Love By Association. Tara Taylor Quinn

she’d intended to ask Captain Reagan first thing Monday morning.

      “You think the police commissioner’s wife is following you,” she said now. Curious.

      “I know she is.”

      And the obvious response to that, in any society, had to be, “Why?”

      “I’m on four committees, and she’s managed to somehow be involved in all four projects.”

      “Our circle isn’t all that big,” Colin said. “Patricia has been heavily involved in volunteer projects since before she married Paul. You know that.”

      Paul. To him. Commissioner Reynolds to everyone in Chantel’s circle.

      “Yes, but over the past several months, she’s joined each project I’m involved with, and they didn’t just all start up,” Julie said. “I know I’m right on this one, Colin. She’s spying on me.”

      With a mental step back, Chantel faced front but had to ask again, “Why would she spy on you?”

      It would be weird if she didn’t ask. Right?

      “I was...involved...in something. Years ago. And recently, another woman we all know had a situation...something that came out through her son at school...and Patricia, I’m sure at Paul’s behest, is watching me.”

      “Why?”

      Colin glanced at her then. “They want her to stay quiet.”

      “About what she was involved in years ago? Or what happened recently?”

      “Nothing happened recently,” Colin said. “It was just a misunderstanding stemming from the wrong interpretation of a harmless school project. But Julie’s friends with the woman. She thinks that Commissioner Reynolds is nervous that she’ll try to bring up old grievances.”

      “I know he is. And it’s not just that I’m friends with...the woman. The things they’re saying...there’s something in it similar to my situation. And we know mine is true.”

      Colin didn’t respond to Julie’s remark. This time Chantel followed his lead.

      Heart pumping, she made a mental note to check Julie Fairbanks again. She’d already run a check on the family, the night after she’d met Colin. But maybe she’d missed something?

      She had to find a way to get Colin to explain to her why he didn’t have much faith in his sister’s judgment on the matter. And why the commissioner would send his wife to spy on her for being friends with someone.

      Maybe, if she got lucky, he’d even tell her what the matter was.

      In the meantime, she’d gained an important piece of information for her case. The woman Julie had just mentioned—the one who’d appeared to have a similar problem, but didn’t—had to be Leslie Morrison. Surely there weren’t two kids with school projects that had been interpreted to mean trouble in their admittedly small circle.

      That would be too much of a coincidence. And as a cop, Chantel didn’t put a lot of stock in coincidence.

CHAPTER EIGHT

      WHILE JULIE’S SUSPICIONS had put a definite damper on the mood in the car that afternoon, Colin found that the changed atmosphere didn’t dim the flame of his desire to see Chantel again. As quickly as possible.

      Because that was a first—him feeling driven from within to pursue something non–Julie related when his sister was obviously upset—the urge grew in intensity. That Chantel was attracted to him, too, wasn’t a huge surprise to him.

      But even the possibility that she could be like most of the women who made their attraction to him obvious—after him for his money as much as anything else—didn’t put a damper on his fervency.

      So he asked her to dinner. She accepted. And as he went on with his day, he had a smile on his face.

      * * *

      IN JEANS, a button-down shirt and over-the-ankle hiking boots, Chantel spent a couple of hours at the precinct Saturday afternoon. She checked in with Captain Reagan. Filled Wayne in on lunch. And told him that she’d be having dinner with Colin Fairbanks again that evening.

      “Didn’t take you long to find an ‘in,’” Wayne said, studying her.

      Chin up, Chantel withstood his visual interrogation without as much as a held breath. “I’m good at my job,” she told him. Married to it, was more like it.

      “You are good at your job,” Wayne said, pulling out an empty chair at the table where she sat with a department-issue laptop in front of her. “Maybe too good.”

      “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “You put the job above everything else.”

      “Lots of guys do.” And she was one of the guys. They had one another’s backs.

      He looked away. “And many of those who do also spend some of their off time in strip clubs.”

      “You think I should go to strip clubs?”

      “I think you’re a healthy, three-dimensional human being who is living a two-dimensional life. Eventually, that’s going to catch up with you. I just don’t want it to be now.”

      She wanted to continue to pretend ignorance. Recognizing it as a weak ploy, she said, “You’re thinking that I might fall for Colin Fairbanks?”

      “The thought has crossed my mind.”

      “Because he’s rich?”

      “Because you’re out of your element.” He was being a good friend, telling her what he thought she needed to hear, not what she wanted to hear. She took offense, anyway.

      “You don’t think I’m up to running with the rich folks?” She was keeping her emotions in check. It was what she was trained to do. You had to when you were on the job.

      “I’m more concerned with the part you’re playing,” Wayne said. “You’re hot as hell, Chantel. You play it down here—like now, your hair pulled back tight, no makeup, loose clothes and those hiking shoe things you seem to wear night and day, even at the company picnic in the middle of summer...”

      He broke off, as though realizing what he was revealing—the fact that he’d not only noticed how she was dressed last summer at the picnic, and all the time, but that he remembered in such detail.

      Still smarting from his insinuation that she wasn’t up to this assignment, Chantel let him swim in his own stew.

      Leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, he seemed about to tell her something confidential. In a lowered voice, he said, “When I saw you the other day, in character...”

      He’d just turned up the heat on his pot. Chantel smiled.

      “Sounds to me like you’re the one with issues here, Wayne,” she told him. Because, after all, friends said what the other needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear. “Maybe you should be the one visiting a strip club.”

      The statement was mean. She knew the second it hit its mark and felt bad. She and Wayne were such close friends because, when they’d been trainees together many years before, his wife, Maria, had caught him out in a bar with a stripper and Chantel had stepped in and helped saved his marriage.

      “You get prickly when you’re feeling defensive.”

      “That’s right. You had no business implying that I can’t do my job.”

      “It’s not your job I’m worried about,” he said, still leaning close. He rubbed his hands together. “I don’t think there’s doubt in anyone’s mind that you’re the best man for the job. That’s not what I’m talking about. And I think you know that.”

      Okay,