Accidentally In Love
Friends First # 3
By: Laura Drewry
Releasing June 16, 2015
Loveswept
Accidentally In Love
Friends First Series
Fans of Jill Shalvis and Susan Mallery will love Laura Drewry’s warm and humorous new Friends First romance, a sexy romp about a good cop and a bad girl playing hard to get.
Ellie Palmer and cops don’t mix, and getting pulled over by Officer Brett Hale—again—doesn’t help. Neither does being forced to take a safe-driving course with him. Brett’s by-the-book attitude leaves Ellie ice-cold, and his rock-hard body won’t change that. Still, the more time she spends with the guy, the more she finds herself warming up to his unexpected charms.
Even though Brett comes off like a boy scout, Ellie has sparked something he wants badly enough to get him to rethink his past mistakes. But when her ex shows up, Brett makes it his mission to keep Ellie safe in the here and now. His gut tells him the guy’s trouble, and Ellie must agree, because she doesn’t complain when Brett pulls her close. To keep her safe, though, he’ll have to choose between breaking her heart . . . and breaking the rules.
Every cop had at least one unsolved
case sitting on his desk, and Brett was no different. For a year now
he’d doggedly followed every tiny lead he could dig up on the
hit-and-run, but he always ended up at the same place: nowhere.
The suspect vehicle, reported stolen
a few days before the accident, had been found easily enough, but the
driver had vanished. IDENT had been all over the truck and had ruled
out as suspect every print they’d found. Painstaking dissections of
the scene and both vehicles, as well as interviewing the victim and
reviewing surveillance tapes, had given him nothing.
Bupkis. Nada. Zippo. Zilch.
And if that wasn’t annoying
enough, the victim in the incident was Ellie, and the lack of
movement in the case had only fueled her contempt for the police
department. Pulling her over today hadn’t helped matters, but she’d
been doing almost twenty clicks over the speed limit.
She was lucky it was him who’d
pulled her over and not Constable Hudak, who would have been too
happy to not only ticket Ellie but to impound her vehicle without so
much as a second thought. He could have written her up today—hell,
he probably should
have—but a couple
things changed his mind.
The first was that she’d just lost
her license, and even though that was her own damn fault, he didn’t
kick people when they were down. The second was that he knew she
expected him to write her up. In fact, she wanted him to do it,
because then she could keep on believing he was a prick, and by not
meeting her low expectations, he was proving her wrong.
And yeah, okay, after all the guff
she’d given him over the last few years, he liked the fact that his
being a good guy and cutting her some slack would piss her off a hell
of a lot more than his issuing her another ticket.
So maybe Ellie wasn’t far wrong;
maybe he was a bit of a prick after all.
He waited until her old blue Beetle
disappeared around the curve near the bridge, then slowly got back
into his patrol car and turned off the flashing lights. A small part
of him would kill to be a fly on the wall when her letter from the
Motor Vehicle Branch finally arrived and she saw the list of driving
instructors in the area.
Until the MVB found a replacement
for Larsen, Brett was the only one in a fifty-kilometer radius, and
maybe if she hadn’t called him “Poncherello” he might have
warned her about that.
“Seriously,” he grumbled.
“Anyone who’s ever seen a single rerun of CHiPs
knows I’m way more
Baker than Ponch.”
But Ponch was better than some of
the other names she called him, like Dudley Do-Right or Barney Fife.
Ellie’s past brush with the
Ontario police was no secret to him; he’d known about it since the
first time he pulled her over and ran her name through the system. It
didn’t surprise him to see drug charges attached to anyone’s
name, not with the number of cases he saw day to day, but after
getting to know Ellie a little, none of that made sense. Hell, so far
as he knew, the only time she’d even been intoxicated in the last
four years was the night she, Regan, and Maya threw a post-wedding
bachelorette party for Jayne.
She liked her wine, there was no
question about that, but heroin? No way. And if she’d been wrongly
charged and dragged through the courts, he couldn’t really blame
her for having such a hate-on for law enforcement, especially after
her stalking complaints against her ex, Kurt Neill, seemed to have
gone nowhere. The whole thing seemed a little sketchy to Brett, but
even if the cops hadn’t been able to help her with Kurt, surely her
dad, some big hotshot attorney, would have been able to secure a
restraining order against him. Yet there was no record of that having
been done, either.
Given her complaints against Kurt,
Brett had added him to the list of suspects in the hit-and- run but
had crossed him off when the info from Toronto came in stating that
Kurt had been on probation at the time, part of which included
restricted travel. According to the Toronto detachment, Kurt had
spoken to his probation officer on the phone the day of the accident,
just like he’d done every week, as required.
One thing about Ellie: she didn’t
seem to lie about anything, so it didn’t surprise him to hear
bits of her past come out in
conversations when they were all together. Regardless, it wasn’t
his place to comment on any of it. What had happened was her
business, and as far as Brett was concerned, the case had to have
been thrown out for one of two reasons: either she was innocent or
the cop assigned to the case hadn’t done his job properly.
Brett slipped his notebook into his
vest pocket, making sure her license was still tucked inside. Jayne
wasn’t wrong about him having Ellie’s info memorized. He only
asked for her license and registration every time because it was
procedure, but he’d long since stopped needing it in order to fill
out her tickets.
Palmer, Elleanor Grace, DL #4885210,
date of birth 1983-12-05, eyes brown, hair brown, weight 59.4 kg,
height 171.5 cm, address 2649 Graemsay Road, Class 5 license with
Restriction 21.
Technically, her hair was more of a
chestnut shade, her eyes weren’t just brown; they were . . . well,
brown brown,
and the right one had a tiny gold speck near the bottom of her pupil.
The only reason he knew that was because he’d once questioned her
on the corrective lenses restriction and she’d responded in typical
Ellie fashion; instead of simply telling him she wore contacts, she’d
opened her eyes as wide as she could, pointed toward her lenses, and
given him one of her all-too-familiar “dumbass” looks. It was his
job to make sure she was actually wearing them, and in the time it
took to actually spot the right one, he’d noticed the speck.
It’d taken him two seconds, maybe
three, but it was long enough for Ellie to call him Mr. Magoo and
make a crack about him being the one needing corrective lenses. He
shouldn’t think it was funny when she took shots at him like that,
yet every single time it happened, he had to work on keeping a
straight face.
Sarcasm and honesty weren’t for
everyone, though, and maybe that was why she didn’t date much;
maybe the guys she met didn’t like the way she just laid everything
out there. But still, a good-looking woman like that who was smart
and funny
. . . didn’t seem right that she didn’t go out more. Regan had
laughed about it while she trimmed Brett’s hair a while back,
telling him that Ellie’s idea of a date was the half hour it took
to meet a guy for coffee.
Weird.
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