Chapter Six

Lassiter stared at his own face in the mirror behind the bar. If he turned his head to just the right angle, he could convince himself that he didn't look absolutely terrified. He slung back the whiskey and set the glass down with a clunk. The bartender sidled over to offer him another round, but he didn't notice. After waiting in vain for Lassiter to break his gaze with his own reflection, the bartender drifted back to the other end. Dinner rush: the bar was filling up with people waiting for their tables.

What was he thinking? How had he let O'Hara convince him to go on a date with one of her friends? Of course he would screw it up, and of course she would tell O'Hara what a jackass her partner was, and of course O'Hara would hate him for it. Probably demand a new partner, one who had his shit together.

"Carlton?"

He blinked, registering after a moment that the voice came from behind him. His eyes shifted slightly to take in the reflection of the woman at his shoulder: on the taller side, with hair a shade of auburn just a little too vibrant to be natural, an emerald dress that accentuated her curves. A sudden feeling of cold came to his fingers, and he realized he was still clinging to the empty whiskey glass for dear life. Ice had melted into condensation against his palm, and he grabbed a couple of cocktail napkins to wipe it off.

Lassiter turned, plastering on his best attempt at a winning smile. "You must be Deborah." He extended his hand – still chilled but at least dry – to the woman, who accepted it with a smile of her own. "How did you know it was me?" Now that he could no longer see himself, he couldn't be sure whether his smile read as relaxed or pained.

Deborah smirked. "I looked for the tall, nervous guy at the bar."

Glancing back at the now-abandoned glass, Lassiter tried to explain. "O'Hara put a lot of effort into us meeting. I don't want her to be mad at me."

"Why would she be mad? If anything, she undersold you." She cast an appreciative eye over Lassiter, pausing to take particular interest in the tuft of chest hair emerging from his open collar. He felt a little exposed, but found the attention not exactly unwelcome. Following O'Hara's advice, he'd donned a shirt in a shade of blue that Victoria would have called deep enough for dinner. Whatever that meant.

"I assume she set your expectations so low that you had no choice but to be pleasantly surprised."

Deborah matched his dry tone. "She did her best to talk me out of it even as she tried to talk me into it."

He blinked, trying to determine whether this was a joke. She smiled, and, in relief, he broke into a nervous grin. Lassiter had expected someone more like O'Hara – honest but gentle – and he had to recalibrate himself for someone so forthright. This was a woman who, he felt, wouldn't hesitate to stop him in his tracks if he ventured into dickishness, and he found that surprisingly reassuring.

The hostess called them to their table before they could order a round of drinks at the bar. Lassiter had picked a restaurant that O'Hara suggested. He'd never been here before, but found it classy without being too upscale, casual enough to keep the pressure off. And not a crayon in sight.

Lassiter trailed behind the hostess and his date, taking a moment to appreciate her from the back. The dress clung to her in the right places. As if she knew he was leering, Deborah put a little swing into her hips, and he caught himself guiltily.

He'd assumed O'Hara would have set him up on a pity date, with some sad sack friend of hers that was as pathetic as he was, but this Deborah was – something else.

Even still, as they settled into their chairs, Lassiter's ego horned in to say, "For the record, I am more than capable of finding my own dates. I'm here as a favor to my partner." Immediately, he winced, imagining O'Hara slapping the back of his head. Don't be an ass.

But Deborah was unfazed. "Oh, absolutely. I'm here to get her out of hot water with your boss, apparently."

There was O'Hara's unending sense of tact, using the Chief to displace the responsibility for this odd assignment, thus sparing him the awkwardness of being a Man Who Couldn't Get a Date, and yet he'd already wrecked it with his big mouth. He tried for a shrug. "O'Hara's too talented to be in trouble. She's doing a… good deed."

A slow smile came to Deborah's face, and he felt that he'd somehow recovered from his misstep. He opened the menu and studied it carefully before he ruined the moment. In his peripheral vision, he saw Deborah pick up the wine list.

"You want to split a bottle?" Bold. A statement like that suggested she meant to stay a while – or didn't care enough about leaving it behind if things went south. Either way, he admired the confidence. And at worst, he could drown his sorrows with the remainder if she ditched him.

He nodded. "Pick whatever you think looks good."

She made a noise of approval.

"What?"

"I got the impression you were a bit of a control freak, but here you are relinquishing a big decision. I mean, what if I choose the most expensive bottle just to prove I'm worth it?" She gave him a sultry look through long lashes.

