Loe raamatut: «Truly, Madly, Briefly»

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The Twango: Catalog Item 231B. Comfort, style and illusion—all rolled into one bottom-shaping, stomach-minimizing brief. Available in Foxtrot Red, Cha Cha Gold and Midnight Mambo.

IF IT HADN’T BEEN for the missing case of size triple-X Magic Magenta thong underwear, Bobbie would have kept her distance from Deputy Aidan O’Shea.

Yes, indeed.

As it was, she had to put aside thoughts of lotteries, love and lust so she could report a possible crime. A really weird crime but a crime nonetheless.

She peered through the window to make sure the deputy was in his office. He was. And he was alone. He had his back to her, the phone squished between his shoulder and neck. It gave Bobbie an unrestricted view of the bottom-snuggling khakis that some had dubbed the item of clothing most eligible for removal. Not that anyone had personal knowledge of such removal, but it’d given the town fuel for fantasies.

When the bell on the door jangled, Deputy O’Shea glanced over his shoulder, and Bobbie eased inside the office. She motioned for him to continue with his conversation.

“Yes, I have that,” he assured the person on the other end of the line.

Ah, the Boston accent. It was pure music to her ears, which were accustomed to Texas drawls. It made her thankful that Boston had actually agreed to the six-week law-enforcement exchange program. Liffey, Texas, however, had gotten the better part of the deal since Bobbie’s cousin, Wes, was already on his way to his exchange station. That put Aidan, eye candy extraordinaire, right in front of her.

“But you’ll actually have to come to the office to press charges, Miss Determyer,” Aidan went on. He paused. “No, you’ll have to come here to do that. With Sheriff Cooper still out with the flu, I can’t leave the office unless there’s a crime in progress.” Another pause. “No. A funny feeling in the pit of your stomach doesn’t constitute a crime.”

Bobbie sank down in the chair in front of his desk and just listened. She couldn’t stop the little trickle of heat that made its way through her. It was stupid, really stupid, but just hearing his voice made her go all warm and gooey. Too bad warm and gooey were the very things she had to avoid—hot fudge sundaes excluded. Deputy Aidan O’Shea was a temporary fixture in town, and she didn’t want to mess with anything temporary.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

Pulling herself out of her daydreams, she got to her feet. “You probably don’t remember me—”

“You’re Bobbie Callahan, manager of Boxers or Briefs, the men’s underwear factory at 225 Everton Road. You’ve had four parking tickets in the past six months. One citation for jaywalking. Yesterday, you were a no-show for your dental appointment. And you have an overdue library book titled The Joys of Swamp Tours through the Everglades.”

So he did know a few things about her after all. Rather embarrassing things. Sheez. What a town of tattletales.

It probably wouldn’t do any good to mention that her cousin had issued each and every one of those parking and walking citations and that he’d done it just to aggravate her.

“I paid the tickets,” she explained. “And I’ll reschedule the dental exam and take care of that library book first thing in the morning.”

But apparently he wasn’t finished. “You’re also the winner of the Aidan-o-rama lottery.”

Oh. That.

Bobbie should have realized that he’d catch wind of something as ridiculous as the ill-contrived lottery put together by a bunch of women with obviously too much time on their hands.

Heck, Aidan had probably known the winner within seconds after Henrietta Beekins plucked Bobbie’s name from the hat. Or rather the gallon-size Crock-Pot that Henrietta’s lottery committee had used to hold the 137 slivers of paper.

Aidan glanced down at the Hank’s Feed and Bait desk calendar. “I didn’t think the lottery thing was supposed to start until tomorrow morning.”

“It isn’t. I mean, I guess it is. I’m really not sure. Look, I didn’t even enter that stupid lottery.”

Mercy, it sounded like a bona fide fish story. But the truth was she hadn’t entered the lottery that would have given her a whole week of sole pursuing rights for the hottest guy in town—Aidan O’Shea.

Nope.

Bobbie hadn’t even considered entering it. After tangling twice with Jasper Kershaw, she needed another man about as much as a longhorn needed ultra-sheer panty hose.

“My uncles thought they were doing me a favor,” Bobbie explained. “They were wrong, as they usually are when it comes to meddling in my personal life. I have no intentions of pursuing you tomorrow or any other day. Not that you’re not worthy of pursuit. But I’m just not in the market for a man. Any man. I’m sort of taking a hiatus from romance and, um, all that other stuff.”

From the deputy’s crisp nod, it seemed he was pleased with her babbling. “Is this because of the travel agent who jilted you twice?”

