Page 2 of Bachelor Cop Finally Caught? (Hot off the Press! 2)

Wrinkling her nose in response to the bad joke, she opened the door wider and motioned for him to enter. “Since the place is clean, you might as well come in.”

“How could I resist that gracious invitation?” Pulling his right hand from behind his back, he handed her a wrapped package as he passed her. “Happy birthday, Lindsey. Sorry it’s a day late.”

Kicking the door closed behind him, she studied the pretty paper and the jaunty bow. “No way you wrapped that. It’s too pretty.”

“You’re right. I had it wrapped at the store.”

“It’s almost too fancy to open.”

He grinned. “What makes you think there’s anything inside? Maybe the pretty package is all I got you.”

“And maybe you’re full of hot air.”

Laughing, he ruffled her hair—exactly the way he had when she was a kid tagging at his and her brother’s heels. His nine-inch advantage over her five-foot-three height made it even easier for him to treat her like a kid. “Just open the present, princess.”

His use of the childhood nickname made it difficult for her to keep her smile in place. “Yeah. Sure.”

With the ease of someone who’d spent a lot of time in this house during the past twenty years, Dan settled on the couch, an arm draped across the back, his legs stretched in front of him. His chestnut hair tumbled over his forehead, ending in a fringe just over his dark brown eyes. He looked tired, and there was a slight touch of gray at his temples now, but Lindsey could still see traces of the handsome teenager he’d been in the roughly good-looking man he had become.

She sat in a nearby chair, the gift in her lap. Though she usually ripped into her presents at light speed, she opened this one with excruciating slowness—just because she knew it would drive Dan crazy.

“You’re going to have another birthday before you get into that,” he complained, as she’d known he would.

“I want to savor the moment. You’re usually giving me grief instead of presents.”

“I give you grief? You’re the gung-ho reporter who stays on my heels all the time looking for a hot lead—as if there’s all that much to report in Edstown.”

“Just doing my job, Chief.”

“Yeah, well, you sure as hell make it tough for me to do mine sometimes.”

Because this was an old and generally unproductive argument, Lindsey let the comment pass as she peeled the last bit of paper away from the box. A moment later she swallowed a lump in her throat so she could say, “Dan, it’s beautiful. Thank you.”

His smile was just a bit smug. “Do I know what you like or what?”

Yes, he knew what she liked—when she was twelve. She had collected unicorn figurines from the time she was a little girl until she’d gone off to college. Her room had been filled with them, the walls covered with unicorn posters. Now Dan had bought her a blown-glass unicorn for her twenty-sixth birthday. Somehow he’d completely missed the fact that she was no longer the little girl he’d known so long ago.

Her heart aching, she set the unicorn—a perfect symbol for hopeless fantasies, she reflected glumly—on the coffee table. “Have you had lunch? I was just about to eat.”

“As a matter of fact, I’m starved. What’ve you got?”

“Sandwiches.”

“Just what I had a craving for,” he drawled.

With a weak laugh, Lindsey led the way into the kitchen. They spent the next half hour munching ham-and-Swiss-on-rye sandwiches, pickle spears, and raw vegetables with ranch dip. During the casual meal, they talked about her brother—Dan’s best friend since adolescence—and their mutual friends in Edstown. She asked about his parents, who were, as usual, spending the winter at an RV park in southern Texas; he assured her they were fine, that he’d spoken to them only the day before.

There were a couple of subjects they carefully avoided, such as the arsonist who’d been eluding the local authorities. And then there was the one topic neither of them ever mentioned—Dan’s bitterly unpleasant divorce two and a half years ago, barely six months before Lindsey had moved back to take care of her father. Even if Lindsey had wanted to bring up his marriage debacle—which she didn’t—Dan would not have cooperated. He’d forbidden everyone to even mention his ex-wife’s name in his presence.

“So, anyway, the noise Mrs. Treadway reported hearing outside her window was nothing more than a broken tree branch tapping against the glass. Unfortunately, by the time we managed to find that out, Jack and I were wet to the bone, covered

in mud, half-frozen, and we’d narrowly escaped being midnight snacks for Mrs. Treadway’s rottweiler.”

Lindsey winced even as she laughed at Dan’s wryly told anecdote. “So you had a close encounter with Baby, did you?”

He all but shuddered. “Baby missed biting me in a very sensitive area by an extremely narrow margin. I swear I felt his hot breath right on my—”

“I get the picture,” Lindsey said quickly. There were some mental images she wasn’t prepared to deal with right now—Dan’s “sensitive areas” among them. “Baby’s not as bad as he pretends to be. Around Mrs. Treadway, he’s just a big, dopey puppy.”

---