He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees as he watched the screen, as if he could hurry the process.
“The police department is, though, isn’t it? Aren’t you hooked up with all those police networks?”
He grunted. “Yeah. One line, one computer.” He looked disgusted.
“Hillsboro is a small town,” she pointed out. “The budget isn’t very big. On the other hand, our crime rate is low.” She paused, suddenly unsure. “Isn’t it?”
“Low enough. There hasn’t been a murder in the city limits since I’ve been here. We have the usual burglaries and assaults, drunk driving, domestic troubles.”
She would have loved to ask him who was having domestic trouble, but bit her tongue. He just might tell her, and then she’d tell her mother and Aunt Jo, and feel bad about gossiping.
Had he moved closer? She hadn’t seen him do so, but she could feel his body heat, and smell him. What was it about men that made them smell different from women? Testosterone? More body hair? It wasn’t an unpleasant smell; in fact, it was tantalizing. But it was different, as if he were an alien species. And he was definitely too darn close.
She had had enough. “You’re crowding me,” she pointed out, very politely.
Without moving, he glanced down; their chairs were separated by at least an inch. “I’m not touching you,” he said just as politely.
“I didn’t say you were touching me; I said you’re too close.”
He rolled his eyes and heaved a sigh, but hitched his chair another inch away. “Is this some other weird southern rule?”
“You’re in law enforcement; you’re supposed to have studied body language. Isn’t that how you intimidate suspects, by invading their personal space?”
“No, I generally use a nine millimeter for intimidation purposes. Not much chance of missing the signal that way.”
Oh, and wasn’t that macho? He was such a typical man, bragging about the size of his weapon. She barely refrained from rolling her eyes, but he’d just done that and she didn’t want to be a copycat.
A typical man . . . The conversation last night with her mother and Aunt Jo echoed in her mind, and a thought tickled her, but she pushed it away. No, she didn’t want to get into that kind of discussion with him. She just wanted his browser to finish upgrading so he would go away—
“Do you know what color mauve is?” she blurted, the words leaping from her tongue before she could stop them.
The effect on him was almost electric. He jerked back, eyeing her as if she had suddenly sprouted fangs and tentacles. “What makes you ask?” he said warily.
“I just want to know.” She paused. “Well, do you?”
“What makes you think I’d know?”
“I don’t. I’m just asking.”
“It sounds like one of those tests women use to find out if a man’s gay or not. Why don’t you just ask, if you’re interested?”
“I’m not,” she said, appalled that he might think she was. “It’s just that someone else—never mind.” She was blushing. She knew she was; her face felt hot. She stared very hard at the computer screen, trying to will the thing to go faster.
He scrubbed a rough hand over his short hair. “Pink,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“Pink. Mauve is a fancy word for pink, right? I heard it often enough when my ex-wife was picking out stuff for our apartment, but it looked pink to me.”
My goodness, Aunt Jo was right about mauve; it was no longer a definitive test. Wasn’t that interesting? She couldn’t wait to tell them.
“Puce,” she said, and nearly smacked herself in the head. Why couldn’t she leave well enough alone?
“What?” He acted as if he’d never heard the word before.
“Puce. What color is puce?”
“Spell it.”
“P-u-c-e.”
This time he scrubbed his hand over his face. “This is a trick question, right?”
“Why do you say that?”
“Puce. Who in hell would name a color ‘puce’? It sounds like ‘puke,’ and nobody would want something colored like puke.”
“Puce is a very pretty color,” she said.
He gave her a disbelieving look. “If you say so.”
“Do you know what color it is, or not?”
“Hell, no, I don’t know what color puce is,” he barked. “I know real colors; I know blue and green and red, things like that. Puce, my ass. You just made that up.”
She smirked. “I did not. Go look it up in the dictionary.” She pointed to the reference section. “There are several right over there.”
He snorted, then shoved back in his chair and all but stomped over to the reference section. He leafed through a dictionary, ran his finger down a couple of pages, then briefly read. “Reddish brown,” he scoffed, shaking his head. “Not that I’ve ever seen anything that’s reddish brown, but if I did, you can be damn sure I wouldn’t point at it and say, ‘That looks like puce’!”
“What would you call it?” she taunted. “Something really imaginative, like ‘reddish brown’? Though I’ve always thought puce was more of a purple brown than anything else.”
“At least people would know what the hell I was talking about if I said reddish brown, or even purplish brown. And who needs a color like that, anyway? Who in his right mind would go into a store and ask the clerk for a puce shirt? Or buy a puce car? I worry about people who buy purple cars, but puce? Give me a break. Puce is only good as a gay test.”