She hadn’t dared to hope that he hadn’t heard about Jasper’s jiltings either. Despite Aidan’s arrival merely a week earlier, he’d probably heard the fiasco discussed in complete fiasco detail. Jasper and she were still one of the town’s hottest topics. “Let’s just say it’s jaded my outlook about any and all future relationships.”

Jaded, jinxed and junked them.

Again, he nodded in approval. “Your uncles,” he commented. “I met them.”

From the way he pulled his rather well-shaped mouth together, it hadn’t been a pleasant meeting either. Since Bobbie didn’t want to speculate about what such an encounter would entail, she settled for an inquisitive sounding “Oh?”

“They were in here this morning.” Aidan unwrapped a small candy-striped mint and popped it into his mouth. “They tried to talk me into modeling for the Boxers or Briefs Internet catalog.” He paused. “I declined their generous offer.”

“Oh.”

Well, that was to be expected. Still, she couldn’t fault her uncles for trying. Aidan O’Shea appeared to have a first-class rump, and there was a shortage of those around Liffey. Actually, there was a shortage of fully functioning males under the age of fifty. With those cool sea-green eyes, rich chocolate-colored hair and lanky six-foot-tall build, Aidan more than qualified as both male and functioning. He was the stuff that dreams were made of.

Or in her case, nightmares.

For some reason he kept reminding her that she was indeed a functioning female. Not good. Not good at all. Her hormones, and other female parts, would just have to find some other way to amuse themselves.

“How’s Sheriff Cooper?” she asked, hoping to get her mind off functioning things.

“As sick as a small hospital.”

“Oh. That sounds pretty sick.”

Aidan nodded. “Let me guess. You’re here to file a complaint about—” He held up one finger. “A Beeping Tom. And you want me to come immediately to your house so I can check it out.”

“Uh, don’t you mean Peeping?”

“No. I mean someone who drives slowly past your house and beeps his horn in a suggestive manner.”

Bobbie frowned. “No. I’m not here to report anything like that. Call me naive but I didn’t even know a horn could sound suggestive. Guess I’ve lead a sheltered life, huh?”

He didn’t seem amused by her comment. A second finger went up. “You’ve had a possible UFO sighting, and you want me to stand guard inside your house tonight.”

She shook her head.

He lifted a third finger. “Your cat’s stuck in a very big tree, and you want me to go to your house to see if I can coax it into coming down.”

Bobbie wrinkled up her nose. “You get a lot of complaints like that?”

“Loads.”

Sheez. And she thought she’d had a rough day, what with the vanishing underwear. “No, actually I’m here because a case of merchandise is missing from the warehouse.”

Aidan blinked, probably stunned at the possibility of a real crime. “And you want to report it?”

That didn’t seem to be a trick question. “Sure.”

None of the skepticism left his eyes. “What kind of merchandise?”

“Thong briefs.” She felt the blush make its way from her cheeks to her daffodil-gold toenail polish. After five years of managing Boxers or Briefs, she probably should have been more accustomed to discussing risqué Magic Magenta underwear with a man, but Bobbie had never quite gotten the hang of it.

His eyebrow rose.

It didn’t help because she figured that minor facial adjustment was a request for more information. When his other eyebrow slid up, Bobbie knew she was right.

She nodded. Shrugged. And shuffled her feet. “The design is called the, uh, Gigolo. It has a loose silk front with a nearly invisible, um, understring thingamajig.”

She had to give it to Aidan. Other than those raised eyebrows, he didn’t have a reaction. No smirking. No cough to cover up a snicker. He just sat there with his shoulders squared and a cop’s demeanor plastered all over his incredibly cute face.

“Any other identifying details regarding this merchandise?” he asked.

Bobbie gave him the stock number. What she wouldn’t mention was that the sales pitch for the Gigolo was a garment to insure easy access to your family jewels. Nope. She’d keep that little gem of advertising wisdom to herself.

“The case contains three dozen,” she added. “All in magenta. And, uh, all in size triple-X.”

Still no smirk. As if it were the most mundane crime of his entire career, Aidan extracted a form from the letter tray on his temporary desk, and grabbed a pen. He’d hardly gotten past the first line when the door flew open. The knob and the bell smacked against the wall, and the sudden rush of wind sent papers scattering.

“You have to come right away!” Maxine Varadore announced. She wriggled herself between Bobbie and Aidan but not before giving Bobbie a what-the-devil-are-you-doing-here? glare.

Bobbie glared back, but then she’d had a lot of practice glaring at Maxine, especially since she’d recently fired the woman from her seamstress job at the factory. Maxine had an uncanny knack for squeezing her size-fourteen butt into a pair of size-six jeans, but she’d been an absolute disaster at decorative stitching and boxer fly assembly.