"Well, now, when you put it that way…" Lassiter leaned forward, reaching for the wine list, half-joking, but now genuinely concerned that she meant to order beyond his means.

She pulled back, a little smug. "Don't worry. I have a perfectly reasonable Merlot in mind."

Casually, she set the wine list on the table and picked up her menu. Lassiter resisted the urge to grab it, and returned his attention to the entrees. He'd looked up the menu online beforehand and made his decision already – it always helped to plan ahead – allowing him to assess his date without her return scrutiny. He snuck a glance.

Right now, Deborah looked carefree, and, oddly, seemed to be enjoying herself. What had he done? A cocky part of him wanted to believe that he'd impressed her through his innate charm, but that was certainly a lie.

When the waiter came by, they ordered the wine. Deborah proposed an appetizer. "Crab cakes?"

Lassiter looked up in alarm. "Maybe we can order the broccoli rabe and polenta instead?"

"Oh, not into seafood? All right." She seemed unbothered by the change, and Lassiter studied her for a moment. Too much time hanging around Spencer had made him paranoid, and he suspected that she'd proposed crab cakes as some sort of test. O'Hara must have told her about his last ill-fated date.

Deborah glanced up from her menu to catch him staring. "Not ready yet?" She turned back to the waiter and ordered chicken marsala. Her reaction was so innocent, even Lassiter had a hard time believing it was anything other than genuine. Maybe she just liked crab cakes.

The server waited patiently for Lassiter's order. Finally, Deborah fixed him with a questioning stare of her own, and he straightened with a jolt. He had chosen the venison tenderloin carefully, avoiding anything strongly flavored with garlic. Just in case. Not that he honestly anticipated an opportunity to get close enough to a kiss on any of his dates, least of all tonight.

Once the waiter left, Lassiter folded his hands in front of him and waited in silence, suddenly panicked at not having a conversation topic. What did normal people talk about on dates? His mind went blank.

Before his recent foray back into it, it had been years since he'd dated. Coupled with that, his only long-term relationship had been with Victoria, and he would have been perfectly content for it to stay that way. Dating was stressful – constantly trying to prove himself to strangers. That was his job, at least in a different way, and while it was easy enough to make an impact on a suspect, women were something else.

"So, what made you decide to become a cop?" Deborah's question broke into his wandering thoughts, and he pulled himself back to the present.

Okay. This was an easy one. He smiled a little. "It's just something I wanted for as long as I remember." Lassiter paused, mind drifting to a more pleasant memory. "I grew up watching old Westerns. Gunsmoke reruns on TV. Clint Eastwood and John Wayne at the movies. I guess I liked the idea of a sheriff who knew how to protect his people from the bad guys."

"You saw yourself as a hero." Not quite a statement, not quite a question.

Lassiter considered, then shook his head. "It wasn't that, really. I mean, every little boy wants to be a hero, right?" He looked to Deborah for confirmation, who shrugged in agreement. "For me, it was more about finding a way to instill order on a world that felt very uncertain."

She frowned in sympathy.

"My childhood was a little chaotic," he added, realizing that he'd already ventured deeper into the feelings part of his background than he'd planned. He waited for her to press further, but she didn't. "Well, I learned that towns aren't run anymore by one lone sheriff with a star on his chest, but the Academy was the next best thing."

"You found a little part of the world that you could manage," Deborah offered.

Just then, the sommelier arrived with the wine and thrust the bottle in Lassiter's face for approval. "Can't you see we're in the middle of something here?" he snapped before he could stop himself.

Everyone froze for a second. Eyes darting between the sommelier and his date, Lassiter thought quickly. "That is, thank you for bringing the wine." He turned and held a hand out toward Deborah magnanimously. "Why don't you take the first taste?"

She sampled the wine and they waited for their glasses to be filled. Deborah offered a toast to meddling friends, and they drank.

Lassiter leaned back and looked off somewhere in the distance, recalling that time of his life when he first felt he truly belonged somewhere. After a moment, he turned his attention back to his date. "What about you? You're in social work?"

She nodded. "Most people assume that I spend all my time working with kids, rescuing them from abusive households or something. But in reality, my days are filled by calling people at various institutions across the state, none of which have enough resources to meet the needs of the clients under my care. We're all just shuffling things and people back and forth, hoping we'll be able to fix something along the way." She lifted her glass for another deep drink. "I mean, I didn't come into it all starry-eyed like some of my peers, but it gets pretty discouraging after a while, you know, wanting to help people and not being able to get them what they need."

