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local precinct certainly hadn’t been his favorite place, but if she’d wanted to press charges, he’d have been willing to back her up. Of course, they would have first had to ditch the car he’d been driving, a stolen Chevy Malibu—very recently stolen, a 1969 SS 396 with three-deuce carburetion, and without a doubt the hottest Chevelle he’d ever driven.
    She’d chosen Doc’s, and the former surgeon had put a few stitches in her arm and offered her a dizzying array of pharmaceuticals to stave off the pain. To his surprise, the pretty little prom princess hadn’t had a clue what she was looking at, so Hawkins had grabbed a couple of Percodans and shelled out fifty bucks for the call.
    “He’s cleaned up his act since then.” Clean and sober, Doc Blake now ran the neighborhood AA meetings, but he was still open for his unofficial late-night business, especially for the street kids.
    The sound she made from behind her hands was indecipherable, but came damn close to sounding like a very unprincesslike snort.
    Fine. She could think what she wanted, but he was calling the shots.
    “Y-you can just take me home,” she said after another long moment, lifting her head up on a steadying breath and dragging one hand back through her hair. “Please. I’ll call my own doctor from there.”
    Please.
He liked the sound of that. He liked it a lot, but her request was impossible.
    “I’m sorry. I may be able to take you home later, but I’m afraid first it’s going to be Doc’s.”
    He felt more than saw her turn in her seat and level her gaze at him.
    “May be able to take me home later?” she repeated. “Are you kidnapping me?”
    Ah, he thought. There it was, the regally cool tone of voice only a prep-school girl and senator’s daughter could pull off.
    “It’s not exactly kidnapping. There won’t be a ransom note, but we need to make sure you’re safe, and we won’t be able to do that until we figure out who blew up all those palm trees while you were standing under them.”
    Her answer was another long bout of dead silence, which he didn’t for a second misinterpret as acceptance.
    “Y-you think somebody was trying to hurt me?” she finally said, her voice a shade too breathless to continue qualifying as regally cool, a degree too hesitant to maintain even the illusion of icy calm. Dammit. “And who’s ‘w-we’? Do you mean the man you were talking with at the party?”
    “Don’t panic, Ms. Dekker,” he said calmly, and took his advice for himself. “I work for the Department of Defense, and we don’t know that anybody was trying to hurt you. That’s what we’re going to try and find out.” She was just a job tonight, just a job in a black satin thong.
    O-kay.
He shifted in his seat.
    “If you want to give your mother a call, I’ll give you a number in Washington where she can verify that my partner and I were at the Gardens tonight under the authority of the DOD. My only request is that you don’t give her my name, at least not yet. It’ll be up to my partner to decide how much she needs to know.” He tried to sound as reassuring as possible. He wanted the full ice-princess package here tonight. He needed the ice-princess package. That was the picture of her he’d nurtured all those months in prison, because what had nearly driven him insane were the memories of her heat—hot mouth, hot love, hot temper.
    And all of it was the last thing he wanted to be thinking about.
    “Department of Defense?” she finally said. “
Our
Department of Defense? You’re kidding, right?”
    Her confidence in him was downright heartwarming.
    “No.” He wasn’t kidding, dammit. He’d turned out just fine, no thanks to her. Was that so damn hard to believe?
    She mulled his answer over for an annoyingly long time.
    “So my mother didn’t hire you to be my bodyguard tonight?”
    Good God, no. “I think I’m the last person your mother would hire for any reason, but especially for watching over