“No sweat.”
He hung up.
She led Jarvis to the front door and hunted up a coat. She wasn’t giving Dal the opportunity to make any nasty remarks about her being dressed for bed and trying to lure him in like a spider with a web.
She thought of herself as a giant spider in a yellow nightgown and started laughing uproariously.
* * *
He was there in less than five minutes, driving a ranch truck. He opened the door and let Snow out and walked her to the front door where Meadow was waiting.
He stared at her in the enveloping Berber coat. It was black, and it highlighted the long, honey blond hair curling around her shoulders. She looked worn and sleepy. Her green eyes were lackluster.
“You’ve just been out on a hot date. Shouldn’t you look bright-eyed and joyful?” he chided.
She glared at him. “It was a nice Chinese dinner.”
He shrugged. “I flew the florist down to San Antonio last week for fajitas and salsa.”
“Lucky her.”
He pursed his lips. “That wouldn’t be jealousy . . . ?”
“As if I could be jealous of a man who once referred to me as a spider!” she burst out.
He raised a dark, thick eyebrow. “I believe the term I used was ‘prostitute in training.’ And you deserved it. Seventeen and trying to seduce a man my age,” he scoffed. “Your father was livid.”
She flushed and averted her eyes. “Teenagers get crushes on all sorts of unsuitable people,” she muttered.
“So they do.”
It was freezing cold. She let the door open so that Snow could run in. Jarvis came when she called him. He ran past her and jumped into Dal’s arms.
“Thanks for bringing Snow back home,” she said.
He was still watching her, in that odd intent way. “You should see a doctor.”
“What?!”
“I mean it,” he repeated, his dark eyes going narrow. “Jeff said you fell today at work.”
“I tripped over a trash can,” she began.
“You had two falls at Christmas, two years running,” he recalled. “You told Jeff you had a fall when pursuing a criminal in St. Louis, and you hit your father’s tractor with a shot when you fell here. Hasn’t it occurred to you that a balance issue like that has a cause?”
No, it hadn’t. She’d never really thought about how many falls she’d had. “I don’t have a medical condition,” she said belligerently. “I’m just clumsy.”
“I don’t think so,” he replied. “Humor me. Old Dr. Colson is still practicing, and we’re not that far from Denver. You’ll have insurance that will pay for tests, won’t you?”
She had private insurance that she assumed when she left the Bureau. “Yes,” she said grudgingly.
“Tests never killed anyone,” he added.
“I’ll think about it.”
He cocked his head and looked at her intently. “It might be nothing at all. But it’s something you need checked. What if you were chasing a perpetrator on a high place and you fell?”
She’d thought about that once or twice herself. But she denied the balance issues because of what they might reveal if she had tests. She knew that tumors of the brain could cause them. She had headaches . . .