“He has a high credit score.” She paused. “He has two nieces that live with him part time. He splits them with his parents. The mother and father, his sister, died in a car wreck years ago. He has another sister, Nivea, who used to help raise them, but she moved to a different part of the country with her new man. Parents and him live on a ranch a couple of towns over. Dad inherited about a thousand acres from his father who passed away recently. Wilhelm—you’ll have to call him Will because Wilhelm is weird—lives in a two-bedroom cabin on the property.”
I smiled at all the information she could find.
“Now, I’ll continue to dig. But you’re gonna have to tell me why you need this information,” she murmured.
I swallowed and looked down at my hands.
“He’s the one,” I told her. “Like you already said.”
There was no reason to lie.
I needed to break out of my funk.
I wanted to live again.
I wanted to be who I was always meant to be, not a shell of Cannel who was scared of her own shadow.
I’d seen the shrinks.
I’d moved out of the town that used to be where my best friends were located—my crutches in all things.
I’d graduated school, found a job, and moved into an apartment on my own.
I was ready to live as well as I possibly could live.
And that meant having sex again.
That meant seeing men on a daily basis, and not overanalyzing their every move.
It meant… Wilhelm Schultz, the detective for Paris Police Department, was going to be the one to break me out of that funk.
I knew, just as well as he did, that he was attracted to me.
I’d seen it in his eyes, and the way that he allowed his gaze to trail down my body.
I only hoped that I could scrounge up the nerve to go for it.
“Just wanted to make sure you were sure. I want you to be happy.”
CHAPTER 3
Life is short. Smile while you have teeth.
-Text from Shine to Cannel
CANNEL
One week later
I didn’t expect him to be drunk, too.
In fact, I expected him to be sober, that way he could take care of my drunk ass.
Two drunk people didn’t normally equal a good time.
At least, that was how it’d always gone with me and my ex. One of us had to always be sober for us to enjoy the night.
Whether that was because Too—Beauregard, formally known as ‘Toot,’ was just a lousy drunk, or I was, I didn’t know.
Over the last week, I’d watched Will, learned his habits, and knew that he’d be here tonight.
Over the last week and a half since I’d met Detective Wilhelm Schultz—I’d already shortened his name in my head to Will, I’d thought about him so much—I’d worked up the courage to enact my plan.
My plan being to get laid.
Get laid by a man that I knew was a good man… even though he didn’t look like a very good man right now.
In fact, he looked like a bad man, and that had my heart thundering.
And I wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure as to why.
I mean, on the outside, he looked bad.
On paper, he looked really, really good.
I mean, he was a detective for the police department—he solved murders, for Christ’s sake.
He took his two young nieces in after his sister died. He fought for them in court with his own sister because he knew that he and his parents would be better for them than his partying sister, who only wanted the cash flow that came with the kids.
He donated to a damn animal shelter on a daily basis and had a dog named Sally who was a rescue.
Sally the Doberman, who liked to scale fences that were six feet high and got posted in the Paris Happenings once a week because of her escape escapades.
But today, he was wearing a black t-shirt that fit him like a glove—and man, did he have a great body. I’m talking, ripped. His muscles had muscles. I only saw muscles like the ones he was sporting on the mannequins in the store that were advertising Under Armour.
And, as a nurse, my eyes were glued to his forearms where every single fucking vein that I could see was popping out like he had a tourniquet around his bicep.
The only thing around his bulging bicep was the sleeve of his t-shirt, and though it was tight—oh, man, was it so tight—it wouldn’t have produced the vein effect.
“Can I get you another?”
I blinked, surprised that I’d been watching Will at the end of the bar with his beer for so long that I hadn’t noticed another man coming up to me.
He wasn’t safe.
He actually looked kind of shady.
“My husband and I are fighting.” I pointed at Will at the end of the bar. “I’m fairly sure you buy me a drink, and you’ll be getting a black eye.”