“He’s busy doing a report,” Bobbie informed her.

Maxine flicked her off with an icy glance and a piqued lift of her makeup-slathered nose. “You’re not my boss anymore, so I don’t have to listen to you.” When she turned her attention back to Aidan, she tossed in a whimper and batted her mascara-gummed eyelashes for good measure. “My poor little kitty, Sue-Sue, is stuck in that big hackberry tree in my backyard. You need to get her to come down. I’ll warn you though, it might take a while.”

Aidan gathered up the scattered papers and dumped them onto the center of the desk. His gaze eased to Maxine. Then to Bobbie. There was a you-didn’t-believe-me-huh? look in his eyes. Bobbie conceded his point with a shrug. So, this is what he had to deal with on an hourly, perhaps minute-to-minute basis. She actually felt sorry for him.

“Miss Varadore,” Aidan said at the end of a sigh. He picked up his pen and got back to work on the report. “I don’t do kitty rescues. And at the moment, I’m attending to Miss Callahan’s situation.”

Maxine huffed. It was enough to extinguish candles on a birthday cake at the senior citizens’ home. “You might have won the lottery, Bobbie Fay Callahan, but you weren’t supposed to start hanging around him until tomorrow morning. That was the deal.”

“I didn’t agree to the deal,” Bobbie let her know. She tipped her head toward Aidan. “And neither did he. I’m here on official business.”

“Yeah, like I believe that. You don’t even own a cat.”

Aidan stood and dropped the pen onto the desk. “But she does have a situation that requires my official attention. So, if you’ll please excuse us…”

Bobbie would have seconded that, but her pager went off. While Aidan continued his explanation, and while Maxine continued to plead her case for a full-scale kitty rescue, Bobbie rifled through her purse, pushing aside the fist-full of travel brochures, to locate the vibrating flamingo-colored device. One look at the tiny screen, however, and she pressed the green button to stop the noise. She snapped her purse shut again.

“Jasper,” she mumbled under her breath. But she obviously didn’t mumble it softly enough because both Aidan and Maxine looked at her.

“Jasper Kershaw’s back in town?” Maxine asked, her voice filled with hope.

Bobbie nodded. “He got back a couple of hours ago.”

To be specific, it was two hours and fourteen minutes. Six people, excluding Jasper himself, had already phoned to tell her about the jilting fiancé’s return. Bobbie vowed to quit answering her phone. Too bad she couldn’t turn off her pager, but she was hoping for a call from the warehouse to say they had managed to locate the case of missing thongs.

“And you’re getting back together with Jasper?” Even more hope abounded in Maxine’s voice.

“No!” Bobbie answered so fast that she risked having her teeth fly out of her mouth. And her assertion was one-hundred-percent true. Too bad Jasper hadn’t quite figured that out yet. In the past two hours and fourteen minutes, he’d called or paged her seven times.

Maxine tsk-tsked. “You’ll get back with him. You always do. Of course, that’ll cancel out the lottery so we’ll just have to have another one to figure out who gets first dibs on Aidan. But this time you can bet your britches that I’ll be the one drawing that name from the Crock-Pot.”

“This is just a guess, but I don’t think the deputy wants a lottery,” Bobbie pointed out.

Bobbie’s pager went off again. She glanced into her purse and saw Jasper’s number highlighted on the screen. She smashed the button to stop it and shut her purse in a hurry.

Darn it.

The man was obviously aiming for a round three, which wouldn’t happen. After being left at the altar not once but twice, she’d learned her lesson regarding Jasper Kershaw.

“The report?” Aidan reminded Bobbie. It was no doubt also a reminder for Maxine to vamoose because he ignored her and got to work. He studied the form a moment. “Estimated value of the missing merchandise.”

“Four hundred and thirty-two dollars,” Bobbie gladly answered.

Maxine leaned over the desk, examined the form and rolled her eyes. “Gimme a break. You’re saying someone stole a case of triple-X Gigolos? Yeah, right. Nobody, but nobody in this town wears a size triple-X.”

Apparently realizing that she’d just given away a rather intimate detail of her not-so-private love life, Maxine hiked up her chin again. “I’ll be back,” she warned, casting another glare in Bobbie’s direction.

Bobbie would have breathed a lot easier if her pager hadn’t gone off again. She didn’t even look. It was Jasper. It had to be. No one else could possibly be that annoying.

“Would you care to use the phone?” Aidan inquired.

“No, thanks. I have a phone in my purse.” Bobbie reset her pager again and sank back down in the chair across from him.

