Alex checked the rearview mirror and changed lanes before answering. “Gage got the head chef’s kid out of trouble with a gang situation a few years ago, and now there’s a table available any time he asks. Gage doesn’t go all that often, so he lets the rest of us use the table every now and then.”
Lacey shook her head. Another case of people doing favors for the SWAT team. She should have known. But again, she wasn’t going to complain. About pretty much anything.
She was still humming from that amazing sex they’d had less than an hour ago. She’d never done anything that remotely crazy before. Having sex up against a wall was completely insane, like something a couple of teenagers would do. But truthfully, she’d loved it. It was the most outrageous and spontaneous thing she’d ever done, and it had felt incredible. In fact, she was already thinking of what they could do for an encore once they got back to her place.
If Alex was willing to come back to her place.
“What’s the plan after dinner?” she asked hesitantly.
For all she knew, Alex might not want to go back to her place, not with Kelsey there. Lacey didn’t know much about guys, but she imagined that having a younger sister in the picture could complicate it for some of them.
Alex threw her a quick look before focusing on the road again. “I don’t have another surveillance shift until late tomorrow night, so I was thinking that we could head back to your place and hang out. Maybe sleep in tomorrow, if that’s okay with you?”
“You don’t mind that Kelsey’s around?” she asked carefully, studiously looking at the mile markers zipping past outside the truck.
“No,” he said. “I was going to ask you the same question. Do you think Kelsey will have a problem if she sees me there in the morning?”
Lacey felt the tension drain out of her. What the heck had she been thinking? This wasn’t some guy. This was Alex, the greatest man on the planet. Of course, his only concern had been how Kelsey would handle finding out about the two of them being together.
“Kelsey will be fine with it. In fact, she’ll probably be thrilled that I’m finally spending time with someone.”
Alex smiled. “Then it’s a plan. Dinner and back to your place for the night.”
Lacey definitely liked the sound of that. In fact, that was the type of plan she could see herself getting used to.
They were still fifteen minutes from the restaurant when Lacey’s phone rang. A part of her wished she could ignore it, but she couldn’t. It could be Kelsey. Or the vet clinic, Wendy’s ACS squad, or the dispatchers from Animal Services.
It turned out to be the latter. They usually called if they had a severely injured animal that had been picked up by one of their officers. If they were calling on a Saturday night, it probably wasn’t good.
“What’s up, Rachel?” she asked, pulling a pad and pen out of her purse.
If this wasn’t a call to ask her to come to the city’s main shelter, Rachel would be giving her an address to some other location. If so, it meant the animal was in bad shape, and Lacey wanted to be ready.
“Lacey, thank God! I hate to call you on the weekend like this, but I didn’t know what else to do.”
“What’s wrong?” Lacey asked.
She’d worked with Rachel Carr dozens of times before. As a dispatcher, Rachel dealt with a lot of bad stuff. If she was unsure about what to do, Lacey was really worried.
“We got a call about forty-five minutes ago,” Rachel explained. “The woman wouldn’t leave her name, but said she heard a bunch of dogs whimpering in pain somewhere behind the abandoned warehouse off Ridgecrest, about a block from where it intersects Park Lane.”
Lacey frowned. This wasn’t the information Rachel and the other dispatchers usually provided in a situation like this. “Are the Animal Service officers there now? Do you need me to meet them?”
“That’s the thing,” Rachel said. “They reported that they couldn’t find anything, but…”
The hair on the back of Lacey’s neck stood up. This was getting weird. “But what, Rachel?”
“The woman on the phone sounded really, really sure about what she heard, and the officers I dispatched called back really, really fast—if you know what I mean. I was hoping you could go over and take a look around?”
Lacey knew exactly what Rachel meant.
“I wouldn’t normally ask you to do something like this,” Rachel said urgently. “I tried to get someone to cover my shift so I could look myself, but I couldn’t find anyone. Can you go…please?”
If there was anyone who loved dogs as much as Lacey did, it was Rachel. If she thought there was something wrong, Lacey needed to check it out.
“What’s the full address, Rachel?”
Lacey wrote it down, then hung up. She hated to ask Alex to postpone the reservation, since he’d gone to so much trouble making it. But…
