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  “Brandon,” one of the girls pleaded when the boy balked, “he’s being really decent about this. Do what he tells you.”

  Slightly mollified by their reactions, Ted said, “That goes for all of you. Get in the house, collect all the pot and anything else you’ve got here and bring it to the living room.” He turned to Katherine, who was watching him with a strange, absorbed little smile. “That goes for you, too, Miss Cahill.”

  Her smile warmed and yet her voice seemed almost shy. “I liked Kathy better than Miss Cahill.”

  She looked so delicious standing there with the moonlight gilding her hair, wearing a sexy bikini and a Madonna’s smile, that Ted had to remind himself that she was too young for him as well as too rich and too spoiled. Remembering all that became even more difficult in the days that followed, because Katherine Cahill possessed all the determination of her pioneering ancestors who’d trekked across half a continent to stake their claim in Texas’s oil fields. Wherever Ted went and no matter how coolly he treated her, she seemed to continually reappear. She fell into step beside him when he left the office to go home at night, asking him about police work; she invited him for dinner, she came to the sheriff’s office to ask his advice about what car to buy, when he went to lunch, she slid into the booth across from him and pretended it was a chance meeting. After three weeks of such fruitless antics, she tried a final, desperate ploy: She put in a fake burglary call to the police station at ten o’clock one night after making certain Ted was on duty.

  When he arrived to check the house, she was standing in the doorway wearing a seductive black silk lounging robe, holding a plate of what she called canapés in one hand and a drink she’d made for him in the other. The realization that the burglary call had been nothing but a childish trick to bring him to her snapped Ted’s strained nerves. Since he couldn’t let himself take advantage of what she was offering, no matter how badly he wanted to, or how much he’d enjoyed her company, he let himself lose his temper instead. “What the hell do you want from me, Katherine?”

  “I want you to come in and sit down and enjoy the lovely dinner I made for you.” She stepped aside and gestured with her arm to the candlelit dining room table, which had been set with sparkling crystal and gleaming silver.

  To his horror, Ted actually considered staying. He wanted to slide into a chair at that table, to see her face in the candlelight while he savored the wine in the silver cooler, he wanted to eat slowly, enjoying each bite, knowing that she was going to be his dessert. He wanted to taste her so badly he could hardly bear to stand there without dragging her into his arms. Instead he spoke as harshly as he could, attacking her in the one place he knew instinctively she’d be the most vulnerable—her youth. “Stop acting like a childish, spoiled brat!” he said, ignoring the tug he felt when she stepped back as if he’d slapped her. “I don’t know what the hell you want from me or what you think you’re going to accomplish with all this, but you’re wasting your time and mine.”

  She looked visibly shaken, but her eyes were level and direct, and he found himself admiring her courage in the face of such ruthless opposition. “I fell in love with you the night you came to break up our party,” she told him.

  “That’s crap! People don’t fall in love in five minutes.”

  She managed a wavering smile at his vulgarity and persevered. “When you kissed me that first night, you felt something for me, too—something strong and special and—”

  “What I felt was common, ordinary indiscriminate lust,” Ted snapped, “so knock off the infantile fantasies about love and stop pestering me. Do I need to make it any clearer than that?”

  She gave up the fight with a slight shake of her head. “No,” she whispered shakily, “you’ve made it perfectly clear.”

  Ted jerked his head in a nod and started to turn, but she stopped him. “If you really want me to forget about you, about us, then I guess this is good-bye.”

  “It’s good-bye,” he said shortly.

  “Kiss me good-bye, then, and I’ll believe you. That’s my bargain.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” he exploded, but he yielded to her “bargaining.” Or more correctly to his own desire. Pulling her into his arms, he kissed her with deliberate roughness, crushing her soft lips, then he pushed her away while something deep inside him howled in protest at what he’d done—and what he’d deprived himself of by doing it.

  She pressed the back of her fingers to her bruised lips, her eyes filled with accusation and bitterness. “Liar,” she said. And then she closed the door.

  For the next two weeks, Ted found himself watching for her wherever he went, whether he was off duty or patrolling or doing paperwork in the office, and when he failed to see a glimpse of her or her white Corvette, he felt . . . let down. Empty. He decided she must have left Keaton and gone off to wherever rich girls go when they get bored in the summer time. Not until the following week, when a burglar was sighted two miles from her house, did he realize how obsessed with her he truly was. Telling himself that it was in the line of duty for him to drive up a winding hill that no burglar in his right mind would climb on foot, Ted drove up to her house—to make certain it was secure. There was a light on in a window at the back of the house, and he got out of the car . . . slowly, reluctantly, as if his legs understood what his mind was denying—that his being here could have long-lasting and probably disastrous results.

  He raised his hand to ring the doorbell then dropped it. This was insane, he decided, turning away, then he jerked around as the front door opened and she was standing there. Even in a simple pink tank top and white shorts, Katherine Cahill was so beautiful she drugged his mind. She was different tonight, though—her expression was sober, her voice softly frank rather than flirtatious. “What do you want, Officer Mathison?”

  Confronted with her calm, direct maturity, Ted felt like a complete fool. “There was a burglary,” he dissembled, “not far from here. I came up here to check—”

  To his disbelief, she started to close the door in his face, and he heard himself say her name. It tore out of him before he could stop it: “Katherine! Don’t—”

  The door opened, and she was smiling just a little, her head tipped to the side as she waited. “What do you want?” she repeated, her eyes searching his.

  “Christ! I don’t know—”

  “Yes, you do. Furthermore,” she said with a funny teasing catch in her voice, “I don’t think the son of Keaton’s very own Reverend Mathison should go around lying about his feelings or using words like crap or taking God’s name in vain.”

  “Is that what this is all about?” Ted snapped, completely off balance, a drowning man, grasping at straws to save himself from a fate he’s about to embrace. “You think it would be a sexual kick to sleep with a minister’s son? To find out how we make love?”

  “Was anyone talking about sex, Officer?”

  “Now I get it,” he said scornfully, seizing on her use of his title. “You’ve got a hang-up about cops, haven’t you. You’ve got me mixed up with Bruce Willis and you think having sex with—”

  “There you go again, talking about sex. Is that all you can think about?”

  Nonplussed and furious with himself, he shoved his hands into his pockets and glared. “If it isn’t sex with me that you have on your mind, then what the hell is it?”

  She stepped forward onto the porch, looking gutsier and more worldly than he felt, but his hands reached for her arms drawing her closer to his hungry body. Softly she said, “Marriage is what I have on my mind. And don’t swear.”

  “Marriage!” Ted exploded.

  “You sound shocked, darling.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “About you,” she agreed. Leaning up on her toes, she slid her hands up his chest and around his neck, and Ted’s body ignited as if hers was a torch held against it. “You get one chance to make up for hurting me the last time you kissed me. I didn’t like it.”

  Helplessly, Ted bent