“We’ll talk,” he said, and headed for the kitchen door.
The door closed behind him. Still gripping the toolbox, Lucas rubbed the back of his neck and took a deep breath.
Where in the hell did that come from? Alana always seemed too—he hated to say innocent because a decade on the Denver PD and five years on the DEA task force had trampled any notions he had of innocence, but that was sure what it seemed like. She blushed, for God’s sake, and she did it a lot. She’d blushed as she signed the rental agreement on the house next door to him, and Lucas hadn’t been able to get the memory out of his mind. It was so completely small-town librarian, which she wasn’t, and so innocently sexy.
He was beginning to suspect she wasn’t innocently anything.
He knew she watched him, but the only time she ever said anything was when something broke. Then after he’d gone over and fixed whatever it was, she’d turn on a throaty jazz singer, hand him a drink, and struggle to make small talk. Which was strange in itself. In his experience, women as polished as Alana knew what they wanted and how to ask for it, but Alana turned pink every time she had to ask him for anything.
And yet she’d come on to him tonight. And he’d let weeks of celibacy dictate his response. She was an enigma he’d have to figure out later—after they finished what they had started.
He inhaled deeply, reaching for his composure, trying to reroute blood from his cock to his brain. Then he crossed their driveways to his house. The purple-blue twilight carried the scent of a greening prairie and texture of starlight. Maybe he’d take a couple of days off and go rock climbing in the Black Hills. It had been years since he’d been cranking, long enough for memories to fade.
He’d go. After Alana left. Just in case she wanted to take what happened tonight to its natural conclusion, then maybe do it again.
That’s an excuse, and you know it. You’re procrastinating.
For a very good reason . . .
“Hi, Mitch,” he said to the man standing on his front porch. He was small and slight, wearing jeans, boots, and a jacket. His gray hair, maintained every week by the barbershop Lucas visited quarterly at best, was neatly parted and combed.
“Lucas.” Lucas climbed the stairs and opened the porch. “Some guard dog you’ve got here,” he said. Duke leaned against his leg, eyes closed in satisfaction as Mitch scratched the sweet spot behind his ears.
“What’s up?” Lucas asked. He opened the front door and walked inside. Mitch and Duke followed but stayed in the living room as he stowed the toolbox in the hall closet.
“I thought we’d head to the meeting together,” Mitch said.
Lucas narrowed his eyes at the mayor. Maybe Alana was more savvy than he thought, because Mitch played the political game with the ruthlessness of a Washington insider. Most of the time he went to council meetings on his own. There’d been a small but noticeable spike in burglaries lately, which meant that the discussion about renovating the library would face opposition from people more concerned with public safety. While Mitch wasn’t one to sell his seed corn to pay for the harvest, he’d been pretty tight-lipped about why he hired Alana temporarily, or how committed he was to a large-scale library renovation. Tonight he wanted to show up with the chief of police by his side.
“What are you up to, Mitch?”
“Just wanted some company.” Mitch unwittingly copied Alana’s move and glanced significantly at the living room wall. “Problem next door?”
Lucas kept his face blank. “Just seventy-year-old plumbing,” he said noncommittally.
“You should replace it, or just sell the house.”
“I’ll replace it when Alana leaves and I renovate the kitchen,” Lucas said, “but you keep extending her contract. Are librarians that hard to find?”
“The right one is,” Mitch said easily. “Look how long it took me to hire you.”
Lucas called bullshit on that one, because Mitch took exactly two minutes to offer Lucas the job when he called to ask about it. At the time it seemed like a good career move that just might save his marriage, too.
He’d been wrong on both counts.
“Let’s go,” Mitch said. “We can talk on the way.”