Blazing Star. Suzanne Ellison

lock the bathroom door behind him, Brick opened it a crack and tossed her his towel.

      “Hang it up, would you, bunkie?” he asked with a fresh chuckle in his voice. Once more he dazzled her with his dimpled smile.

      Suddenly Karen saw the rest of him—every manly inch—in her female imagination. It didn’t seem to make much difference that his body was completely hidden by the door.

CHAPTER THREE

      BRICK MANAGED to beat Karen to the station house, but Sergeant Steve Fletcher poked his head out of the locker room and motioned him inside the moment he arrived. About Brick’s age and one of his closest friends on the force, Steve had been divorced for years and had two children. At the moment he was living with a pretty young woman in nearby Belton and trying to decide if he was ready to take the plunge again.

      Steve was not alone in the locker room. Every man on the day shift was waiting for Brick, plus two guys from the night shift about to go home.

      Some of them looked angry. Some of them looked shell-shocked. Orson Clayton, who was overweight and had trouble keeping his uniform buttoned, wore a pathetic frown. Brick remembered only too well Karen’s scathing comments the day before about Clayton’s appearance—delivered in front of the other men.

      “You’ve gotta do something about Captain Curvaceous, Brick,” was Steve’s blunt greeting. “We’ve been talking it over, and we’re just not going to last. It’d be bad enough to take this kind of abuse from a man, even if we deserved it. But from a looker like that...”

      “If I didn’t have another baby on the way, I’d quit right now,” vowed Clayton. “I’m a damn good cop, Brick. You know I’ve never shirked my duty, never run from a fight, never protested when you or Paul asked me to put in overtime. But I’ll be damned if I’ll take fashion lessons from a female!”

      Each one of the men had a specific complaint to air. Some of them objected to writing meticulous reports; some objected to being told to shine their shoes. All of them objected to having to put the word Captain in front of a woman’s name. And all of them looked to Brick to make Karen vanish so everything would be the way it used to be.

      Brick himself was torn. Up until this morning, he’d been quite certain that Karen Keppler was the enemy, a vicious-hearted woman who had no redeeming human features despite her tantalizing beauty. But during their latest sparring session, he’d glimpsed something in Karen he hadn’t seen before. A reason for her toughness...and a powerful longing for respect.

      She wasn’t at all the cold fish he’d first expected. There was a genuine person inside that protective shell...an intelligent woman with hopes and fears and maybe even a sense of humor. Karen was determined to do her duty, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed being disliked. Brick was quite certain that his own resentment had truly wounded her.

      After promising not to stab her in the back, he now felt a curious obligation to defend her from this communal onslaught. “Look, guys,” he said carefully, “we’ve got a difficult situation here. At the moment, this woman is the boss. Paul can’t help us anymore. I think our best bet is to try to play the game her way, at least until we get the lay of the land.”

      “Why doesn’t somebody lay her instead?” one of the men joked.

      “Well, hell, Brick’s got the best shot at it. He’s sleeping right next door to her.”

      Brick battled with a sudden memory of the morning’s tango in the bathroom...Karen in her robe, he in his towel. He was rarely uneasy with women, but this morning he’d felt positively disconnected...and, to his absolute fury, he’d also felt aroused. He didn’t know what she’d been wearing underneath her robe and that magnificent black mane, but he knew it wasn’t a uniform. And he also knew, though he hated like hell to admit it, that he’d spent entirely too much time imagining what she looked like in the altogether.

      His imagination was speaking to him now.

      “I don’t know if ol’ Brick could stand sleeping with that porcupine. Talk about whips and chains! Can you imagine—”

      “My point,” Brick said firmly, uncomfortable with the tone the men’s jokes were taking, “is that the oath I swore when I became a police officer means I have to obey her...at least when I’m on duty.”

      Steve shook his head. “You can’t mean you’re just going to roll over and play dead, Brick! You can’t mean you’re just giving up.”

      Brick’s lips tightened as he thought about the job that was rightfully his. But Karen’s rank required his public respect, and to his surprise, her honesty this morning commanded his personal respect as well.

      Swallowing his own apprehensions, he insisted, “As long as she’s the captain, she’s the captain. No matter how bitter this pill is to swallow, in the line of duty we’ve got to give her the same allegiance we’d give any other cop.”

      Orson Clayton said, “Hell, Brick, I’d like to strangle that broad, but that doesn’t mean I’d ever forget she’s a fellow cop when the chips are down.”

      “Neither would I,” agreed Steve. “Neither would any of us. But I can’t see her rushing to an officer-in-need-of-assistance call if she’d scheduled the afternoon to dictate some damned memo.”

      A day-shift guy said, “It’s just not fair.”

      Another growled, “Dammit, we can’t count on her out there! I don’t want to get shot just because she does something stupid.”

      Brick wondered, as the men shuffled out of the room grumbling, if Karen’s worst-case scenario might someday come to pass. What if she gave an order in a crisis and they all looked to Brick instead? Professional prudence would dictate that he relay his captain’s commands no matter what his own judgment told him. But his career wouldn’t be worth a damn to him if he ignored his own conscience and one of these fellows ended up dead.

      * * *

      BRICK LOOKED uncomfortable, but not surprised, when Karen asked him to give her a tour of the town later in the morning. Their odd encounter in the bathroom seemed to have cleared the air. She decided to ignore his whimsical farewell—bunkie, indeed!—and he seemed willing to give the illusion of respect during their encounters at the station house. There was a difference in the other men this morning also. They didn’t look quite so sullen and shocked as they had the day before.

      Karen usually drove the first time she got in a car with a man, just to set him thinking of her in an equal light. This time, however, she decided that she needed to listen and observe. It was Brick’s town and Brick’s beat. She sat on the passenger side of the cruiser as he effortlessly took the wheel and filled her in on all the subtle things that a police officer needs to know about a new town. She couldn’t remember everything, but she made mental notes and a few written ones, too...especially on everything that pertained to Judson Ingalls.

      As he drove, Brick recounted the highlights of Tyler’s history: tall tales of a Winnebago burial ground, stories of the original German and Swedish settlers, the beginnings of the now-fading tradition of dairy farming. When he told her a funny story about a local man who’d lost his favorite cow and found her in the middle of the town-square fountain, Karen was inspired to regale him with the highlights of her own disastrous first day as a rookie. They shared a hearty laugh together, and a little more ice was broken.

      “This is the poorer side of town,” Brick informed her as they cruised to the south after riding for half an hour. “Not that any part of Tyler is really slummy. We’re not rich, we’re not poor. We’re just heartland.”

      Karen took the opportunity Brick had unwittingly given her to probe into the subject of her secret investigation. “Does that go for the Ingallses, too?”

      He raised an eyebrow. “What do you know about the Ingalls clan?”

      “Not