noisiest damn woman I've ever seen – " The injustice of that made her forget she was a little afraid of him. Jaine stalked up to him, glad she was wearing shoes with two-inch heels that lifted her up so she was level with his… chin. Almost.
So what if he was big? She was mad, and mad beat big any day of the week.
"I'm noisy?" she said through gritted teeth. It was tough to get much volume when her jaw was locked, but she tried. "I'm noisy?" She jabbed her finger at him. She didn't want to actually touch him, because his T-shirt was torn and stained with… something. "I'm not the one who woke the whole neighborhood at three o'clock this morning with that piece of junk you call a car. Buy a muffler, for God's sake! I'm not the one who slammed his car door once, the screen door three times – what, did you forget your bottle and have to go back for it? – and left his porch light on so it shone into my bedroom and kept me from sleeping." He opened his mouth to blast her in return, but Jaine wasn't finished. "Furthermore, it's a hell of a lot more reasonable to expect people to be sleeping at three o'clock in the morning than it is at two in the afternoon, or" – she checked her watch – "seven-twenty-three in the morning." God, she was so late. "So back off, buddy! Go crawl back into your bottle. If you drink enough, you'll sleep through anything."
He opened his mouth again. Jaine forgot herself and actually poked him. Oh, yuk. Now she'd have to boil her finger. "I'll buy you a new can tomorrow, so just shut up. And if you do anything to hurt my mom's cat, I'll take you apart cell by cell. I'll mutilate your DNA so it can never reproduce, which would probably be a good thing for the world." She swept him with a blistering look that took in his ragged, dirty clothes and unshaven jaw. "Do you understand me?"
He nodded.
She took a deep breath, reaching for the rein on her temper. "Okay. All right, then. Damn it, you made me cuss; and I'm trying not to do that."
He gave her a strange look. "Yeah, you really need to watch that damn cussing."
She pushed her hair out of her face and tried to remember if she had brushed it this morning. "I'm late," she said. "I haven't had any sleep, any breakfast, or any coffee. I'd better leave before I hurt you."
He nodded. "That's a good idea. I'd hate to have to arrest you."
She stared at him, taken aback. "What?"
"I'm a cop," he said, then turned and walked back into his house.
Jaine stared after him, shocked. A cop?
"Well, fuck," she said.
CHAPTER TWO
Every Friday, Jaine and three friends from Hammerstead Technology, where they all worked, met after work at Ernie's, a local bar and grill, for a glass of wine, a meal they didn't have to prepare, and girl talk. After working all week in a male-dominated atmosphere, they really, really needed the girl talk.
Hammerstead was a satellite company supplying computer technology to the General Motors plants there in the Detroit area, and computers were still largely a male domain. The company was also fairly large, which meant the general atmosphere was a little weird, with its sometimes uneasy blending of computer geeks who didn't know the meaning of the words "appropriate for the office" and the usual corporate management types. If Jaine had worked in any of the research-and-development offices with the weirdos, no one would have noticed she was late to work that morning. Unfortunately, she was in charge of the payroll department, and her immediate supervising manager was a real clock watcher.
Because she had to make up the time she was late that morning, she was almost fifteen minutes late getting to Ernie's, but the other three had already gotten a table, thank God. Ernie's was already filling up, the way it always did on a weekend night, and she didn't like waiting in the bar for a table even when she was in a good mood, which she wasn't.
"What a day," she said as she dropped into the empty fourth chair. While she was