Wildfire by Cathie Linz Page B

the rest. That’s the most natural way to learn a foreign language, through practical usage.”
    Amanda got the impression that Brady was stating his opinion on all types of learning, that he’d rather go out there and do it, not talk about it in the controlled sterility of a classroom.
    “Don’t you speak any foreign languages?” he asked, interrupting her silent speculations.
    “I had two years of French in college.”
    “And?” he prompted her.
    Amanda’s smile was tinged with self-mockery. “And as a result I can ask you, ‘Où sont les pommes frites?’”
    “It’s amazing you learned that much after only two years,” he marveled.
    “I’ve never been good at languages.” She shrugged.
    Brady’s voice lowered intimately, his look one of undivided interest. “What are you good at?”
    “Dodging questions like that one,” she archly countered, pleased with the way she’d extricated herself. “Did you want that pickle?”
    “No, I want to take you to the Oktoberfest.”
    “In Munich?” Amanda squeaked.
    Brady ruefully shook his head. “Not on my salary, no. But with careful planning I might just be able to swing a visit up to Milwaukee’s version of Oktoberfest. How about it?”
    Amanda had enjoyed their evening together, but it was an enjoyment tinged with an element of danger, for Brady Gallagher had nothing in common with her. He was a streetwise, experienced policeman, while she’d been nurtured in the comparatively sheltered world of academe. But that didn’t stop her from wanting to see him, to be with him. Surely she was mature enough to handle her own emotions without letting them get out of hand. They were having an enjoyable, lighthearted relationship, nothing heavy.
    “I had no idea that my invitation to spend a day in Milwaukee would require such thought,” Brady teased. “A night in Milwaukee, maybe, but not just a day.” Amanda’s reproving look bounced right off him, like water off a duck’s back. “Did you know that your nose sort of scrunches up when you’re disapproving?”
    Not sure that she liked the sound of a scrunched-up nose, Amanda smoothed out her expression immediately. “It does?”
    “Yes. Very cute.”
    “Cute?’
    “Of course. I haven’t reached the ripe old age of twenty-eight without learning to recognize a cute nose when I see one.”
    Amanda almost choked on her pickle. “You’re twenty-eight?”
    “That’s right. Why? How old are you?” he asked with easy familiarity.
    Amanda was disgusted to admit that for one fleeting moment she was actually tempted to lie about her age. What had happened to her? How could she even consider altering the truth for vanity’s sake?
    “I’m old enough to know better,” she muttered under her breath, not realizing that Brady could hear her.
    He was astonished at her anger. “What’s wrong? Are you sensitive about your age?”
    “No, I am not sensitive!” she practically shouted. “I’m thirty.”
    “Well, don’t sound so tragic about it.”
    Amanda wasn’t tragic about it; she’d accepted the arrival of her thirtieth birthday without the attendant trauma some people experienced. Having been told even as a teenager that she was “mature for her age,” Amanda had always dated men at least four years her senior. Consequently in her own mind there was a world of difference between her age and Brady’s.
    “Mandy?”
    “You can’t call a thirty-year-old woman Mandy,” she sniped.
    “There’s no law against it.”
    “There ought to be,” was her muttered response.
    “Why? Because it doesn’t go with your cool librarian image?”
    Amanda was immediately on the defensive. “It’s not an image.”
    “I think it is. I think that underneath the layers of formality is a little girl who never got the chance to play.”
    “You’re entitled to your opinion, Detective Gallagher.”
    “How kind, Ms. Richards,” he drawled. “Frankly I don’t see what you’re getting so het up about. There’s