“Uh, okay.”
He made a little fist pump in the air. “Yes! Success. Does tomorrow work?”
It did. She was off work the next two days. He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to her. “If you’ll put your name and number in there, I’ll ring you tomorrow and we can settle on a time.”
Sinead took the phone with a sense of surrealism. Was this actually happening? She took a call that led to her meeting David, the most attractive man she’d ever seen. Now she was going on a date with him.
“This doesn’t really happen to me,” she muttered, staring down at the phone in her hand.
“What’s that? You’re saying you don’t normally date the people you come to arrest in the middle of the night?”
This time she laughed. “No, it happens very infrequently that I’m willing to have dinner with suspected criminals.”
“This will be a first, then.”
Smiling, Sinead typed her name and number into his phone as a contact. Maybe she would hear from him again, maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe this was just his thing, to be handsome and charming. His phone was probably full of women’s names and numbers he’d collected over the years.
Sucker that she was, she added hers to the list.
Better than Charlie Hunnam handsome. There was no woman who could resist that.
“Goodnight. And remember to get your friend to give you the correct security code as soon as possible.”
“Will do. Goodnight Sinead. See you tomorrow.”
“Yep,” she said, still not convinced she would ever hear from him again. She walked back outside the house and to her cruiser. When she pulled out of the driveway, she noticed he was still standing in the front doorway, watching her retreat. He lifted his hand in a casual send-off wave, and ridiculously she waved back.
Chapter 2
“Really Dad? Seriously?”
Sinead came out of her bedroom to find her father counting twenty-dollar bills on the living room table.
“What you don’t know, you don’t have to worry about.”
“I’m a cop, for crying out loud.”
He glanced up at her over the rim of his readers. “Please,” he snorted. “You’re a Mill Valley cop. Doesn’t count.”
He said it all the time, and she knew better than to rise to the bait, but she was anxious about tonight so she was a little more on edge than normal. “Yeah, and why is that? Is it because the SFPD wouldn’t have anything to do with another cop named O’Hara?”
“Sinead, I do not need your attitude right now.”
Sinead took a deep breath and summoned her patience. “All I’m asking is that you make an attempt to hide the result of your criminal activities from me. You have a bedroom. Use it.”
Her father ignored her and instead took the time to take in her appearance. “You’re all gussied up.”
Sinead shook her head. Only her father still used words like gussied. She hesitated and then told him the truth. “I’ve got a date.”
That had him raising his eyes again. It was no secret dating wasn’t something she did a lot of. The truth of the matter was, Sinead was a pretty reserved person and had been since losing her mother as a teenager. She had a few close friends, her work and her father.
Who she was still living with at the age of twenty-eight.
A fairly sad commentary on her life. Except housing in the Bay area was ridiculous. And for some reason their two-bedroom apartment in the Shady Oaks complex in the south side of San Francisco was affordable as long as they were both contributing.
She just wasn’t overly thrilled with how her father got those contributions. He told her what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.
“A date huh? I know this guy?”
“No.”
“He a cop?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t trust cops.”
Sinead shook her head in disgust. “You used to be a really good cop.”
“Yeah well sometimes life takes a turn, doesn’t it?”
Taking a turn was code for her mom’s death. Something her father never recovered from.
“Don’t wait up for me,” she finally said and headed for the door.
“This guy,” her father called out before she could leave. “He can’t come knock on a door to pick you up?”
Sinead looked around the shabby apartment, her father’s take from who knew what on the living room table, and thought it all looked a little crooked. Then she thought of David’s voice on the phone when he’d called her earlier. His accent had literally made her wet.
“No, he offered but I didn’t want him to see where I lived.”
She let her father sit with that and she skipped out the door, closing it behind her. She made her way down the steps of the complex through the courtyard, which to her looked even sadder thinking about how David might look at it.