That was true as well. He couldn’t help her if he didn’t know that what she was telling him was legit.
“Got it.” She nodded again. “Sorry.”
“Change your clothes.”
She stepped behind the rocking chairs, dropped the tote, and reached back for her zipper.
“Inside,” he said, through partially gritted teeth when he realized she was about to strip on the porch.
“Why? Keep facing forward, Officer. This will take two seconds and we can keep talking.”
Bold. Practical, even. See, that seemed true to her character as well. She was just going to change her clothes right out here in the open.
“There might be other people staying in the cabins,” he commented. They were on the back porch, away from the road that, honestly didn’t have much traffic anyway. But they were facing the huge flower garden and the large circle of six “bungalows”, as Heather called them, that made up the rest of the bed and breakfast.
“Well, I’m sliding the shorts up under the skirt of the dress before I take it off,” she said. “Then I’ll pull the shirt on before I slide the straps of the dress down. And I’m behind your chair. They might catch a flash or two, but it’s not going to be anything worth getting worked up about.”
Really? Because he was feeling pretty fucking worked up just imagining it.
Do not ask her about panties and a bra. Do not ask. Don’t you fucking ask.
A minute later, she stepped back in front of the rocking chairs, draped the red dress over the porch railing, set the diamond tiara on top of it, and leaned back against the railing as she reached up to gather her hair at the back of her head.
She watched him as she wove her hair into a thick, long braid and secured it with an elastic band she pulled out of seemingly nowhere. Zander had spent enough time around women, however, to know that elastic hair bands seemed to just appear when needed.
And, with her arms up, hands behind her head, wearing a soft, light gray t-shirt, it was very obvious—painfully so—that she was most definitely not wearing a bra.
Her nipples were hard points behind the soft cotton and Zander was having a hell of a time keeping his gaze on her face.
But damn, he really was pretty good at sizing up a woman's body and figuring out which size clothes she needed.
Unfortunately, he'd made a big mistake. Now Caroline Holland was dressed like a regular girl. And it turned out that made her seem even more approachable. And touchable.
Finally she finished with her hair and leaned over to pick up her iced tea. She dropped into the rocking chair again, propped her feet up on the porch railing, and gave a long, contented sigh.
Yeah, those long legs were as bare in the shorts as they had been in the evening gown. He wanted to run his palm from her ankle to her hip and see if he could elicit some goose bumps.
He gripped his fist tightly and shook himself. For fuck's sake. He was acting like he was a horny thirteen-year-old.
He'd just been out with someone last weekend. Or maybe it was the weekend before that. Or the one before that. He couldn’t remember for sure. But it had been fairly recent. It wasn't like he was going without.
Fuck, maybe he needed to call someone tonight. He needed to get rid of these ridiculous primal urges where this woman was concerned.
In his work in Autre, he'd felt frustrated, exasperated, pissed off, and protective. But intrigued? No. Not in a very long time. If ever, really. But beyond intrigued, she made him feel like he needed to stay on his toes.
And then there was the temptation. Temptation he didn't need. Being a little challenged, having a mystery to solve, that might be a little fun he could admit. Certainly, coming to the rescue always fired him up. But tempted, to the point where he was having trouble focusing on the job? No. He didn't want that.
She looked over at him. “Now what?”
He worked on seeming nonchalant. “Now you start at the beginning. Who are you exactly? What do you do exactly? And why are you in my town getting me mixed up in your trouble?”
“I've been trying to tell you that since I got here.”
“Well, now I'm ready to listen.”
She huffed out a breath and Zander could only hope that she was feeling a touch of the exasperation he was feeling. If he was going to be all worked up whenever he was in her presence, she could feel a little bit too.
“Why don’t you start with why your fiancé thought giving you a lion cub was going to be such a great wedding gift. If you're so offended by buying exotic animals, what made him think that that was the right thing to do?”
“Because he doesn’t actually know me at all.”
See, that right there was exactly the kind of thing he didn’t want to be interested in.
But he definitely fucking was.
6
Don’t push me.
His words kept playing in Caroline’s mind.
Zander Landry was dangerous. He was sharp and skeptical and he’d figured her out. And she’d confessed. Her usual tactics for getting men to let down their guard weren’t going to work with him.
She might as well spill her guts.
The urge to do just that was crazily overwhelming. She just wanted to dump it all out there and have him say, “I’ll take care of it.”
She dropped her feet from the railing to the porch floor and pushed with her toe, starting the chair rocking.
“Brantley thought I would like a lion cub because I told him I wanted one. I was trying to get him to take me where they're keeping them.”
“Where they’re keeping them? Who’s keeping them?”
“The people Brantley's working for. He and my brother are transporting the animals from the sellers to the buyers. I actually don't think Brantley has anything to do with getting the animals from wherever they're originally coming from. And he has nothing to do with setting up the sale. He's just the transporter. But still, I thought the more information I could get out of him, the closer Max could get to figuring out who was behind it.”
“Who's Max?”
Zander’s question was short and curt and Caroline glanced over at him. He was scowling at her. He almost seemed angry.
“Max is…the person I usually tell about this stuff.”
“This stuff?”
Caroline stopped the chair rocking and sat forward. But that didn’t quite give her the direct eye contact she wanted. She set her tea down, grasped the seat of the chair, jerked it around it so she was facing Zander more directly, then leaned in so her forearms rested on her thighs, mimicking his position.
“Yeah. Stuff like embezzlement. Like tax evasion. Like fucking underage girls.” She watched his perfectly stoic gaze flicker at that. “The stuff I find out about the horrible people my family now hangs out with. Though the underage girl thing Max and I turned directly over the cops. Tax evasion and embezzlement takes a little more investigation and the public exposure is as bad for them as the legal implications. But the truly evil shit, like rape and animal abuse, we know can't wait around for headlines.”
A muscle tensed along Zanders jaw. “Who the fuck is Max?”
“Max is the journalist that I give information to. That's where the big breaking stories in the newspapers come from. It's how Paul Dixon was brought down in the big embezzlement case three years ago. It's how the feds ended up raiding Arthur Taylor's mansion and offices last year. It's how Heath Connor ended up divorced and in jail because of his affair with his seventeen-year-old daughter’s best friend.”