Dangerous by Diana Palmer Page A

and cut off her head. Ten days later, he married a woman who could give him a son.”
    “The wretch!” she exclaimed, outraged.
    “That’s why we have elected officials instead of kings with absolute power,” he told her.
    She shook her head. “How do you know all that?”
    He leaned down. “You mustn’t mention it, but I have a degree in history.”
    “Well!”
    “But I specialized in Scottish history, not English. I’m one of a handful of people who think James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, got a raw deal from history for marrying Mary, Queen of Scots. But don’t mention that out loud.”
    She laughed. “Okay.”
    He opened her car door for her. Before she got in, he drew a long strand of her blond hair over his big hand, studying its softness and beautiful pale color.

    Her eyes slid over his face. “Your brother wears his hair long, in a ponytail. You keep yours short.”
    “Is that a question?”
    She nodded.
    “Jon is particularly heavy on the Native American side of his ancestry.”
    “And you aren’t?”
    His eyes narrowed. “I don’t know, Winnie,” he said quietly, making her name sound foreign and sweet and different. “Maybe I’m hiding from it.”
    “Not you,” she said with conviction. “I can’t see you hiding from anything.”
    That soft pride in her tone made him feel taller. He let go of her hair. “Drive carefully,” he said.
    “I will. See you.”
    He didn’t say anything else. But he did nod.
    With her heart flying up in her throat, she got in and drove away. It wasn’t until she got home that she realized, she still didn’t know his first name.

4
    Winnie was back at work the next morning almost walking on air. Kilraven had kissed her. Not only that, he seemed to really like her. Maybe San Antonio wasn’t so far away. He might visit. He might take her out on a date. Anything was possible.
    She put her purse in her locker and went to her station. It was in the shape of a semicircle, and contained a bank of computers. Directly in front of her was a keyboard; behind it was a computer screen. This was the radio from which she could contact any police, fire or EMS department, although her job was police dispatch. There were separate stations for fire, police and EMS. Fire had one dispatcher, EMS had two. She, along with Shirley at a separate console, handled law enforcement traffic on her shift for all of Jacobs County. Beside her was a screen for the NCIC, the National Crime Information Center. Behind the computer screen, on a shelf, sat three other computer screens. One, an incident screen, noted the location of the units and their current status. The middle was CAD, or computer aided dispatch, which featured a form into which information such as activity code and location were placed; typing in the location brought up such data as prior calls at the residence, the nearest fire hydrant in case of fire, the name and address of a key holder and even a box to fax the incident to the police department. It also had screens for names and numbers of law enforcement personnel, including cell phone and pager numbers. There was a mobile data terminal from which dispatch could send messages to law enforcement on their laptops in their cars. The third computer screen was the phone itself, the heart and soul of the operation, through which desperation and fear and panic were heard daily and gently handled.
    This information came through two call takers. Their job was to take the calls as they came in, put them into the computer and send them to the appropriate desk: fire, police or EMS. Once the location and situation were input, the computer decided which was the appropriate agency or agencies to be dispatched. For a domestic incident with injuries, police were sent first to secure the scene, and an ambulance would stage in the area until it was deemed safe for the EMS personnel to enter the house to assist the injured. Often the perpetrator was still inside and dangerous to anyone who