trying very hard to remain calm. Caldwell has not on the card. At least he remembered her name. “My maiden name was Caldwell.” Her mouth went very dry. “Have we met?” The final word came out as a tinny squeak.
He snorted lightly beneath his breath. “You know damn well we have. Sorry, I didn’t immediately connect Mayor Sara Vance with the girl of many names, Sarabeth Louann Caldwell. You’ve changed.” He looked her up and down, openly appraising and seemingly approving. “Your hair’s lighter and you’ve put on twenty pounds, all of it in the right places.” He grinned, and though he was older, the smile was familiarly wicked and tempting. “The eyes haven’t changed at all. Neither has the mouth. As soon as you mentioned the city’s ‘unfortunate manpower shortage’ I knew it was you. Since you didn’t seem to remember me at all, I decided to let it go.” He looked her up and down. “You look good, Sarabeth, and I’m going to kill Jesse for not telling me exactly who the mayor is these days.”
Busted. Dante obviously knew she’d been pretending not to remember him. At least she could pretend not to be mortified. “Everyone just calls me Sara these days, and I do hope you won’t incapacitate my chief of police over a simple misunderstanding. I’m sure he doesn’t have a clue that you and I were once friends.” After all, they’d done their best to hide their short relationship from their friends and families and had done a good job until the very end. Sara had been the A student, good girl, daughter of a prominent local family and, yes, rich. Dante had been in town for the summer to stay with his aunt, uncle and cousins. He’d driven a motorcycle, worn his hair long, smoked too much and stayed out too late. They’d truly had nothing in common, except some perverted chemistry they never would’ve discovered if not for a crazy string of coincidences on one hot summer night.
“Oh, he has more than a clue,” Dante said as he returned his attention to the anonymous gift on the table.
Great. All this time and she’d had no idea that her chief of police knew about her teenage mistake. She’d made more than one, as most teenagers had, but Dante was the big mistake. Foolish of her to think no one outside a very small circle had known. Even more foolish of her to think it mattered now, after so many years.
One piece of tape at a time, the package was unwrapped with Dante’s little knife. Sara watched as he dissected the paper as if he were a surgeon and the hot-pink wrapping paper, his patient. No move was unsteady or unthinking. The work claimed his entire attention, and she was quite sure he had dismissed her entirely. She might as well have not been in the room at all.
Eventually, he revealed a square, white gift box. He listened to the box, hefted it with the tip of his knife, turned it this way and that, and eventually opened it with the same calculating blade he had used to remove the pink paper.
Fine, dark eyebrows lifted. “Oh,” he muttered as he looked down into the box.
Sara moved to stand beside him, since there was obviously no danger. She reached forward, but again Dante stopped her with that strong hand of his. “No touching,” he said. “There might be prints.”
Sara sighed. “Yes, I’m sure the state lab will be anxious to get right on that. Alert, alert,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Drop those murder cases and get right on this anonymous gift of…” she glanced into the box to spy a jumbled mixture of fine, brightly colored silk. Dante reached into the box with his knife and pulled out a demicup red silk bra adorned with a smattering of black lace. The bra dangled from the short, sharp blade.
“Your size?” he asked.
She glanced at the tag and felt her insides drop. “Yes. But seriously, we don’t have our own fingerprinting facilities, and by the time the state lab gets around to something like this, whatever crime has been committed will be well beyond the statute of limitations.”
“I’m not sending it to the state lab,” he said as he returned the bra to the box. “I work for a top-notch private firm, when I’m not doing one family member or another a favor. The Benning Agency has a more than competent facility and crew. They can handle a little fingerprinting.” He looked down at her. “The undergarments will all be ruined in the process.” His knife blade entered the box again, and he came out with an absurdly insubstantial pair of panties that matched the demibra. “So if you’d rather keep these…”
“No!” she responded hotly, stepping away from Dante and the box. “I’m not going to wear underwear that’s been left on my doorstep by a pervert who obviously has some kind of fetish.”
He returned the panties to the box and came up again with an emerald-green bra no more ample than the red one. “A fetish and very good taste.”
Dante dropped the green bra into the box. So far this was the most interesting crime he’d investigated since coming to the small town of Tillman, Alabama. Just last week he’d nabbed a thief who’d tried to make his getaway on a riding lawn mower. Even when the moron had realized he was being followed, he hadn’t stopped, not even to dump his pillowcase full of loot. There had been a nasty fight at the barbershop over a really bad haircut, and a tussle over a prime parking spot in front of the drug store.
And now this. For his newest assignment he’d be hunting down a creep or creeps who stole underwear and replaced it with sexier stuff. Not that he’d seen what had been stolen from her clothesline, but judging by what little he remembered of Sarabeth Caldwell—now Sara Vance—he suspected her drawers—of the furniture sort—were filled with sensible and sturdy underwear that held everything firmly in place. Personally, he liked a little jiggle. Lovely extra pounds aside, Sara looked as if she avoided jiggling at all cost.
It had been a real shock when she’d looked at him just so and pursed her lips and the past had come rushing back. In his mind Sarabeth—Sara—had remained seventeen, skinny and young and timid. To see her in this woman, to instantly have that part of his life come rushing back, had given him a jolt. Fortunately he was much better at hiding his emotions than he’d been at seventeen.
Jesse deserved an ass-whoopin’ for this one. When he’d handed over the slim file on this case, he could’ve warned his unsuspecting cousin that the mayor was the young, beautiful woman Dante had once made out with in a ’72 Camaro that had not afforded him nearly enough maneuvering room, as he remembered. He had heard that the mayor was a widow, and with a common name like Sara he had suspected she’d be an older woman, one who’d taken up local politics in retirement. No wonder the other investigators didn’t want this job. How could any red-blooded man look at Sara Vance and talk about her bras and panties and not get, well, a bit flustered?
Dante didn’t fluster easily, not even when he had to face down a pretty woman who stammered when she said underwear, who looked naturally sexy with her dark blond hair in a thick ponytail and her T-shirt stretched over nicely shaped breasts encased in what appeared to be, from his vantage point, a very sturdy bra, who had changeable and smart blue eyes that revealed everything. Surprise, annoyance, anger…even a woman’s reluctant interest in a man. He’d seen her interest, as well as her disapproval as her eyes had fallen on the curling end of the tattoo that crawled across his shoulder and partway up his neck.
Pretty or not, Sarabeth Louann Caldwell Vance—how many names did any one woman need, anyway?—was not the kind of woman he’d tangle with. This house and her demeanor screamed old money, her position in politics screamed old power. The set of her mouth and the glint in her eyes screamed, “Interested or not, I don’t fall easily, not anymore. If you think you’re going to feel me up again, you are sadly mistaken.” No, she wouldn’t fall, not into bed, not into relationships, short or long. Dante was definitely into easy, at least where women were concerned.
The thought sounded shallow and callous, even to him, but it was honest enough. He hadn’t fought for anything or anyone that wasn’t assigned by the Benning Agency for a very long time.
“I’m going for my walk, now,” Sara said, her voice almost prim as she dismissed him and the box. “If I don’t hurry, I won’t get home before dark.”
“Wait one minute while I get a pair of gloves from the car.”
She