Free Gotcha! by Christie Craig

hours, she’d committed two of the greatest sins a woman could against a man: interfering with his job and messing with his family jewels. Well, a man’s jewels could and should be messed with, but gently. For a split second his mind conjured an image of the two of them naked and—
    “I only told them what Ellie said.” She frowned.
    Was that guilt? Well, even the woman’s grimace was cute and sexy. “I guess you didn’t have a choice,” he admitted. “But you’d better get moving.” He pulled the tape out of the answering machine. “We’re leaving in five minutes.”
    She stared droopy-eyed at the television. The ten-inch tube was still on, the volume muted. He’d cut the sound last night after she’d dropped off. Sleep hadn’t come so easily for him. He’d sat in the chair and watched her, and somewhere around four in the morning he’d finally decided she was beautiful. Not drop-dead gorgeous, exactly, with legs up to the neck and knockout boobs. But she was more than girl-next-door pretty. She had one of those faces you just wanted to study forever. And her body? Yeah, about four thirty, he’d decided a closer look at that was high on his wish list.
    Visions of tattooed Tanks suddenly flashed in his head. Maybe it was his attraction to Macy, or maybe it was because he felt guilty for not listening to Ellie Chandler, but he felt personally responsible for this whole mess.
    “Come on. Up and at ’em. Get ready,” he told her.
    “Ready? For what?”
    “You’re coming in with me. Five minutes.”
    “Why?” Macy asked.
    “First, because you’ve got an escaped convict after you and I don’t want to leave you alone. Second, because I’m certain that the Feds will want to chat.”
    “I already talked to them,” she grumbled.
    “Yeah, but that was before they knew Tanks had a thing for you and…well, it was when you had me down as a bad guy.”
    “And you think I’ve changed my mind about that?”
    “You chose me over your ex.”
    “You were listening?” She frowned. “I don’t have time—” Her gaze shot to the clock. “My test!” She buried her face in her hands. “Oh, crap! How could I miss my test?”
    Jake shrugged. “Five minutes. I’m serious.”
    Macy took thirty. Five minutes were to politely suggest that she could meet him at the precinct as soon as she pulled herself together, but polite didn’t work, and she’d never had a surplus of early-morning patience. The other twenty-five minutes were needed to shower, brush her teeth, comb her hair, and then find her very last emergency tampon under the sink. Every time he’d yell from behind the bathroom door, she’d give herself permission to dawdle for another five minutes. She wasn’t his prisoner, his wife, or his girlfriend. And while she didn’t enjoy being mean, she didn’t believe in rewarding bad behavior.
    Banging on the door when a PMS-stricken woman was trying to insert her last tampon? That definitely fell into the category of bad behavior. Oh, and when he screamed, What are you doing in there? she’d been tempted to tell him the truth. That would have shut him up.
    But she also had begun to feel a few things other than annoyance for the man.
    Staring at her image in the mirror, Macy made one of those face-your-fears kind of confessions that are supposed to help your mood. “Hi, I’m Macy Tucker, and Jake Baldwin scares me. He tempts me. Being with him is like driving a bike too close to the edge of a cliff.” A cliff with great scenery, of course. But Gawd have mercy, she hadn’t thought there was a man alive who could make her want to risk falling off that cliff again. Hadn’t she fallen too many times, only to find herself bruised, battered, and broken?
    She blinked at her image and waited for the confession to offer her some relief. None came.
    She gave her reflection another once-over. “You look like hammered poo on a bad hair day.” It all showed on her face: lack of sleep, stress over Billy,