“Okay, good. Do they have hot corned-beef sandwiches?”
“Yes. We’ll get that for you.”
After lunch, he and Sierra left Tori’s place to return to work. Sierra was busy on other cases that detectives needed her to do sketches for, and he was still trying to run down other leads he had to finish up. Then it was time to return home. “Dancing tonight at the wolf restaurant and club?”
Sierra yawned and smiled at him. “How about tomorrow night? TGIF. No work the next day, just helping Tori unpack her boxes. I barely helped her at all before I had to start sketching perps per witness accounts.”
He smiled back at Sierra. “I think we need to go to bed early tonight.”
“No wolf run?”
“No. Let’s do that Friday night too. We’ll be at the wolf club, and it’s near the pack leader’s ranch. We can just run afterward. Like you said, we don’t have to go to work the next day.”
“Okay, so what do we do tonight?”
“I can grill chicken for dinner. We have avocados, spinach, tomatoes for a salad, with roasted potatoes. And we can just watch something on TV and go to bed. We’ve been burning the candle at both ends, so we’ll need to get some sleep.”
She smiled as he parked her car in the garage. “I imagine we’ll get to a bit more than that.”
“Exactly. That’s why we need to retire early…so afterward we can still get some sleep.”
She chuckled as they went into the house.
“Oh, and about my car… It’s going to cost a couple thousand dollars.” He pulled chicken out of the fridge.
“Oh, no. Can you afford it? I can help out if you can’t.” She got the potatoes out of his pantry.
He smiled. “Yeah, Burt Barnes’s car insurance is covering it.”
“Oh, good. So when will your Hummer be repaired?” She began peeling the potatoes, then wrapped them in foil for the grill.
“Monday morning. That means, if you don’t mind, I’ll just be driving your car for a while longer. Or I can rent a car. The insurance will pay for it.”
“No, that’s okay. As long as we’re going to work together and I just need to ride with whoever needs a witness sketch, or I’ll be at the office. And that way I’ll be protected.”
“That’s true.”
They had dinner while watching a movie, just chilling and enjoying themselves. Once the movie was done, they went to bed. It was only nine, but they weren’t going to sleep just yet!
* * *
Friday was a hectic day, and after doing sketches of four bodies in the morgue they needed to identify, Sierra was so ready to call it a day and just dance the night away at the wolf club. Adam was careful not to show her a lot of affection at the police bureau or it wouldn’t be professional, but when she had viewed the last body of the day and returned to the bureau, he gave her a hug and a kiss.
She really didn’t think she’d ever get used to doing morgue sketches. But she was so glad Adam was there to give her a hug afterward and make her feel so much better.
“Do you still want to go dancing tonight?” he asked as they got into her car and headed home.
“Oh, yeah. Unless you don’t feel up to it.” Even though she wanted to go, she had to make sure he was feeling just as eager to go out. She could just envision dragging him onto the dance floor and him being tired and worn out and wishing they’d just stayed home. They were going to be busy all weekend too.
“Yep, I’ve thought of nothing else all day.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I bet.” She figured he would have been busy thinking about all the cases he had to work on, not about dancing with her tonight.
“Truly. What better way to show the whole pack we’re together than to go to the restaurant and dance with you, have dinner with you, and show off we’re a couple.”
She smiled. “Okay, gotcha.” She should have known that was why he wanted to go with her there. “Uh, you do know how to dance, right?”
Chapter 21
As soon as Adam and Sierra arrived at the Forest Club, she was surprised to see how busy it was. Of course that meant that the food was great, the music was riveting, and the patrons were a lot of fun. But they probably should have made a reservation first. “It’s packed,” she said, worried. They could probably dance a few dances, but getting a table wasn’t happening. Not tonight anyway.
“I’ve got reservations.”
She threw her arms around Adam and hugged and kissed him. “You are so my hero.”
He laughed and kissed her, waving at another couple who had just arrived. “I learned my lesson when I came here on a Friday night a year ago with a date and there were no seats to be had. She was an out-of-state wolf, just passing through, and she was so disappointed. I took her to a steak restaurant instead, but I never saw her again after that. No great loss, but I never did that again.”
Sierra hurried him inside. “I’m glad we weren’t the ones who were out of luck. I’ve never been here to dance. My brother kept raving about their steaks, so he bought his mate and me lunch there. I always wanted to go dancing here, but I had to call it quits with Richard first.”
“I learned from a girl I dated when I was younger. She loved to dance. She was more like a sister to me than anything, but I was always glad I had learned.”
“My brother and dad taught me.”
They were shown to their seats and given menus and glasses of water. The place was full of wolves, some eating and drinking, others already dancing.
As soon as Sierra and Adam had ordered their meals, she was taking him to the dance floor to prove to her that he liked to dance, just like she did.
This was so nice, the decor woodsy as if they were in a forest, lights flashing over the dance floor, and a great band. And Adam was a dream to dance with.
They moved across the floor in slow motion, glued to each other during the slow dances and shimmying to the fast ones.
“This could be a mistake, you know,” Sierra said as she waltzed with him again, their bodies pressed intimately against each other’s.
He glanced over at their table. “You mean because our meals were just delivered to our table?”
She nipped at his chin. “No, because we’ll want to take this to somewhere a lot more secluded.”
He smiled down at her and kissed her nose. “Now you’re talking.”
They finished the dance and then headed to their table to eat. Though they saw their pack leader and his mate and several others they knew, everyone was just waving at them, smiling but not intruding. She was impressed. She wasn’t used to that because when she and Richard went somewhere to eat, there were no other wolves about, no pack, so she hadn’t realized how the pack would react to her dating Adam.