Lassiter nodded. "I know what that's like." He thought of criminals who walked free due to legal technicalities, homicides that remained unsolved because there weren't enough hours in the day to solve them all. "There was no DA's office in the Old West. No jury to convince."

"How much easier would our lives be if we had unfettered access to do our jobs without interference?"

He agreed. There would certainly be more bad guys locked up, and he could for the moment excuse the possibility that that number would also include some innocent parties.

She laughed. "My boss says that we have no problems that can't be solved with heaps of money."

"Maybe we have the same boss." He grinned, marveling at his new-found ability to maintain a conversation with a woman for longer than a minute without her running away screaming.

Before he could put his foot in his mouth following his moment of self-awareness, the food arrived. They settled into their meals, their conversation drifting into brief comments on the food. Though it felt less intimate than when they'd ventured into personal territory, Lassiter still found himself enjoying the companionable exchanges.

Then he screwed it all up.

Deborah assessed her meal. "My grandmother's specialty was her marsala sauce, so I always like to try it when I'm out to see how it compares."

Lassiter glanced up, half his attention on cutting his steak. "Oh, yeah, that's my wife's favorite dish." He caught himself too late. "Uh, ex-wife."

Ex-wife. When would he get used to thinking of her that way?

Victoria had made it clear that she was moving on, though she hadn't yet pulled the plug on the marriage. And if she hadn't pulled the plug herself, there was still hope, right? Lassiter was caught in this state of limbo where some part of him understood that he should get on with his life, and yet there was this thread to the happy life he'd thought was his, the potential for happiness. Giving that up meant that he recognized it as a mistake, which in turn meant that ten years of his life has been wasted.

Lassiter realized that he'd been sitting there with his mouth gaping open for too long. "I mean, technically, she's not my ex in that we're not divorced." She hadn't yet reacted, so he felt the need to carry on. "Yet, that is. If we are splitting – I mean. We're separated," he finished lamely.

Though they hadn't officially divorced, after over three years of separation, could he really believe that there was any other possible outcome? He certainly wasn't an optimistic man by nature, so why did he cling to this absurd belief that Victoria might see the light and return to him? And if he was so desperate to get her back, what was he doing sitting here in a restaurant with a beautiful woman? A woman who definitely didn't look like she wanted to kill him…

"Well," Deborah said, drawing it out as if she knew it was torturing him to anticipate what she had to say next. "It's not Nana's cooking, but it's pretty good. You want to try it?" She lifted her fork as an offering.

He stared at her.

"No?" She shrugged and turned the fork back toward her own mouth.

Lassiter looked down at his own plate, understanding on some level that she'd offered him an out and he needed to capitalize on it. "Uh… you want to try mine?"

"Sure," she said with enthusiasm, as if she'd only been waiting for him to ask. "I've never had venison."

He cut off a piece and hesitated, uncertain of the protocol of food-sharing with a virtual stranger. Was he meant to feed her off his own fork?

She spared him the agony by poking her fork across the table to pierce the meat, then back into her mouth before Lassiter could react. Deborah chewed thoughtfully and nodded in acceptance.

Somehow, Lassiter made it through the rest of dinner without making an ass of himself again. Though the memory of his awkwardness lingered for him, Lassiter did his best to maintain a casual demeanor as Deborah steered the conversation across several light-hearted topics. She avoided inquiring into his marriage or his childhood, for which he was grateful. In fact, he almost enjoyed himself.

Outside, Lassiter walked Deborah to her car. "I had a really nice time tonight," he said. Though it wasn't entirely true, it wasn't totally a lie, either.

She turned to him and smiled. "Let's do it again sometime." Her hand slid up to catch him by the lapel, and she pulled him down for a kiss. Surprised at her assertiveness, Lassiter was tentative at first, but quickly responded in kind to her enthusiasm. His arms naturally moved around her hips, drawing her body toward his.

After a few moments of mutual exploration, she pulled back just far enough to look him in the face. "Unless you'd like to come back to my place now."

-x-x-x-x-

Am I the only one who trolls the menus of restaurants I've actually been to in order to find food to describe in a story? Carne di cervo – served at one very specific restaurant in my area. And probably others.

Thanks to you all for reading so far, and special thanks to Loafer for faithfully reviewing each chapter. I will make no promises about how this story will end, in no small part because I haven't entirely figured that out for myself yet.