I loved hair with some body to it.
I’d always wanted it when I was younger. In fact, I’d gone to great lengths to get curly hair. I’d gotten a perm. I’d bought the most expensive curlers.
But my stick-straight black hair had too much volume, and it was so damn heavy that the moment I got a curl into it, it faded. Not even the best of the best hair spray could hold those suckers in.
But damn, did Detective Schultz have some to-die-for hair.
And his eyes.
My God, his blue eyes had been the bluest of blue. Like the sky on a cloudless day. Or the bright ‘blue’ crayon straight out of a crayon box.
“Are you even listening to me?” Beckham chirped, bringing me away from contemplating the detective’s eyes and back to the problem at hand.
“I’m sorry, I was daydreaming about eyes,” I admitted.
Beckham snorted. “He does have some pretty ones. Pairing them with that wavy black hair and dimple? I’ll bet he had you tongue-tied when he spoke to you.”
I scoffed. “I don’t get tongue-tied around men.”
That was a lie, too.
I didn’t used to get tongue-tied around men.
Now, I was lucky to be around them without having a downright panic attack.
That was one of my ‘side effects’ of my kidnapping/trafficking.
I didn’t do well in public without someone I trusted at my side, and that could come in the form of a man—my best friends’ husbands counted—or a woman. I wasn’t picky, as long as I had someone.
I also didn’t grocery shop anymore.
That had been when I was taken—while grocery shopping. I’d actually gone out for a present for Troup and Beckham and realized I needed a few things for dinner.
I’d been minding my own business, loading my groceries into the car, and I’d been snatched from behind into a white panel van.
I don’t know what the hell I’d been thinking.
I mean, everyone and their brother knew damn well and good not to load and unload next to a white panel van.
Yet, that day, my mind had been on other things—i.e., marriage to a man that I loved, at the time, with all of my heart. It turned out that he wasn’t the man I thought he was.
I’d been on cloud nine.
I’d never seen it coming.
“You get flustered around men,” she corrected. “You get… weird.”
“Well, I didn’t get weird around this one,” I admitted. “He made me feel… safe.”
She scoffed.
“He looks a lot like Henry Cavill with that almost curly black hair and the chin dimple,” Beckham mused.
That’s when I snapped my fingers.
I’d been trying to put my finger on it for damn well ten hours. But I couldn’t figure out why he looked so familiar to me.
And then that hair and chin dimple finally clicked into place with her words. He did look like Henry Cavill. Only a hell of a lot more attractive one, which I hadn’t realized was possible.
“He was wearing a pair of dark blue jeans and a button-down Wrangler khaki shirt,” I admitted. “I’ve never, ever in my life found a man wearing cowboy clothes attractive, but the detective was…”
“Hot,” she mused. “He lives on a ranch. That explains the cowboy clothes.”
Over the next ten minutes, she gave me everything that she could find on him in a short amount of time.
“He has a high credit score.” She paused. “He has two nieces that live with him part time. He splits them with his parents. The mother and father, his sister, died in a car wreck years ago. He has another sister, Nivea, who used to help raise them, but she moved to a different part of the country with her new man. Parents and him live on a ranch a couple of towns over. Dad inherited about a thousand acres from his father who passed away recently. Wilhelm—you’ll have to call him Will because Wilhelm is weird—lives in a two-bedroom cabin on the property.”
I smiled at all the information she could find.
“Now, I’ll continue to dig. But you’re gonna have to tell me why you need this information,” she murmured.
I swallowed and looked down at my hands.
“He’s the one,” I told her. “Like you already said.”
There was no reason to lie.
I needed to break out of my funk.
I wanted to live again.
I wanted to be who I was always meant to be, not a shell of Cannel who was scared of her own shadow.
I’d seen the shrinks.
I’d moved out of the town that used to be where my best friends were located—my crutches in all things.
I’d graduated school, found a job, and moved into an apartment on my own.
I was ready to live as well as I possibly could live.
And that meant having sex again.
That meant seeing men on a daily basis, and not overanalyzing their every move.
It meant… Wilhelm Schultz, the detective for Paris Police Department, was going to be the one to break me out of that funk.
I knew, just as well as he did, that he was attracted to me.
I’d seen it in his eyes, and the way that he allowed his gaze to trail down my body.
I only hoped that I could scrounge up the nerve to go for it.
“Just wanted to make sure you were sure. I want you to be happy.”
CHAPTER 3
Life is short. Smile while you have teeth.
-Text from Shine to Cannel
CANNEL
One week later
I didn’t expect him to be drunk, too.
In fact, I expected him to be sober, that way he could take care of my drunk ass.
Two drunk people didn’t normally equal a good time.
At least, that was how it’d always gone with me and my ex. One of us had to always be sober for us to enjoy the night.
Whether that was because Too—Beauregard, formally known as ‘Toot,’ was just a lousy drunk, or I was, I didn’t know.
Over the last week, I’d watched Will, learned his habits, and knew that he’d be here tonight.
Over the last week and a half since I’d met Detective Wilhelm Schultz—I’d already shortened his name in my head to Will, I’d thought about him so much—I’d worked up the courage to enact my plan.
My plan being to get laid.
Get laid by a man that I knew was a good man… even though he didn’t look like a very good man right now.
In fact, he looked like a bad man, and that had my heart thundering.
And I wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure as to why.
I mean, on the outside, he looked bad.
On paper, he looked really, really good.
I mean, he was a detective for the police department—he solved murders, for Christ’s sake.
He took his two young nieces in after his sister died. He fought for them in court with his own sister because he knew that he and his parents would be better for them than his partying sister, who only wanted the cash flow that came with the kids.
He donated to a damn animal shelter on a daily basis and had a dog named Sally who was a rescue.
Sally the Doberman, who liked to scale fences that were six feet high and got posted in the Paris Happenings once a week because of her escape escapades.
But today, he was wearing a black t-shirt that fit him like a glove—and man, did he have a great body. I’m talking, ripped. His muscles had muscles. I only saw muscles like the ones he was sporting on the mannequins in the store that were advertising Under Armour.