impressive.”
“She called me,” Harvard said, “a bigot.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got to admit, you’ve been pretty narrow-minded when it comes to P.J.’s part in this exercise.”
Damn, Joe Cat thought he was a bigot, too.
Joe finished his beer. “I’ve got to go. That was Ronnie who paged me. Frankie’s had an ear infection over the past few days, and now he’s throwing up the antibiotic. I’m meeting them at the hospital in fifteen minutes.”
“Is it serious?”
“Nah, the kid’s fine. I keep telling Ronnie, babies barf. It’s what they do. She’s just not going to sleep tonight until she hears a doctor say it, too.” Joe rolled his eyes. “Of course, she probably won’t even sleep then. I keep telling her it’s the baby who’s supposed to wake the mother up at night, not the other way around. But she has a friend who lost a kid to SIDS. I’m hoping by the time Frank turns two, Veronica will finally sleep through the night.” Joe picked up his jacket from the back of the chair he’d thrown it over.
“You sure there’s nothing I can do to help?”
The captain turned to look at him. “Yeah,” he said. “There is something you can do. You can stay away from P. J. Richards after hours. It’s clear you two aren’t ever going to be best friends.”
There was that word again. Friends.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned as a commander,” Joe continued, “it’s that you can’t force people to like each other.”
The stupid thing was, Harvard did like P.J. He liked her a lot.
“But it’s not too much to ask that you and she work together in a civil manner,” Joe continued.
“I’ve been civil,” Harvard said. “She’s the one who walked away in a huff.”
Joe nodded. “I’ll speak to her about that in the morning.”
“No, Cat…” Harvard took a deep breath and started again. “With your permission, Captain, allow me to handle the situation.” He wasn’t a bigot, but he was guilty of generalizing without noting that there was, of course, a minuscule amount of the population that was an exception to the rule. And maybe P. J. Richards was in that tiny percentage.
Joe Cat looked at Harvard and grinned. “She drives you crazy, but you can’t stay away from her, can you? Aw, H., you’re in trouble, man.”
Harvard shook his head. “No, Captain, you’ve got it wrong. I just want to be the lady’s friend.”
They both knew he was lying through his teeth.
CHAPTER SIX
“THAT’S AN APOLOGY?” P.J. laughed. “You say, ‘Yes, I’m guilty of being small-minded when it comes to my opinions about women, but oh, by the way, I still think I’m right’?”
Harvard shook his head. “I didn’t say that.”
“Yes, you did. I’m paraphrasing, but that is the extent of the message you just delivered.”
“What I said was that I think women who have the, shall we say, aggressive tendencies needed to handle frontline pressures are the exception rather than the rule.”
“They’re few and far between, was what you said.” P.J. crossed her arms. “As in practically nonexistent.”
Harvard turned away, then turned back. He was trying hard to curb his frustration, she had to give him that much. “Look, I didn’t come here to argue with you. In fact, I want us to try to figure out a way we can get along over the next six weeks. Joe Cat’s aware that we’re having some kind of personality clash. I want him to be able to look over, see us working side by side without this heavy cloud of tension following us around. Do you think we can manage to do that?”
“The captain knows?” Every muscle in P.J.’s body ached, and she finally gave in to the urge to sit on the soft leather of the lobby couch.
Harvard sat across from her. “It’s not that big a deal. When you’re dealing with mostly alpha personalities, you’ve got to expect that sometimes the fit won’t work.” He gazed at her steadily, leaning slightly forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “But I think that transferring out of this particular program isn’t an option for either of us. Both of us want to be here badly enough to put in a little extra effort, am I right?”
“You are.” She smiled. “For once.”
Harvard smiled, too. “A joke. Much better than fighting.”
“A half a joke,” she corrected him.
His smile widened, and she saw a flash of his perfect white teeth. “That’s a start,” he told her.
P.J. took a chance and went directly to the bottom line. “Seriously, Senior Chief, I need you to treat me as an equal.”
She was gazing at him, her pretty face so somber. She’d changed out of her uniform shirt and into a snugly fitting T-shirt boasting the logo, Title Nine Sports. She had put on running shorts, too, and Harvard forced his gaze away from the graceful shape of her bare legs and back to her eyes. “I thought I had been.”
“You’re always watching me—checking up on me as if I were some little child, making sure I haven’t wandered away from the rest of the kindergarten class.”
Harvard shook his head. “I don’t—”
“Yeah,” she said, “you do. You’re always looking to see if I need some help. ‘Is that pack too heavy for you, Ms. Richards?’ ‘Careful of your step, Ms. Richards.’ ‘Let me give you a boost into the boat, Ms. Richards.’”
“I remember doing that,” Harvard admitted. “But I gave Schneider and Greene a boost, too.”
“Maybe so, but you didn’t announce it to the world, the way you did with me.”
“I announced it with you because I felt it was only polite to give you a proper warning before I grabbed your butt.”
She gazed steadily into his eyes, refusing to acknowledge the embarrassment that was heating her cheeks. “Well, it just so happens that I didn’t need a boost. I’m plenty strong enough to pull myself into that boat on my own.”
“It’s harder than it looks.”
“I didn’t get a chance to find that out, did I?”
She was right. She may indeed have found that she couldn’t pull herself into the boat without a boost, but she hadn’t had that opportunity, and so she was right. Harvard did the only thing he could do.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have assumed. It’s just that women tend not to have the upper body strength necessary—”
“I do.” She cut him off. “It’s one of the times my size works to my advantage. I can probably do more chin ups than you, because I’m lifting less than you.”
“I’ll grant that you weigh less because you’re smaller, but everything’s smaller. Your arms are smaller.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t have muscles.” P.J. pushed up the sleeve of her T-shirt and flexed her biceps. “Check this out. Feel this. That’s one solid muscle.”
She actually wanted him to touch her.
“Check it out,” she urged him.
Harvard was so much bigger than she was, he could have encircled her entire upper arm with one hand—flexed biceps and all. But he knew if he did that, she would think he was mocking her. Instead, he touched her lightly, his fingers against the firmness of her muscle, his thumb against the inside of her arm. Her skin was sinfully soft, impossibly smooth. And as he moved his