The Case of the Mesmerizing Boss by Diana Palmer Page A

revealed. She reached up, for the first time voluntarily touching his lean cheek. Her fingers were cold.
    He jerked back from her, his eyes glittery, and closed up like a clam. “I don’t need pity, honey,” he said mockingly. “I don’t need a damned woman, either.”
    He got up and stomped off down the aisle, leaving a shocked, puzzled Tess behind.
    For the next two days, it was Dane who avoided her, almost as if his confession had embarrassed him. Tess found herself less nervous as she considered how his attitude toward women had stifled his ability to feel tenderness.
    Tess had never really liked his mother-Nita Lassiter had been very brittle, very flighty. When Tess’s father wasn’t around, she was all but hostile toward Tess, and even more so toward Dane.
    Dane’s ex-wife hadn’t seemed much of a prize, either, judging from that one dinner Tess had spent with Dane and her. Her sullen, resentful behavior had convinced Tess that the woman had never loved Dane, and he himself had said that it was the uniform that had attracted Jane more than the man inside it. Jane had struck Tess as being just as much a man-hater as Dane’s mother.
    She frowned thoughtfully. Didn’t they say a man unconsciously looked for women who reminded him of his mother? Or that men sometimes, equally unconsciously, chose women who lived down to their image of them? Dane had spent his time around women of questionable character in his youth, so perhaps he thought sex was only permissible with women who had no softness, no vulnerability.
    It was a sobering thought. But she had no time to work on the theory, because Dane announced suddenly that he’d been away from the office long enough and had to get back. Naturally, Tess agreed to return to work, too, because her arm was back to normal, even if a little soreness remained.
     
    The Case of the Mesmerizing Boss49
    He packed and drove them back to Houston, silent and unap-proachable, after Tess had said her goodbyes to Beryl.
    “I’m going to post a man outside your apartment, and I’m having you followed,” he said curtly when he deposited her suitcases in her apartment an hour later.
    She looked up at him irritably. “I don’t need a watchdog. I’m perfectly capable of calling the police if I need to.”
    “No, you aren’t,” he replied. “You don’t know these people. I do.”
    “Mr. Policeman.” She nodded, eyes flashing at him. “I’ll bet when you were a beat cop, your badge was sewn to your skin!”
    He smiled, a sensual twist of his lips that made her heart race. “I loved the job,” he agreed. “It was, and is, the only place I feel comfortable, apart from the ranch. Detective work isn’t so different from what I did. Especially when I take a criminal case.”
    That was a fact. During the time she’d worked for him, she’d known him to track down murderers and bank robbers, to subdue them and bring them in, all as part of the job. Returning fugitives for worried bail bondsmen was a big chunk of the agency’s income. Tame cases he left to the skip tracers and operatives. He took the dangerous ones-he and Nick, his protege.
    “It’s the adrenaline,” she murmured. “You’re addicted to the danger.” “Am I?”
    “It would explain why you won’t slow down,” she said. Her eyes slid down the muscular length of him, over the scarred shoulder and chest she knew were hidden under his clothes.
    “You wouldn’t want to look at me after the damage the bullets did,” he said quietly. “It would make you sick.”
    Her eyes jumped back to his. “I was thinking about how it happened,” she said. “Not how it would look.”
    He relaxed a little, but not much. He always seemed as if his spine were glued to a wall. He walked tall, never slumped or slouched. His posture, like his character, was arrow-straight.
    “All the same, I’ll never be anyone’s idea of a pinup in a bathing suit,” he said with a faint smile. “Not that I was before I got