He reached out and took her arm, his grip warm and too firm, as if he were accustomed to handling miscreants who didn’t want to go with him. “Don’t poker up on me, Miss Daisy,” he said, stifling an audible snicker. “It’s just. . . Downtown doesn’t have quite the same ring to it in Hillsboro as it does in New York.”
Well, that was true, considering they were already practically downtown, only a few blocks from the police station and the business section. He still could have been nicer about it.
As he opened the front passenger door of his car and put her inside, the front door opened again and Evelyn came out. “Chief Russo! Where are you taking Daisy?”
“Just for a ride, ma’am. We’ll be back within an hour, I promise.”
Evelyn hesitated, then smiled. “Y’all have a good time.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the chief said gravely.
“Oh, great,” Daisy muttered as he got in the car. “Now she thinks we’re seeing each other.”
“We can go back and set her straight, tell her what’s really going on,” he offered as he pulled away from the curb, not even waiting for her answer. That was so annoying; of course she didn’t want to do that, but he knew it before he even made the offer. He was just being a smart aleck.
“I had just as much right to be at that club as you did,” she said, crossing her arms and sticking her nose in the air.
“Agreed.”
She lowered her nose down to give him a startled look. “Then why are you interrogating me? I didn’t do anything wrong. The brawl wasn’t my fault, and I truly didn’t mean to smash that man’s testicles.”
“I know.” He was grinning again, darn him. Just what was so funny?
“Then what’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. And I’m not ‘interrogating’ you. I asked you to come for a ride; that’s a helluva lot different from taking you to an interview room and grilling you for hours.”
Relieved, she let out a whoosh of air and relaxed in the seat, then immediately sat upright again. “You didn’t ask me, you told me, so what else was I to think? ‘Let’s take a ride.’ Cops say that all the time on television, and it always means they’re taking you downtown to be booked.”
“So the scriptwriters need to learn some new dialogue.”
A new thought, an appalling one, occurred to her. My goodness, the chief wasn’t courting her, was he? Their encounters had always been bristly, but last night had shown her what a difference her new appearance made in the way men treated her. Her stomach knotted; she wasn’t at all practiced in telling a man to shove off, she just wasn’t interested. He couldn’t be interested, could he? Maybe she didn’t look as much better as she thought.
Swiftly she flipped down the sun visor and peered into the mirror attached there, then just as swiftly flipped it back up. Oh, dear.
“What was that about?” he asked curiously. “You didn’t look long enough even to check your lipstick.”
She’d forgotten all about her lipstick. Anyway, a quick peek was all it took to tell her that, no, she wasn’t mistaken about the change.
“I was just wondering if cop cars had visor mirrors, too,” she blurted. “It seems kind of. . . sissy.”
“Sissy?” He looked as if he were biting the inside of his jaw.
“Not that I’m questioning your masculinity,” she said hastily. The last thing she wanted was for him to feel he had to prove his masculinity to her. Men, she had read, tended to take such comments personally. Their egos were all tied up with their virility, or something like that.
He sighed. “No offense, Miss Daisy, but following your train of thought is like trying to catch a jackrabbit hopped up on speed.”
She didn’t take offense, because she was too thankful he hadn’t been able to follow that particular train. Instead she said, “I wish you wouldn’t call me Miss Daisy. It makes me sound like an—” She started to say old maid, but that description hit too close to home. “—a fuddy-duddy.”
He was biting the inside of his jaw again. “If the hairnet fits. . .”
“I do not wear a hairnet!” she shouted, then sank back in the seat in surprise. She never shouted. She never lost her temper. She hadn’t always been exactly polite to him, but neither had she shouted at him. She began to worry, was there a law against yelling at someone in law enforcement? Yelling at him wasn’t the same as yelling at a cop who’d stopped her for speeding;—if she had ever speeded, that is—but he was, after all, the chief of police, and it might be even worse—
“You’ve gone off into the ether again,” he growled.
“I was just wondering if there was any law against yelling at a chief of police,” she admitted.
“You thought you were going to be thrown in the pokey for yelling?”
“It was disrespectful. I apologize. I don’t usually yell, but then I’m not usually accused of wearing a hairnet, either.”
“I can see the provocation.”
“If you keep biting your jaw,” she observed, “you’re going to need stitches.”
“I’ll try not to do it again. And for your information, I call you Miss Daisy as a sign of respect.”
“Respect?” She didn’t know if that was good or not. On the one hand, of course she wanted him to respect her, on the other, that wasn’t exactly the kind of reaction she wanted from a man who was, after all, at least several years older than she. Maybe last night at the club had been a fluke, and she wasn’t as attractive now as she’d thought. Maybe men would dance with anyone at a club.