Irresistible Force (12 page)

James and Bogart came back from their trial at a trot. The sight of the pair of healthy male specimens drew a half-smile of begrudging admiration from their coach. She pinched if off immediately and placed a fist on each hip. It was time to chew their asses.

James stopped before her, not at all winded. “Sorry. We’re a little rusty.”

Yardley ignored the gorgeous smile he slanted her way. “Rusty can let a suspect escape. Or get you killed.”

He sobered instantly. “Yes, ma’am.”

“How long have you and Bogart been off required training?”

“Four weeks, ma’am.”

“Eight hours a week minimum, times four weeks. Well, hell. You’ve missed thirty-two hours of training. That’s enough to ruin you as a team.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s why I came out here first thing. To be assessed.”

Yardley walked slowly around the pair, assessing the tension running through the young officer’s body and the concern expressed by the way his canine companion was watching his partner’s every twitch.

“You youngsters get a few takedowns under your belts and think you don’t need to learn anything else. But without constant discipline and training, you’re not K-9 officers. You’re just a boy and his dog.”

“We’ll do better tomorrow, ma’am. I’ll work him day and night between shifts.”

“Did you not hear me? You’re not fit for street duty.”

Stung by her assessment, James had to bite back the comment that came to mind. It wasn’t Bogart’s fault he was rusty. It wasn’t his … Hell. Maybe it was.

“Come with me.”

They were both silent as they walked back to the main office. Hard as she could be, James was grateful for Yardley’s close connection to the partners she paired up. Without it, Bogart might not have been found.

Aware that Bogart was missing, Yardley had paid special attention when she received a call from a young woman who said she had recently adopted a Belgian Malinois from a shelter. The caller said the dog was so well trained she thought he might have professional abilities. Yet when Yardley asked her to describe the dog, the young woman hesitated. That hesitation was enough to prick Yardley’s curiosity. When pressed for details, for instance where exactly she had adopted the dog, she’d only say it was near Lake Gaston. When asked if the dog was tattooed or tagged, the caller had hung up. Even more suspicious. Following a hunch, she had called James.

They agreed. Why would the caller contact Harmonie Kennels unless she was aware of some connection to the dog in question? It could be a setup. Someone who’d steal a police dog might have a vendetta against the owner or the department. Worst-case scenario was the go-to mode of operation. The benefit of the doubt could get a law enforcement officer killed.

James and his sergeant had come up with a plan. On his own time, James would do some investigation in the general area of Lake Gaston, by pretending he was a civilian with a missing pet.

It was amazing what a local gas station or café owner knew or observed about her or his customers. One glance at the photo James carried of Bogart, and the owner of a café located on a farm road off Interstate 95 just east of Littleton gave him the location of a recent customer with a dog that fit the description. But, he added, she wasn’t a local. Just visiting. Using one of the old 1950s cabins located on a cove on Lake Gaston. Sure enough, that’s where he found Bogart, and Shay Appleton.

James found himself wondering what Shay was doing now.

“That’s your problem right here.”

James paused, looking guiltily at Yardley. “What?”

“Your mind just wandered. That single-minded obsession to do your best, it’s missing today.”

“Yes, ma’am. I was just thinking how lucky we were that Shay was the one to get custody of Bogart.”

Yardley noticed that he called the woman by her first name but let that slide. “Did she know anything about handling a dog with Bogart’s special talents and needs?”

“No, but she has good instincts. They developed a relationship very quickly.” He told her about the incident in the woods the night he’d discovered Bogart was alive and then, the next day, how his partner had alerted him to the man’s return. “Both times Bogart understood without prompting that she was in danger.”

She regarded Bogart thoughtfully. “That’s quite remarkable.”

James grinned with pride. “Bogart has a sixth sense about such things.”

“You need to keep that in mind.” Yardley then bent down and gave the Malinois a big hug. “Good boy! Such a smart boy, too.”

