Читать книгу Holding Out For A Hero - HelenKay Dimon - Страница 6

He sensed her before he saw her. The dangerous mix of high-end perfume and wealth gave her away. Josh Windsor knew some men found the combination attractive. He sniffed and smelled nothing but trouble.

Tucking his pen in his inside suit-jacket pocket, he crossed the marble courthouse hallway to meet Deana Armstrong before she materialized at his side. She would track him down anyway. Might as well take the offensive and be done with it.

“Ms. Armstrong.” He nodded. “What brings you here?”

“To Honolulu?”

“To the fourth floor of the Circuit Court.”

She took a step forward and put them less than two feet apart. “You.”

Somehow he knew she would say that. “How’d you guess I was even on Oahu?”

“I flew over to Kauai and went to your office.”

As if that was a perfectly normal thing to do. “Of course you did.”

“I couldn’t get near the Drug Enforcement Administration. Not even on the same floor.”

“Government buildings are funny like that.”

“I also checked your house while I was there.”

“You…” Surely he heard that wrong. “Wait, what?”

“Your house.”

Nope. Heard it just fine. He ignored her behavior before, wrote it off as annoying, and moved on. Not this time. “Care to explain?”

“Well, it’s really a condo.” She had the nerve to throw out an innocent, wide-eyed look.

To shut that down he leaned in, letting her feel the looming presence of every inch of his six feet. “You actually went to my place in Lihue?”

“Do you have another house?”

“Only one of us has a trust fund and owns multiple properties.” Including a sprawling estate on one of the best beaches on Oahu. That person sure as hell wasn’t him.

“What does my housing situation have to do with our conversation?” She waved her hand in front of her face. “Look, none of this matters.”

“Yeah, it kind of does.”

“Can we focus on the topic, please?”

Was she trying to annoy him? “Which is what?”

“I heard you were on some sort of leave from your position with the DEA—”

“Jesus, lady. Is there anything you don’t know about my life?”

“—which is why I took the chance of catching you.” Her voice increased in volume from cool to almost booming as she talked over him.

“Keep yelling like that and courthouse security will be all over you in two seconds.” Which, the more he thought about it, was not a bad way to get out of this conversation.

“My point is that your home address isn’t exactly a secret.”

“I guess not to people with detectives on their regular household payroll.” When he fixed every other part of this life, Josh vowed to fix that as well. Make it so no matter how much money folks like her waved around, no one would find him unless he wanted to be found. And right now he didn’t. “Did you at least water the plants while you were at the condo?”

She frowned.

He was impressed she managed to show any emotion.

“I didn’t go in,” she said. “That would have been inappropriate.”

At last, a boundary. No sense to know when someone was flinging sarcasm right in her face, but a boundary. “Looks as if we agree on something.”

Deana laced her fingers together in front of her. “I read in the newspaper that you were testifying here today as part of an old case, so I flew back home to Oahu and came downtown to find you.”

Under different circumstances he might be flattered with a woman being interested enough to chase him around Hawaii, but he knew better than to get excited about this one. “So, you’re stalking me now.”

“Of course not.”

“Harassing a federal officer is illegal.” He nodded hello to the judge’s clerk when she stuck her head out of an office. “Sorry. We’ll keep it down out here.”

Deana waited until the younger woman disappeared again before whispering. “You’re overstating my actions a bit, don’t you think?”

Oh, he had done a lot of thinking about Deana. The woman was a walking contradiction. Round face, high cheekbones, big green eyes and long near-black wavy hair that fell below her shoulders. Five-six and slender. An objectively beautiful woman. That part suited Josh just fine. The rest of her, not so much.

She possessed a demeanor chilly enough to freeze steel. Her serious affect and ever-present blank stare made her appear far older than the twenty-nine years he knew her to be. But that wasn’t the oddest thing about her. Even now the woman hid most of her potentially impressive body under a pile of clothing. A long-sleeve navy blazer with a collar cut high enough to strangle. The only piece of skin exposed above her waist, other than her hands, was a thin slice of wrist…with a watch shiny enough to advertise incredible wealth.

Somehow Deana Armstrong lived her whole life in informal Hawaii and yet insisted on dressing as if it were winter at a convent in Nebraska. Few people wore full business suits in Hawaii except him and anyone else in a federal law enforcement position, most opting instead for a more casual look. Certainly no one without a job dressed anything other than casual. And the one thing Deana didn’t do was work.

“Is this a good place?” she asked.

He glanced around the empty hallway leading back to a restricted corridor to the judge’s private chambers. “Depends on what you want to use it for.”

“Excuse me?”

He pointed to the back corner of the wall above the emergency exit and her head. “Security is watching.”

“I don’t care about that. I’m here because I’ve been trying to reach you.” She rubbed her palms on her knee-length skirt.

He tried not to stare at the legs peeking out of all that buttoned-up stuffiness. “And?”

“You haven’t called me back.”

Clearly the woman didn’t tune into not-so-subtle hints. “True.”

“Are you available now?”

If she asked him two days from now the answer definitely would be no. He planned to be free of all ties by then, specifically those related to his work at the DEA. No reason not to get an early start on that. “No.”

“In a few hours or tomorrow?”

“Still no.”

She crossed her arms over her middle. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you were ignoring me.”

He thought about lifting his fists toward the ceiling in victory. “We’re finally understanding each other.”