The Date Next Door. GINA WILKINS

of home shopping; it seemed to have made sense to her when he said that he’d seen the For Sale sign in the yard of this house and had made an offer the next morning.

      Nor had she asked, as quite a few others had, why he wasn’t interested in living in a more upscale, moneyed area—say, on a golf course or in a gated lakeside lot. Nic seemed to understand that he’d been looking for a private retreat, not a showplace—and for now, that was here.

      Joel still couldn’t say whether Nic had been in love with her cowboy or had just considered him a pleasant diversion from the demands of her job. He suspected the latter, but since she wasn’t one to share her deepest feelings, he couldn’t say for sure.

      He hoped she hadn’t been badly hurt. Nic was too nice a person to have her heart broken. His doctoring skills didn’t extend to repairing that particularly painful condition.

      He hadn’t even been able to fix his own.

      

      “And then he had the nerve to offer me twenty dollars to tell him who’s going to win the football game Monday night. Twenty dollars!”

      With indulgent amusement, Nic watched her friend Aislinn Flaherty furiously pace the living room. Aislinn’s near-black hair was escaping its neat up-twist, so that long, wispy curls bounced around her indignant face. The midcalf-length tiered brown skirt she wore with a belted camel-colored tunic top whipped around her shapely legs with each forceful turn.

      Aislinn made a habit of dressing conservatively almost to the point of blandness, but her efforts were pretty much wasted. She was still striking enough to draw more attention to herself than she would have liked.

      “What did you say to that offer?” Nic asked—as if she didn’t already know.

      “I told him that if I were psychic—which, of course, I am not—I would hardly sell my services so cheaply. And then I told him that if I had been psychic, I’d have known better than to agree to a blind date with him.”

      “So what you’re saying is that your date didn’t go very well,” Nic drawled, smothering a grin.

      Aislinn shot her a look of reproval. “This isn’t funny, Nic. It was a miserable evening.”

      Relenting, Nic shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of it. But you have to admit both of us have had some pretty disastrous dates lately.”

      Actually, Nic had only been out twice since her breakup with Brad in July, three months ago. Neither outing had been successful enough for a second date with either guy. Since available singles were pretty hard to find in a town the size of Cabot, Arkansas, her social life wasn’t looking too promising for the foreseeable future.

      “Tell me about it.” Plopping onto Nic’s brown leather sofa, Aislinn crossed her arms over her shapely chest and pouted. “I should have known better than to let Pamela set me up. She thinks it’s so funny to tell everyone I’m…well, different. But I thought I had convinced her to quit saying that.”

      “You know Pamela. She thinks it’s cool to claim to know an honest-to-goodness psychic.”

      Aislinn sighed gustily. She had been trying for almost all her twenty-eight years to convince everyone that she had no supernatural abilities. She just had “feelings” sometimes, she always added earnestly. Feelings that had an uncanny record of coming true. Nothing more than somewhat-better-than-average intuition, she said.

      Having known Aislinn since kindergarten, Nic thought the truth lay somewhere in the middle. She couldn’t explain it any better than Aislinn—but she had learned to take her friend’s “feelings” seriously.

      Aislinn shook her head impatiently. “Enough about my lousy date. How are things going with you?”

      Nic unbuckled her heavy utility belt and wearily set her weapon aside. She had gotten home less than twenty minutes earlier, arriving just in time to greet Aislinn, who had been invited for an evening of pizza and gossip. “Long day.”

      “The Castleberry break-in?” Aislinn asked sympathetically.

      “Yeah. We found evidence that it was Mr. Castleberry’s nephew who ransacked the place. Kid’s an addict with a record of B and E, but Castleberry couldn’t believe the boy would rob the only relative who has stood up for him during the past few years. I think I finally convinced him that there’s no room for love or loyalty when drugs take over someone’s life.”

      “I had a feeling it was a male relative. I guess I watch too many of those TV crime shows, despite you making fun of me for it.”

      “Yeah. Probably.” Stretching, Nic rose from the chair she had fallen into to listen to Aislinn’s account of last night’s unsuccessful date. “Why don’t you order the pizza while I change out of my uniform? Help yourself to something to drink—I’ve got sodas and wine in the fridge.”

      It was one of the many benefits of being friends for so long, she thought as she emerged from a ten-minute shower and climbed into a pair of purple plaid cotton drawstring pants and a lavender baby T-shirt. She didn’t have to stand on formality with Aislinn or bother to entertain her every moment. Leaving her collar-length naturally blond-and-brown hair to dry in a tousled bob, she slid her feet into purple slippers and wandered into the kitchen to rejoin her friend.

      Aislinn sat at the kitchen table with a glass of white wine and the morning newspaper, which Nic hadn’t yet had a chance to open. It didn’t surprise her that Aislinn had bypassed the headlines and was reading the comic strips instead. Aislinn tended to shy away from crime reports. She never said why, exactly, but Nic suspected it was because Aislinn got too many unsettling “feelings” when she read those grim accounts.

      “So did you finish that monster cake today?” she asked, opening the refrigerator to take out a diet soda for herself. “The funky blue one?”

      “It isn’t blue. It’s aquamarine.”

      “Whatever.” Nic carried her soda to the table and helped herself to the sports pages as she took a chair across from Aislinn. “It looked blue to me.”

      “Trust me. The bride would be very upset if the cake she ordered to exactly match her bridesmaids’ hideous aquamarine dresses came out too blue. It matches exactly. And, yes, I finished it.”

      “How many hours did you put into that one?”

      “More than I want to count,” Aislinn replied with a groan. “I never again want to see another aquamarine frosting rose.”

      “The cake really should have been horribly ugly,” Nic commented as she glanced over the football scores. “But somehow you made it look really nice—at least, from what I could tell when I saw it yesterday.”

      Visibly pleased, Aislinn smiled. “Thanks, Nic.”

      The doorbell rang, and Nic pushed away from the table. “That’ll be the pizza. I’ll get it.”

      Glancing over the recipes in the food section of the newspaper, Aislinn nodded absently.

      Five minutes later, Nic entered the kitchen again, eying her friend quizzically. “Were you especially hungry when you ordered? Since when have we eaten two pizzas in one night? And why is the second one pepperoni? We always get mushroom and black olive or extra cheese.”

      Aislinn folded the paper and shrugged. “I just thought we might need extra tonight. If there are any leftovers, we’ll divvy them up for cold pizza breakfasts tomorrow morning.”

      “Sounds good to me.” Nic figured it was a good thing she liked cold pizza for breakfast, since it was a safe bet there would be leftovers. Pepperoni wasn’t her favorite—or Aislinn’s, either, for that matter—but it was food, which pretty well fit her criteria for a meal. She’d never been a picky eater.

      She had just set two plates on the table when someone tapped on the back door. She knew that tap. A smile spreading on her face, she moved to respond.

      As