Seduce Me Tonight Read Online Free PDF Page B

nodded, studying his hands as if they contained the secrets of the universe.
    ‘What was it? Homicide?’
    He jerked his head up. ‘How’d you know?’
    I shrugged, almost embarrassed by my own nonchalance. Everything I knew about police work was second-hand information. I’d feel differently if I’d been the one standing over the body. ‘Seen that expression before. First one, huh?’
    ‘Yeah. Never seen a … dead person … before.’
    ‘That sucks,’ I said, filling a beer glass with seltzer. ‘What’s your name, kid?’
    ‘Williams,’ he said. ‘And I’m no kid.’
    ‘Yeah, I know. What’s your first name?’
    ‘Leo, ma’am.’
    ‘Well, Leo, I’m no ma’am. My name is Kayla,’ I told him. ‘This is my bar.’
    ‘Yeah, I know. The guys told me.’
    I wondered what else the guys had told him. Cops talk. They’re more gossipy than a bunch of housewives drinking the kitchen sherry. I knew more about their lives than their own families did.
    I fished a couple of maraschino cherries out of the container under the bar and dropped them into his glass, sending little tendrils of syrup spiralling down into the carbonated seltzer. I pushed the glass in front of him. ‘There you go.’
    He held the glass up to the light, studying it. ‘What’s with the cherries?’
    ‘For your first homicide. You broke your cherry, kiddo.’
    He rewarded me with the first smile I’d ever seen on his face, which served to reinforce how young he looked. ‘Thanks. You just made my night.’
    I felt something spread through my belly the way the cherry syrup spread through his glass. ‘Any time,’ I said, putting more meaning into the words than I intended.
    I left him alone to drink his cherry-flavoured soda, but there wasn’t quite so much tension in his shoulders as there had been when he walked in. That made me feel good. Bartending is about more than serving up drinks – it’s about understanding people and what they need. Or maybe I’m just trying to justify having the hots for a young cop.
    After that, we were on a first-name basis. Some nights, he’d walk in with that familiar dejected expression and say, ‘It’s cherry time, Kayla.’ Then, if the bar was slow, he’d tell me what he’d been through that night. Sometimes he’d wait for me if I was busy and that gave me a little thrill, even though a part of me believed he only saw me as his bartending therapist.
    I was there when Leo made his first suicide call and I listened without comment as he described the knife wounds on the woman’s wrist and how she looked almost happy in death. He told me about his love of animals and the first time he had to put a bullet in the head of an injured deer hit by a car. I dared to pat his hand when he told me about his first experience with a car full of drunk teenagers, half of them dead on the scene after a collision with a tree. That one brought tears to my eyes, thinking about my own two sons.
    They weren’t all traumatic events; some were good career firsts. His first search warrant, his first drug arrest, the first court case he won. Other firsts were just plain embarrassing and he’d relate them in hushed tones, looking over his shoulder to make sure none of the other guys overheard his shame. Some things he could laugh at, like the first time he caught a couple going at it in the backseat of a car. That one made him blush and his blushing turned me on.
    ‘They didn’t even care that they were sitting there naked,’ he said, naïve incredulity in his voice.
    ‘Lust makes people do crazy things.’ I thought back to some of my antics, not all of them in the distant past. ‘Lust is the devil.’
    He shrugged, as if he didn’t have a clue. ‘I guess.’
    We had an easy camaraderie that wasn’t quite like what I had with the other guys in the precinct. There was no swagger to Leo, no macho bullshit to peel away like layers of an onion. At night, after I locked up the bar and headed home alone, I