sort. Anyway, he’d been too preoccupied with his own situation to give it much thought. Now he knew he should have followed up with her so that he could have salvaged their professional relationship.

Barry learned from his mistakes. He wouldn’t make that one again.

Megan always spoke the truth. She was the best thing to ever happen to the Dallas police force—but she was dangerous to the media. Yes, she absolutely spoke the truth—as she knew it—and Barry suspected it was just a matter of time before someone exploited her.

Megan was too honorable to see dishonor in someone else. Some people might call that naïveté, but Barry admired her faith in her fellow human beings, even as he knew that he’d have exploited her long before now.

He wasn’t proud of that. Just realistic.