Troublemaker Read online

  Bo made a low sound in her throat that could have been either laughter or a muffled snort. He suspected the latter, but he ignored her and took Miss Doris’s hand, lifting it for a light kiss on her knuckles. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Her mouth was an O, and she blinked several times. “Oh,” she said weakly. “Oh, my. You’re so welcome, Mr. Rees.”

  “Call me Morgan,” he invited. “When you feed a man, first names are called for.”

  Bo planted her hands on her hips and said, “Just when did you start kissing hands, Morgan Rees? You never did before.”

  Again, she’d hit just the right note that spoke to old acquaintance. In return he managed a little smirk while still striving to look “pitiful.” “You were never around when circumstances called for hand-kissing.”

  “Stop talking, and let’s see what’s on that platter,” Loretta ordered. The woman was sensible.

  Miss Doris removed the cover and revealed several cupcakes, individual little fruit pies, a lumpy something that turned out to be monkey bread—he knew because Bo said, “Oh! Monkey bread!”—and some cream-filled doughnut holes. There were also several bone-shaped treats that she told Bo she’d baked just for Tricks, using only stuff that was good for dogs. Tricks’s sense of smell was much better than theirs, of course, and she was dancing around the platter, her doggie expression one of great happiness and expectation.

  “Here’s one for you, darling,” Miss Doris cooed; for a shocked second Morgan thought she was talking to him. Shit, had she taken his flirting seriously? But no, she was talking to the dog. He should have known.

  Tricks gobbled down the offered treat and immediately looked for more. Bo said, “You can have your chew bone while we have our treats.” She produced what looked like an antler from her desk and gave it to Tricks, who pounced on it and immediately took it to her bed, where she lay down and started some serious gnawing.

  Everyone—except Tricks—seemed to be waiting for Morgan to make his selection, given that the platter had been brought in his honor. He wasn’t much of a cupcake guy; they seemed kind of sissy to him. He wanted one of those pies. But the lumpy brown thing was interesting. “What’s monkey bread?” he asked.

  “It’s like a bunch of little cinnamon rolls stuck together,” Bo replied.

  All right! He liked cinnamon rolls. Miss Doris pulled off a few of the lumps and put them on a paper plate that she’d been thoughtful enough to also provide. Miss Doris was rapidly becoming his favorite person in the town.

  Coffee was poured for those who wanted it—that would be him and Loretta—and they all made their choices. For a few minutes the only sounds in the office were chewing and a few little mmms of appreciation. Jesse went for the pies, Bo for a cupcake, Loretta for the monkey bread, while Miss Doris looked on with a beaming smile.

  For a few minutes Morgan was too taken up with the melt-in-your-mouth cinnamon-y lumps of monkey bread to notice anything else, but when he did look around it was to see Bo delicately licking the icing off her cupcake.

  A savage kick of lust almost paralyzed him. He froze, every muscle locked on target. He managed to look away and pretend he was concentrating on his monkey bread, but fuck, all he could see in his mind was the pink tip of her tongue licking almost gently at the icing. His skin was too hot and tight, his breathing restricted. Holy shit. Just like that, he had a hard-on like iron, and he needed to sit down before someone noticed, if he could only fucking move.

  He did, somehow. He all but collapsed in the visitor’s chair, which was the best he could do because his hard-on made it impossible for him to sit down normally without making some major adjustments in his pants, which he wasn’t about to do in front of the ladies. Loretta and Bo might take it in stride, but Miss Doris might faint.

  “Are you okay?” Bo asked, her attention snapping to him.

  “Yeah, fine,” he muttered. Maybe they’d think he was embarrassed by how weak he was. He set his paper plate on his lap to cover the evidence, and prayed a sudden throb didn’t knock the plate sideways. Damn it, didn’t women know better than to lick things in front of a man?

  There followed a flurry of attention from Miss Doris and even from Loretta, who volunteered her brothers to help him with some workouts when he felt better, to rebuild his strength. He had to verbally appreciate Loretta’s offer and fend off Miss Doris’s intention of slapping a cold wet cloth over his face. He was sweating, but not from sickness. At least all that took his attention off Bo’s tongue and gave his hard-on time to give up and start subsiding.

  Miss Doris had to get back to the bakery, and she left in a flurry of thank-yous. Jesse had another pie, though he did slant a look at Morgan that made him think maybe the officer had seen enough that he had a good idea about the true cause of Morgan’s “weakness.” Probably every man alive had had the same thing happen to him. Unruly body parts in your pants just came with the territory.

  Thank God, Bo didn’t want to lick a second cupcake; she didn’t even eat the cake part of the first one. A call came in about a four-year-old stuck in a tree, and Jesse left to go do some tree-climbing. Bo began wading through all the paperwork on her desk, and Tricks napped, worn out from her antler-gnawing.

  A pretty blonde, who was introduced as Bo’s friend Daina, dropped by with slushies for them all as an afternoon treat. Morgan began to feel as if he was going to die from sugar overload. Daina was there purely out of curiosity, of course. She didn’t stay long, but long enough to get in a little impersonal flirting.

  Then a bunch of vehicles pulled to the curb outside, several pickup trucks and cars. A gaggle of high school kids exited; the door opened and the whole gaggle poured in, all of them talking at once. “Chief Bo! Mr. Cummins said we needed to practice driving Tricks around.”

  On the face of it that didn’t make sense because he doubted Bo would let them practice their driving with Tricks on board. But she seemed to know exactly what they meant, because she said, “What do you have?”

  “We thought we’d start off with a pickup,” one of the boys said. “Get her used to riding in the open. If you get in back too, we know she’ll stay.”

  Tricks had jumped up when the kids entered and was in the middle of the group, getting her required petting. One of the girls said, “We even have a tiara and a feather boa for her.”

  “She’ll do okay with the boa, but I don’t know about the tiara,” Bo said, not blinking an eye. “I tried putting a cap on her once and she wouldn’t have it. But she did like the Christmas bow I stuck on her head.”

  Morgan kept his mouth shut. The conversation was getting weirder by the minute. What the hell were they doing?

  “Let’s get her loaded up and see what she’ll do,” the boy said. “I’ll drive really slow, Chief.”

  Bo and Tricks and the whole group went outside. Loretta left her cubicle to stand on the sidewalk and watch, so Morgan joined her. The boy lowered the tailgate of his truck and tried to get Tricks to jump up in the bed, but she was too busy with the petting. Bo said, “Tricks, up,” and patted the tailgate. Tricks obediently jumped up, then immediately jumped down again.

  “Tricks, up.”

  Same result.

  Sighing, Bo climbed into the bed of the pickup, sat down, and said, “Tricks, up.”

  With the center of her life sitting there, Tricks jumped up and covered Bo’s face with a mad flurry of licking. A couple of the girls climbed in the back with them. One had the aforementioned tiara and boa. She looped the pink boa around Tricks’s neck, and carefully set the tiara on her head. With one shake, Tricks had the tiara off. It was tried again, with the same result.

  “I think there’s a sticky bow in the break room,” Loretta said, and went inside to see if she remembered right. She didn’t bother explaining why a sticky bow might be in a police station.

  She returned with a slightly crushed and mangled glittery green bow. The backing was peeled off and the bow carefully stuck on top of Tricks’s head.

  The