Strong, Sleek and Sinful - By Lorie O'Clare Page 0,16

the guy leap backward and fall on his back when the car hit him. The guy driving found his brake and slammed it hard enough to lock his tires. The driver stared in shock out his windshield while white-knuckling his steering wheel. Immediately a squad car pulled up behind the idling car in the driveway.

“Take it easy,” Perry said quietly, placing his hand on the guy’s shoulder when he tried rolling over.

“Fuck you!” the man grumbled, and then moaned when he again tried rolling over.

“Suspect is down,” Perry informed Dispatch, and then stood, walking toward the front of the house to find an address. “We’re going to need an ambulance.”

Barker walked around the side of the house and grinned smugly as she moved to his side. “You’re pretty impressive for a man close to forty,” she said under her breath, and glanced up at him with an invitation in her eyes.

It was an invite he’d never accept. “You need help getting statements from everyone?” He didn’t bother telling her he was thirty-three, not close to forty. There wasn’t any reason to dwell on personal information with her, or anyone on the force.

She squeezed his biceps and gave him a quick once-over. There was definitely approval on her face. “What? And let you do all the work?” She met his gaze and lowered her voice. “I have no problem jumping in and getting dirty to get the job done, darling.”

Perry nodded. Anything he said would simply encourage her. There were as many cops on the scene now as there were civilians. This time Perry walked around the block back toward his Jeep, nodding to the ambulance driver when he came around the corner. Perry paused at the middle of the block, spotting the mother of the small children, who now stood talking to her neighbor at the end of the hedge dividing their yards. She sounded shaken but okay. Perry picked up pace toward his Jeep.

He paused when he reached for his door handle, frowning and staring over the roof. A green hybrid was parked across the street in a narrow driveway. Perry instantly recognized the tags—those registered to Enterprise. Dani had told him Kylie was a college student at KU, working on a thesis about teenagers as a subculture. He imagined that would make for an interesting paper; his nieces definitely lived in a world of their own.

Perry opened his car door and leaned against it, taking his time studying the hybrid, the narrow driveway, and the small home. Although it wasn’t quite evening, the blinds in the house were all closed. The yard was neat, though, with patches of dirt breaking up thick clumps of grass, typical of the many yards on this street. The house was probably a rental. Most on this street were government housing or rented to private individuals. It was an affordable alternative to living in an apartment and not unusual for college students to be found living here, although not many who attended KU, which was half an hour drive from here.

There was something about her, though. He’d spotted it the moment he laid eyes on her the previous afternoon in the mall parking lot. Dani was a pretty perceptive kid, and she’d noticed something about her, too. Enough so to approach a stranger, which he should have lectured Dani about doing, and ask what she was about. Obviously Dani didn’t confront her—Kylie—because she was distractingly pretty. Although his niece did comment that Kylie was a sharp dresser, he didn’t conclude from that statement that Dani approved of her appearance.

Perry wouldn’t describe her as a sharp dresser, more like alluring, tempting, as if she slipped into that minidress she’d worn the night before knowing it would turn the head of every man who passed her. Her blond hair wasn’t long, but long enough to give a man something to grab hold of, to yank her head back and enjoy the slender arch of her neck and back.

There was a compelling spark in her bright blue eyes, noticeable even at night. But the way her dress hugged her figure, showing off perky, decent-sized breasts and narrow hips, made it damn hard for him not to physically respond when he first laid eyes on her. It was more than the challenge in her eyes, the cool way she had responded to him when he let her know he’d pulled her tags after seeing her at the mall the other day, which made him ache to know