Page 9 of Beyond the Badge: Crew

He’d be wrong. She picked this vehicle for a reason.

“591.”

His eyebrows rose just slightly above his sunglasses as he continued around her vehicle, acting as if her form of transportation needed to pass inspection and not her.

She decided to hit him with a couple more facts. “It has the capability of going zero-to-sixty in 3.2 seconds and tops out at 190 miles per hour.”

His step stuttered. “Damn,” he said under his breath.

“Like I said, it would blow your bike’s doors off.Ifit had doors.”

“Not off the line, it wouldn’t. But when it came to distance, you’d be correct. My bike’s top speed is 160. But anyone doing 160 while on two wheels on Pennsylvania roads has a death wish.”

“They don’t call it Pot Hole Pennsylvania for nothing.”

His eyes would’ve locked with hers if he wasn’t wearing those mirrored sunglasses. Funny, most of the assholes she knew preferred mirrored sunglasses. They thought it gave them some sort of edge. All it did was make douchebags easily identifiable.

“Never heard it called that but even so, it’s painfully true.”

Oh, look at that.Did he just pull an inch of that long stick out of his ass?

She was used to having to prove herself, dealing with Crew and his task force would be no different.

He finished circling her car, stopped just inches away and tipped his face down to hers. “You figure out your living arrangements?”

“Not yet.”

“What I’m hearing is, you failed your first assignment.”

Apparently, he was going to do his best to make her miserable so she’d ask to be reassigned elsewhere.

He didn’t know her. Because if he did, he’d know that trying to push her out would only make her dig her heels in deeper.

She was stubborn like that.

Don’t tell me I can’t do something because that will only make me work harder to prove you wrong.

But he didn’t need to know that. He’d find out soon enough. “Since you didn’t give me a deadline to complete it, I don’t consider that a failure.”

“You were almost late this morning.”

“The word ‘almost’ means that I wasn’t. And it had nothing to do with my commute, it was because you failed to tell me that the entrance to this place was hidden at the rear of the building.”

“Since we deal in investigations, that was test number two.”

Bullshit.“Really,” she said dryly.

“Really,” he echoed.

“What’s my third test?”

“Now if I told you that ahead of time then it wouldn’t be a test.” He tipped his head toward the side of the building. “Let’s go.”

“No wonder your wife divorced you,” she muttered under her breath.

His head twitched and his shoulders stiffened but he kept going without breaking his stride.

He led her around to a covered exterior stairway. On their climb up the steps, they passed a landing on the second floor, but he didn’t stop.

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