Believing Again Read Free

himself for behaving like an idiot, first with Danny, now with her partner. He needed to lose himself in his work.

Chapter Two
    Danny didn’t go all gooey-eyed over a man, no matter how good-looking or sexy he was. She thought women who did that were silly. She made fun of the females she and Sam interviewed who preened for him. Even teased him that no man well into his forties, happily married and the father of three, should put up with that kind of behavior.
    Point of fact, she didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about any of the men she came in contact with every day. First of all, she was too damn busy trying to do her job. Second, she was used to being around a whole hell of a lot of men, which had inured her to most of them.
    Third, and probably most important, it was usually more trouble than it was worth to think about someone because he looked attractive or seemed interesting enough to get involved with. Her hours were long, her job was demanding. And no matter how charming or handsome they were, most of the men she’d met so far didn’t understand how important her job was to her.
    The only men who understood were other cops, and her one foray into that dating pool had been a disaster. With the schedules they had, it had been hard work making the time to see each other and when they broke it off after almost two years of trying, only making detective and moving to Central Precinct had made her comfortable about going back to being merely colleagues again.
    No, it was easier to be businesslike with the men she met. She didn’t really need a man in her life to make her happy anyway. What made her happy was her work.
    Growing up she hadn’t collected pictures of wedding dresses or named the children she planned to have with the as-yet unknown groom. She was more the pretend-to-be-a-snake-eating-Special-Forces-operative kinda kid. Her mother had despaired of her ever wearing a dress or learning to dance or, heaven help her, dating. Her mother had been homecoming queen in both high school and college — where she’d majored in English literature — and wanted her only daughter, her beloved Danita Rebecca Hartmann, to follow in her footsteps as a wife, a mother, and a college professor.
    Instead she’d come within inches of getting Captain or Major or Colonel Danny Hartmann. The military had been where Danny was headed until a college professor piqued her interest in the justice system and police work. So, instead of watching her daughter go off to the Army, her mother saw her obtain a degree in criminal justice, move to Portland with a college friend, join the Portland Police Bureau, and make detective at a younger age than any woman in the history of the Bureau.
    Danny sometimes felt her choices in life had put a strain on her relationship with her mother. It was part of the reason the move to Portland had been easy. Although her mother always said she was proud of her daughter and loved her, Danny was pretty sure she was just as happy living a state away in California where she didn’t have to come face to face with her daughter’s life on a regular basis. And Danny didn’t have to explain it at the family gatherings and holiday dinners she’d avoided like the plague since leaving California. Her colleagues were her family. They understood.
    That kind of determination and focus had gotten her as far as she’d come in her career and usually erased the memory of any guy she met ten minutes after she met him. However, this morning, in spite of everything she told herself about how important her work was and how unlikely it was that Jake Abrams would be interested in someone like her, he had managed to insinuate himself into Danny’s thoughts. There was something about him that wouldn’t leave her consciousness.
    When she returned to Central Precinct, she had the urge to Google him — to find out about the veterans’ clinic, she told herself. But as soon as she typed his name into the search box on the