James waited patiently as Yardley lavished affection on his partner. Her voice became light and girlish when she dealt with the dogs. Then her smile would betray the sensuous woman behind the military posture. She was an enigma in a male-dominated field of K-9 law enforcement. Once in the armed services, she had left to train K-9s. Yet she commanded the respect of a general whenever she entered a room or came on the training field. It didn’t hurt that she was one helluva good-looking woman.

Not that you could mention that around her. She was tall and lean but with curves in all the right places. She had eyes so black rumor was she was part Apache. But then there was that long dark red hair, almost mahogany, usually stuck under a fatigue cap. Her strong-boned face held a hint of sensuality most often disguised with a no-nonsense expression. Her friends called her Yard. Everyone else called her ma’am.

James wondered from time to time what sort of man would be able to get behind those defenses and claim the woman only rarely glimpsed, like now? So far, he’d seen every man who tried get shot down. He hoped he’d be around when that changed.

Yardley came to her feet, produced a ball from her pocket and threw it. Bogart was off like a missile, chasing it. “What happened with Ms. Appleton’s boyfriend?”

“Her ex.” James flexed his shoulders, revealing more than he knew. “I leaned on him a little.”

“Can’t she take care of herself?” Yardley’s tone was that of a woman who wouldn’t need a dog or a man’s help to put anyone in his place.

That question had been on James’s mind, too. “She was doing okay with Bogart around.”

Yardley frowned. “You think she’s still in danger?”

He retrieved a ball from his pocket as Bogart waited patiently for another toss. “Not really my business. She made that clear.”

Yardley nodded. “Then she’s got some grit. Good.”

She took the ball from James and sent it sailing away. Bogart hustled after it as if it were a sirloin steak.

Yardley used the pause in conversation to think about what she should do next.

She knew more about her K-9 teams’ private lives than most trainers. It was that kind of a business. Man or woman, and dog, needed to be part of a support system, an extended K-9 family, which included keeping up with one another’s business, even if it was personal. Everything affected the bond between officer and canine. Nothing could be allowed to come permanently between that. When something did, they often needed help to work it out quickly, or they would fail.

While visiting a German breeder two years ago to observe their methods for selecting dogs to be trained, Yardley had had a chance to watch Bogart come into his own. And fell a little in love with this scrappy runt of the litter.

Bogart needed a master who knew when to hold him back, and when to get out of his way. From the beginning, James seemed to have an intuition about that delicate balance. But today, everything possible had gone wrong. Now there was something else in the mix.

She could tell James’s preoccupation had something to do with the young woman named Shay. Bogart had bonded with her quickly. Perhaps James had, too. There was no way to know how important she was to them. And neither man nor dog was going to be back in top form until that issue had been worked out.

She seldom made command decisions for her teams, but she wasn’t above steering from the rear.

“I’ll sign off on your readiness for duty, temporarily, but I’m going to recommend sending you and Bogart down to a place near Raleigh where you can get an intensive week of retraining. A sort of K-9 boot camp.”

James looked startled. “I’d prefer to work with you, ma’am.”

“I’d like that, too, James. But I’ve got a special forces team coming in to learn parachute jump techniques with their K-9s starting on Monday. I won’t have the time or manpower to spare for you for several weeks.”

“I don’t know how my chief will react to the idea of giving me more leave after all the time I took off to look for Bogart.”

“You leave Joshua to me.”

It surprised James that she referred to his senior officer by his first name. He didn’t know what her relationships were or how high up they went in both law enforcement and national security. But clearly, she had access to every power security player who mattered. If she wanted him at a K-9 boot camp for a weeklong refresher course, that’s where he was going.

But first he had to settle the matter of his partner’s disappearance.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

James made sure he saw her first.

Engrossed in conversation with a station employee, Jaylynn Turner stood at the far end of a hall on the third floor of the building that housed one of Charlotte’s TV station offices. A former Miss North Carolina runner-up, she was a long leggy blonde with a bosom that impressively filled out a swimsuit. The cascade of long blond hair dipping to the center of her back made her instantly recognizable in a crowd. Dubbed “Charlotte’s Sweetheart” after viewers voted her their favorite local morning-show host, she wasn’t particularly good at news delivery, often flubbing a line. But she had the charisma to cover slipups with a girly “oops, I did it again” kind of glance. The camera loved her. And the right demographics tuned in to watch her. She was on a trajectory for bigger things.

