To Kiss A Cowgirl

She did love a challenge.

“What happened to your leg?”

“The windshield got shattered on my cruiser and I lost control and hit a power pole.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t expected a real answer, but before she could ask about the windshield, he raised his index finger in a warning gesture.

“Don’t ask, because I’m not answering.”

“All right then,” she finally said, pulling her papers closer and doing her best to ignore the sparks snapping between them. “I think it’s time to heat up my lunch.”

“Don’t let me keep you.” He gave a slight nod and headed for his lair.

Once he disappeared, Jolie shut her eyes and let out a short breath.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_2eb91f28-4975-54ee-a38e-54dff0937f20)

DYLAN SHUT THE office door and tried to shake off the feeling that he’d just escaped. Ridiculous. He had work to do and he’d wasted too much time chitchatting with Jolie.

The office was a paper nightmare and he’d been slowly going through everything, one file at a time, deciding what was needed, what should be shredded and what could be simply trashed.

He hated paperwork—all cops hated paperwork except for the overachievers—but this seemed like a good time to make a few more inroads.

Over the course of the next hour, he filled two black garbage bags with stuff that shouldn’t have been kept in the first place: old calendars, advertisements, magazines, catalogs. It was as if Mike hadn’t thrown anything away in the past decade. Dylan couldn’t figure out why until it struck him that most of the collected junk was dated after 2005—the year Grandma, the keeper of the office, had passed away. Maybe Mike had given up after that. Maybe going through the accumulation after he’d stopped grieving had been too much. It’d obviously been too much for Finn, since he hadn’t tackled it.

Or maybe he hadn’t felt the need to hide out from his associate.

The thought came creeping out of nowhere and Dylan disregarded it almost as soon as it registered. He wasn’t hiding...he was just in his office, with the door closed and no intentions of coming out any time soon.

All right, he was hiding, but it wasn’t from Jolie. He was avoiding questions that he didn’t want to answer. Hell, he was avoiding questions he couldn’t answer because he didn’t know the answer. He’d never been one to run away from hard issues, but he didn’t want to discuss them with Jolie, and he really didn’t want to come right out and tell her to mind her own business. He sensed that, despite everything, she was honestly concerned about him on some level and it seemed cold, even for him, to tell her to back off.

And then there was the matter of the tension between them that they were both obviously aware of and both obviously ignoring. Something else he didn’t care to think about. But it was a big part of the reason he was in the office doing something that Finn could do when he came back.