He gave her a considering glance. “Does this mean Jasper Kershaw will be coming in here to file a missing person’s report because he can’t get in touch with you?”

She shook her head. No missing person’s report. But it did likely mean that Jasper would pester the heck out of her. Why couldn’t he have just stayed on the run, and away from a telephone? The man certainly knew how to use speed dial.

Aidan turned the form around so that it was facing her. “Check to make sure I have all the facts right and then sign at the bottom—”

The phone rang, and he snatched it up while he handed her a pen.

“A Peeping Tom who drove slowly past your house and beeped his horn, you say?” Aidan asked the caller a moment later. “And you’d like me to come to your house to check out things?”

Bobbie would have tried to convey some sympathy if her pager hadn’t gone off again. This time she did look. And it was Jasper.

“Great day in the blooming morning!” she grumbled. This was past pestering and into a whole new realm of aggravation. She took the pager from her purse, stabbed the off button and tossed it in the trash can next to the desk.

“You believe I’ll have to spend the night at your house in order to catch this beeping Peeping Tom?” Aidan continued, obviously repeating what the caller had suggested. He squeezed his eyes shut and grimaced.

Bobbie did the same when her pager went off again. She’d obviously not turned it off after all. The metal trash can rattled and echoed the series of annoying, pulsing beeps. It was the proverbial back-breaking straw, and she didn’t have to be a camel for it to be majorly effective. She ripped her phone from her purse and punched in the numbers. Jasper answered on the first ring, but the only thing he managed to get out was the hel-part of hello.

“Don’t call or page me again,” Bobbie warned. “As far as I’m concerned, Jasper Kershaw, you’re no better than highly contagious foot fungus, and I’ll do whatever’s necessary to avoid you.”

Obviously engulfed in his own battle of wills, she heard Aidan continue with his call. “No, I’m afraid I can’t come out, Miss Martindale, since this person only beeped and didn’t come onto the premises. My advice is not to undress while standing in front of an open window.”

“Bobbie,” Jasper crooned as if she hadn’t just issued a really disgusting insult. “It’s good to hear your voice. We need to talk. Where are you? I’ll be right over.”

“No, you won’t,” Bobbie said at the very moment that Aidan concluded, “No, I can’t.”

Their gazes met. In the swirl of all those shades of tropical green, Bobbie saw the same frustration, the same aggravation, the same why-the-heck-me? look that she was sure she had in her baby-browns. Without taking her gaze from his, Bobbie clicked off the phone. Without taking his gaze from hers, Aidan placed his phone back onto the desk.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” she asked.

He squinted one eye. “I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking?”

It seemed a reasonable request, but it could lead to a thoroughly embarrassing moment if they weren’t on the same frequency here. After all, Bobbie had been thinking something totally ridiculous.

But perhaps necessary.

“You first,” she insisted.

Their phones rang again. Her pager rattled and beeped from the trash can. They didn’t answer any of the annoying communication devices. Bobbie and Aidan just stood there with their gazes locked.

“Look, we hardly know each other. Heck, we’re practically strangers, but maybe we can help each other out,” Bobbie suggested.

“Maybe.”

It wasn’t the most enthusiastic response she’d ever received, but it was a start. A start that just might buy them both some time to regain their sanity.

“I’m not looking for anything remotely romantic,” Bobbie added. Since the rattling and beeping were driving her to the brink of madness, she reached into the trash can, calmly removed the pager and smacked it with her foot. It took three good stomps before it shattered into a dozen flamingo-pink chunks. “I’ve had enough romance to last me a couple of lifetimes. And this is more than just a guess, but it appears you’d like to avoid any more kitty rescues and Beeping Tom reports.”

He nodded. “Go on.”

Bobbie took a deep breath, hoping a good analogy would come to mind.

It didn’t.

Unfortunately, a bad one popped right into her head and found its way straight to her suddenly chatty mouth. “It’s sort of like the Twango, one of Boxers or Briefs’ best-selling products.”

From the look on his face, she’d dumbfounded him. “The Twango?”

The bad analogy just kept coming. “It’s a satin-lined, control-top foundation garment for men.”

He just stared at her.

Bobbie probably should have shut up, but the non-stop ringing of phones gave her enough courage, and perhaps the insanity, to continue.

“The Twango,” she explained, the slogan slipping right off her tongue. “Comfort, style and illusion—all rolled into one bottom-shaping, stomach-minimizing brief.”

All right. So, that wasn’t her best attempt at explaining things.

But then, sadly, it wasn’t her worst either.

Rather than keep digging a hole that was getting awfully deep, Bobbie took a step back and waited to see if Aidan O’Shea was desperate enough to snap up her offer.