A Fine Specimen Read Free

talking to Lieutenant Cruz, for example. He was a walking
meat mountain. For all his size, however, that man could be overlooked in a
room. Not Lieutenant Cruz. All eyes would immediately turn to the prime male.
    Lieutenant Cruz’s
clothes were nondescript. White shirt, black tie, black trousers, black leather
belt, which again was textbook. He didn’t need Armani or Versace or Hugo Boss clothes
to prevail. He didn’t need to dress for power. He was power.
    There was power in the
dark eyes, in the chiseled jaw, in the corded neck. Strength, authority and
responsibility were right there, in every feature of his face, in every line of
his body.
    He was watching her out
of black eyes, his face without expression. The lines of his face were sharp,
angular.
    Not for the first time,
Caitlin wondered at Ray Avery’s advice. More than advice, really—insistence.
Ray had been urging her for weeks to spend time in a station house to round out
the information in her dissertation on Dominance Hierarchies in Law
Enforcement.
    You’ll like Alex , Ray had said. He’s a nice man.
    Caitlin wasn’t entirely
sure nice was the right word to describe Alejandro Cruz. Overwhelming ,
maybe, oh yeah. Intimidating , certainly. But nice ?
    Caitlin stepped forward,
feeling with each step as if she were moving into a force field. A power
greater than her own. If she’d been convinced her studies had taught her how to
deal with the male of her species, she had to think again. This was an entirely
different order of magnitude from dealing with a fellow graduate student or an
associate professor or even—God!—the dean.
    This was raw,
unadulterated male power, backed up by the weight of the entire U.S.
government—not to mention a gun—and she couldn’t possibly match it in any way.
    But she’d promised Ray,
so she walked forward slowly, as if through a sea of molasses. Caitlin stopped
at Lieutenant Cruz’s desk. Solid, uncompromising, enduring, a little
scarred—just like the man behind it. She glanced at the chair in front of the
desk and started to sit just as he said, “Please have a seat.” His voice held
faint tones of irony.
    “Thank you.” Caitlin
hated the touch of breathlessness in her voice, but she couldn’t help it. This
was going to be much, much harder than she’d imagined. She sat down, raised her
eyes to his and tried to still her wild heartbeat.
    “So.” Lieutenant Cruz
had a deep voice, slightly raspy, as if he didn’t use it much. He probably didn’t
have to. One look from him and underlings would scurry to do his bidding. She
felt like doing a little scurrying herself.
    The lieutenant tapped
Ray Avery’s letter with a blunt fingertip. “It seems we have a problem here.”
His face was as cold as his voice.
    Caitlin clasped her
hands together. Not to stop them from trembling. Of course not. Just to have
something to do with them. She didn’t dare show shaking hands or allow her
voice to tremble. She didn’t dare allow herself any show of weakness at all.
    Studies had shown that
hyenas can smell blood ten miles away. This was a man who could smell weakness
at a thousand paces. He held all the power and she was here asking for a favor.
Conditions didn’t get more lopsided than that. It was true that she had a secret
weapon, maybe. But it might also be a weapon that would blow up in her hands.
    Caitlin drew in a deep
breath, wondering if the lieutenant noticed that it hitched slightly. She
opened her mouth to speak, hoping she could keep her voice firm, then turned in
gratitude as someone came in through the door of Lieutenant Cruz’s office
without knocking, bearing two steaming Styrofoam cups of coffee.
    A woman in uniform. She
had dark, curly hair and a round, lined face. Caitlin sent up thanks for the
presence of a member of her gender in the room, to counteract the pure male
pheromones Lt. Cruz was emitting by the ton.
    “Hi,” the woman said,
slipping a cup in front of her with a friendly smile.