long my business takes, and then… Well, they owe me some time off. Seems like a nice, quiet place.” He shrugged. Damn, his shoulder hurt. He was falling apart. Whereas she seemed perfectly put together.
“It is a nice place. And friendly,” she said.
Friendly? Was she going to be friendly? And just what did she think being friendly entailed?
“I might stay awhile,” he said.
Please, please don’t let this take a while. Please don’t let her get all that friendly. He couldn’t take it.
Let her crook of a boyfriend show up tomorrow. Let him get this over with and get out of here and forget all about her and the way he feared she’d look once he was done here.
“Well, I hope you like it. Let me know if you need anything.”
“I will,” he said, then couldn’t let it go at that. He did have a job to do. He couldn’t stand to fumble around gawking over her, not if he was going to get the job done. “Actually, I need lunch. A place to have lunch. What’s good here in town?”
“That’s easy. The Corner Diner on Main. Just go that way.” She pointed off to the left. “It’s about eight blocks down. You can’t miss it. I’m meeting my sisters there in a few minutes, trying to beat the lunch crowd.”
“There’s a crowd?”
She nodded. “Just about the only one you’ll ever see in town. If you want lunch without having to wait, you should go now. I’m going inside to say hello to Mrs. Baker before I head that way myself.”
“Okay. I’ll give it a try.”
“Then I guess I’ll see you there,” she said, heading up the steps and inside, calling out Mrs. Baker’s name and knocking only as she went through the doorway.
So, he was going to lunch and she was going to be there. Hopefully telling her sisters all about her little trip and the guy she’d met.
Nick sighed.
Maybe this would be easy.
Maybe it would be easy and he could finish it up and go home.
“Not bad,” Harry said. “Not as smooth as I’ve seen you, but still…not bad.”
“Where the hell are you?” he barked.
Harry just laughed.
Nick headed off to lunch.
To spy on her.
Chapter Three
Nick was happily eating his lunch—meat loaf and mashed potatoes smothered in heart-clogging gravy—when people started screaming.
At least, at first he thought they were screaming.
He nearly pulled out his gun before he realized it wasn’t really screaming.
It was more like…squealing.
Happy squealing?
Sounds he wasn’t sure he’d ever heard come out of a woman’s mouth before in public, maybe not even in the privacy of his own bedroom, and here he was thinking that he could make women make some really interesting, happy sounds.
But there he was, in the Corner Diner in Magnolia Falls, and his prime lead in the case of the pirate ring had just entered the establishment in a rush, thrown open her pretty suntanned arms, embracing three different women at the same time, and all four of them were doing something that could only be described as squealing for joy.
“Good God,” Nick muttered, just loud enough for Harry to hear, apparently.
Because the next thing he heard was Harry in his ear saying, “It’s a Southern thing. Southern women do that.”
“Do they do it in bed?” Nick asked, unable to help himself.
Harry laughed. “If you do it right, Southern women can make all sorts of little sounds like that in bed.’ Course the way you’re limping along right now and with that bad back of yours—”
“I don’t have a bad back. A shoulder. Just a shoulder—”
“Okay. Shoulder. I don’t think you should attempt a move like that, Nickie. I don’t want you to hurt yourself, you know?”
“In bed?” he muttered. “The day I can’t take a woman to bed without hurting myself is the day I—”
Nick looked up into the half-disapproving, half-amused face of the woman who’d seated him at the diner, the owner herself, Darlene Hodges.
“Sorry,” he told her. “I was just…” He gestured feebly at the headset he wore and shrugged.
“No problem, honey. I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself, either.” She nodded understandingly. “But just in case, you should know, a man gets to a certain age and all sorts of things just start to go. Women understand these things. At least, some women do. Not that I think you really need to worry all that much.”
Harry was howling.
Nick gulped. He had no idea what to say.
“You want some more coffee?” Darlene asked, smiling in that understanding way of hers.
“Sure,” Nick said, so that maybe she’d go away and not come back again anytime soon, so that he wouldn’t have to decide whether she was flirting with him or making fun of him and his feebleness. He really wasn’t sure. He really didn’t want to know.
His head hurt. His shoulder and his back hurt. His knee hurt. And he just wanted to go to sleep but was afraid he’d dream about Kim and things a man ten years younger than him might be able to do to her to make her make that sound Nick had never heard before from a woman in bed.
Darlene poured his coffee and walked away.
“That was the funniest damned thing I’ve heard all week,” Harry proclaimed. “Maybe so far this year—”
“Shut up, Harry,” Nick said. Then, in disgust over having Harry and his smart-ass comments in his ear, Nick hit a button and cut off the connection. It wasn’t like Harry was helping.
Nick sat there, pretending to eat, watching as Kim continued to greet the two women—who had to be her sisters from the resemblance between the three of them—and a petite brunette. Most of the squealing had stopped, but the hugging hadn’t and the women were chattering like mad, all at the same time. He couldn’t make out anything, really, and he was only two tables away.
He’d spotted her sisters the minute he’d walked into the diner. It was frightening to think there were two other women in the world who looked nearly as good as her. Really scary. Same shade of blond hair, same young, happy, girl-next-door sexy looks. They must have driven the men in this town nuts for years. He was scared to be in the same room with the three of them, but he had to. So Nick planted himself at a table nearby and expected to be able to hear everything. He had very good hearing. Unlike his knee, his hearing wasn’t going, yet.
And he was sure there was good stuff to hear. He just couldn’t keep up, because he could swear every one of the four women was talking at once. He stared, thinking that looking at them as they talked might make it easier to follow the conversation.
It swirled around him in a practically indistinguishable blob of chatter.
“Really in love—?”
“Knew the minute you saw him—?”
“Just like that—?”
“Scared—?”
“Hear all about the attack—”
“So brave—”
“Protect you—?”
“Ever get home—?”
“Worse than that time in