“Horseback riding is your way of swaying me over, Deputy Torres?”
Deputy Torres.
She called me Deputy Torres.
Why is hearing her call me that going to give me a fucking hard-on.
I’m standing on the ground for once—boots in the paddock dirt, hands resting on the fence rail, lookingupat this woman. And the vantage point is doing something to me that I wasn’t prepared for, because in every interaction I’ve had with Hazel Martinez since she arrived in Sweetwater Falls, I’ve been at her level or above it. Standing beside her in a hallway. Sitting across from her in a cruiser. Looking down at her in a hospital bed while she slept off a neurotoxin and I monitored her fever and changed her into my flannel and tried not to think about the way her body fit against the fabric like it was designed for it.
But now she’s on a horse.
And I’m on the ground.
And the shift in elevation has rearranged something fundamental in my perception, because Hazel Martinez sitting in a saddle—spine straight, shoulders back, one hand resting on the pommel and the other holding the reins with a grip that looks more comfortable than it should for a woman who supposedly needs guidance—is a visual that my brain is going to be processing for the foreseeable future.
She’s in the black tights and the crop top.
Normal clothes.
Fitted clothes.
And I cannot help but admit—to myself, in the privacy of my own increasingly compromised thought process—that seeing her out of the chief’s uniform is doing things to me that the uniform never did. Not that the uniform wasn’t attractive. It was. The crisp authority of the pressed jacket and the regulation pants and the badge positioned over her heart carried a specific, competent appeal that I am man enough to acknowledge. Hazel Martinez in a uniform is a woman who commands rooms and solves crimes and makes you want to salute even if you outrank her.
But Hazel Martinez in a crop top.
Fuck.
The black fabric cuts across her midsection at a height that exposes a strip of brown skin above the waistband of the tights—smooth, taut, carrying the lean definition of a woman whose physical fitness is a professional requirement and a personal discipline. The tights themselves are performing an act of engineering that should probably be classified, the material conforming to the contours of her thighs with a precision that leaves approximately nothing to the imagination and everything to the increasingly vivid imagination that I am currently failing to manage.
She looks like a different person.
No. That’s wrong. She looks like thesameperson with fewer layers between her and the world. Like the chief was always in there, but the chief came wrapped in institutional armor, and the woman sitting on this horse in October sunlight with her ponytail catching the breeze is what happens when you remove the armor and let the person breathe.
She blinks.
Stares at me.
Her dark amber eyes carrying the particular, evaluative patience of a woman who asked a question, is waiting for an answer, and has noticed that the man she asked is staring at her midsection instead of responding.
She tilts her head.
“Are you checking me out?”
I blush.
A little. The warmth spreading across my cheeks with the involuntary speed of a man whose face has been caught doing exactly what it was doing and whose pride is insufficient to produce a convincing denial.
“I’m one hundred percent checking you out,” I say, “because you’re hot in fitted clothes and pretending otherwise would be insulting to both of us.”
Her turn.
The blush that rises on Hazel’s face is extraordinary—not because it’s dramatic but because it’srare. A flush of color climbing from the base of her neck to her cheekbones with the slow, reluctant progression of a reaction she can’t prevent and didn’t expect. Her eyes break from mine for a fraction of a second—the micro-avoidance of a woman who has been hit with a direct compliment and doesn’t have a defensive formation prepared for it.
She’s not used to it.
The realization lands with a quiet, devastating weight that has nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with comprehension.
Direct commentary. Honest, unambiguous, this-is-what-I-think-and-I’m-saying-it-to-your-face compliments. The basic, human act of telling someone that they’re attractive and meaning it.
