What a Fool Believes Read Free

reporting to work.
    Regretted patrolling the condo parking lot.
    Regretted catching the woman vandalizing.
    He just wanted to go home. The Lakers were playing tonight.
    His biggest regret was not setting TiVo to record the game. He’d been so sure he’d be home by tip-off.
    Damn.
    This lady was in a lot of trouble, but he couldn’t help but complete his list of regrets.
    He regretted scaring her so badly that she dropped the knife that gashed her foot, which caused her to faint, which made him think she was hitting on him, which made him elbow her in the eye, which made her injuries worse than they should have been.
    Why had he thought her capable of such a lame ploy?
    Because she was a woman, and women were the masters at playing the sympathy symphony.
    Okay. He’d made an honest mistake.
    But no one would see it that way. This was the second time in thirty days that one of his prisoners had been on the receiving end of his reflexes, and his new captain would have something to say about that.
    The rest of the events ran play by play through his mind.
    When she’d fainted, he’d swept her up against his chest.
    Her breasts rose and fell in a smooth, slow rhythm. He’d held her there, his first aid training gone, before reality slapped him into the present, and he’d called for an ambulance.
    He’d perched her atop the hood, his thigh at the center of her body, his left hand across her midriff.
    In warmer temperatures, under different circumstances, he could conceive of them on a journey to intimacy. But the situation wasn’t ever going to be like that.
    This lady was a woman scorned, and she was going to jail.
    He was in trouble, too, but that didn’t matter right now.
    He nudged the exam room door open and stuck his head inside. “How’re things coming along?”
    â€œWe’ll be a while,” Dr. Khan said, bent over the woman’s foot.
    â€œYou in a rush to blacken my other eye?” the woman asked.
    Chocolate. Her right eye, her good eye, was a delicious-looking chocolate. Byron tried to speak quietly. “I already apologized for elbowing you.”
    â€œI don’t see how you could think I was going to do something to you, you big baby!” Tia tried to cover her mouth, but her handcuffed wrist stopped her.
    Her gaze darted from her arm to him, and he shuffled his feet. She was about to blow.
    â€œYou have a right to be angry.” He knew those were the wrong words before they’d completely fallen from his mouth.
    â€œYou bet I do,” she yelled. “These cuffs are for total humiliation, right? I guess I’ll hop on my one good foot, with my one good eye to guide me, and make a break for it.” She shook her head, disgusted.
    â€œI’m just doing my job.”
    â€œYeah, well, you’re superior at it. Feel better?”
    An internal war waged. He’d get in big trouble if anyone found out, but she was pretty much incapacitated.
    â€œI’m taking these off because”— I’m a sucker , he thought but didn’t say it—“you should be more comfortable.” The toe of his shoe rammed the bottom of the steel bed frame. Noise reverberated upward, and annoyance flashed across her pretty face.
    Guilt be damned. She hated him. Snatching his pad from his pocket, he clicked his Bic and noticed that she’d put her hospital gown on backward.
    Officer Rivers did the unthinkable.
    He peeked.
    She jerked the gown closed.
    â€œI wasn’t looking at your bra,” he snapped.
    â€œRight, and my eye is black because I ran into your elbow.”
    â€œYou did fall into me.”
    â€œBecause I was stabbed,” she told him, as if he were the biggest knucklehead in the world.
    Dr. Khan, who’d kept quiet, patted the woman’s arm, sharing a bond. “Now, now. You mustn’t get worked up again.”
    â€œDr. Khan, I’ve never been worked up in my life.” She breathed