When he was growing up, hot girls like her had not been within his reach. He’d been a late bloomer, not topping five foot seven and a hundred and thirty pounds on high school graduation day. Homecoming queens, cheerleaders, and other popular girls thought him nice, smart, and funny; a social death sentence that relegated him to friend status.

He’d sprouted during his first year of college. He’d played soccer since first grade so his fit physique just proportioned up with him. Now that he was a combination of nice guy and stud muffin, the dynamics shifted. Suddenly, women were eager to give him the sexual experience he had lacked. The short, skinny kid without confidence remained. So he had treated sex like it was a competitive sport through his early twenties until he adjusted to his new self-image. Things were different now.

He would be thirty next April. Most of his friends were either married or engaged. And he’d begun to feel the need—which had nothing to do with his mother’s unsubtle prompting—to settle down.

He had thought he knew what he wanted. It was a fantasy he hadn’t even fully let himself in on until he’d found her. He was looking for the kind of woman who would turn heads and gain him the envious admiration of his male friends. And be willing to become his wife and, in time, mother to their children.

When “Charlotte’s Sweetheart” singled him out with her flirtatious attention during an appearance on her morning show with Bogart, for the Charlotte K-9 service, he was so flattered his hard-on lasted the next three hours. He even started thinking about how to make payments on a diamond ring that first day.

James felt the heat of a rare blush sting his neck. The memory made him want to kick his own sorry butt around the block.

She’s so beautiful but so boring.
Wasn’t that a song lyric? He’d always thought:
Screw boring. If I could nail a woman like Jaylynn I wouldn’t care if she couldn’t add four plus four.

Only that was no longer true. Not even great sex could prevent his quick disillusionment with his fantasy girlfriend. That was because Jaylynn had only one topic of conversation: Jaylynn.

After an initial fuck-o-rama weekend, even their physical relationship began to have limitations. She didn’t want him to tangle her perfect hair that was, he discovered, not really all hers. She didn’t want to stay up late or wake up early for sex on his days off. She needed to be “fresh” for the camera. She couldn’t do “it” the day she got a bikini wax. “It doesn’t look good.”

Turned out, she was great at faking emotions, too. She wanted him on her arm for her public appearances but she couldn’t make time for a barbecue with his colleagues, let alone spend time with his family. After one too many arguments on the subject, she admitted that she didn’t like any of them that much. She even let slip that her dating him had been a calculation. The obvious chemistry between them on-screen, not to mention Bogart’s appeal to dog lovers, had tracked well with her demographics. Being a couple raised her profile. And she was always on the lookout for people and situations that gave her more publicity.

Just before they broke up, she was bragging about the fact that she had a new following in the Virginia penal system. She’d visited a correctional center as part of a morning-show segment on rehabilitation of the incarcerated. Their fan mail, she told one and all, just made her day. She told James that the thought of a building full of horny incarcerated men thinking about her made her feel all hot and kinky.

She turned away from the colleague to address an underling who had approached, long hair rippling with her every move. James felt his nut sack tighten. She’d betrayed him. He wasn’t ever going to forget that.

James let his anger rise a bit. He’d been one sorry-ass fool, letting pride keep him from ending it. How long would it have gone on if Bogart hadn’t disappeared?

Jaylynn had never even tried with Bogart. She didn’t want him around. No, Bogart couldn’t be kept in a kennel outside when they were together. Yes, his partner shed, but it wasn’t that bad. If Bogart was part of the deal, then James couldn’t stay at her place overnight.

Not surprisingly, the feeling of dislike was mutual. Oops, sorry, Bogart chewed up her favorite purse. Oh no, you can’t find your cell? Yes, look, Bogart hid it. He does that when he’s bored, or being ignored. Maybe if she didn’t leave her things lying around everywhere. If she just tried to be friends with Bogart …