Chapter Sixteen
Rylee
Thursday
As Rylee set off next to Dakota, he reached for her bag and slung it over his shoulder. She noticed right off that he took her elbow and steered her to his left side so that he walked closest to the street.
She wanted to reach her hand into the crook of his arm or hold his hand.
But that would be weird, right? She reproved herself. After all, they’d met like ten seconds before.
And yet, it was so nice to be walking with him, like this.
Calming.
“Tank always walks to my left.” Dakota’s voice was deep and resonant, and it rumbled through her body, shaking away the sticky parts of her day, letting them waft away in the breeze that was kicking up now that twilight was descending. “I’m sorry if he’s bumping you.”
“No worries,” Rylee said.
“We just met, and I don’t know if you’re comfortable driving with a virtual stranger.
I’m not offended in the least if that’s the case.
Up the street, there’s a guy who does really delicious Mediterranean out of a food truck, and there are benches nearby.
Or two blocks around the corner, there’s a place that has a bit of everything on its menu.
They have outdoor seating and heat posts.
I can’t go into a restaurant with Tank.”
“I’m okay getting in a car with you.” Rylee liked the way he was handling this. No pressure. No agenda. “Neesa knows where I am, and Jasper would kick your ass if anything happened to me, so I’m not worried.”
“I was at the bar and saw the outcome of your skills last night. You would kick my ass. Jasper needn’t be involved.”
That was laughable. If Dakota were a bad guy, she’d have zero shot at self-protection.
But Rylee felt not even the slightest pang, didn’t see even the tiniest red flag.
Quite the opposite. Rylee was so comfortable with Dakota that she’d better watch her Ps and Qs. They were, as he pointed out, strangers. And the warmth she sensed between them was collegial.
Tank pranced along between them, his head lifted and his snoot sniffing. Rylee thought she could smell it, too, the hope that rides the air just before the leaves unravel their bright spring green.
“Neesa said you were with the Navy?” Dakota asked.
“Marine medic.”
“On the battlefield, huh? No wonder the shithead in the bar didn’t phase you.
” She felt his gaze on her and looked up to find worry in his eyes.
“Let me amend that. From the outside, it looked annoying, but you handled it, and it didn’t mess you up.
But that might have been your public face, and you might well have felt something different. Are you okay?”
“I am. You read it right. I’m glad to bring accountability to public gropers. And at the same time, I would rather not have to deal with it. I went home because I wasn’t in the mood for a crowd. I had only planned to have a beer and leave. He didn’t run me out or ruin my evening.”
They came to a stop at the corner, waiting for the light to turn green.
“You’re craving chicken soup?” Dakota asked.
“Absolutely not,” Rylee laughed. “That is the last thing I would want to eat tonight. Neesa was giving me a hard time about finding a surgical glove.”
He lifted his elbow, an offer to lean on him for stability as they stepped off the curb; it was smooth and gentlemanly. Not the look-at-me kind of gentlemanly that expected some type of reward for the performance, but an easy, natural gesture that was an invitation, not a demand.
In fact, Rylee was a little stunned by the whole Dakota Kayne thing going on.
Rylee slid her hand into place; his skin was warm against her tingling, chilly fingers. He covered them over with his hand. “I’ll get the heat going as soon as we get to my car. You’re braver than I am, paddling this early in the season.”
Which was ridiculous. The man spent days lying in the pounding surf on Coronado Beach, proving that he’d never give up.
“Chicken soup.” Dakota chuckled as they walked along. “I think I got the imagery. If you were pulling a hand out of the water. Yeah,” he shook his head, still laughing, “that’s dark humor there.”
“Gallows.”
“You do what you have to do to stay sane, right?” he asked.
They stepped up onto the next sidewalk, but Dakota was still warming her hand with his, and Rylee didn’t pull away.
Yes, non-performative gentlemanliness, his behavior seemed so gracefully normal that it was a bit shocking to Rylee’s system because it wasn’t the norm she’d encountered at all.
It should be, though.
Of late, she’d run up against a lot of guys who believed they were the “good guy.”
But they were good only as a tool. As soon as they realized they weren’t getting what they wanted, the good veneer pulled away, and the angry, entitled guy showed his true nature.
On one of her last dates, she took out her credit card to pay her share.
She’d already decided that she’d never see this guy again after he insisted he order for her.
And he didn’t even ask what she wanted to eat or if she had any allergies.
She drank her water and left the food on the plate.
He didn’t notice. He did put his whole attention on the credit card in her hand, though.
The guy was livid that she had been emasculating all evening, opening the door on her own and trying to pay. How dare she embarrass him that way?
Rylee excused herself to go to the restroom.
On the way out, she found her server, explained the situation, paid her share, gave the woman a generous tip, because she assumed bro wouldn’t leave anything for the woman after he realized Rylee had slipped out the back door, hailed a cab, and left his sorry ass at the table by himself to seethe.
The dating pool that she tried to navigate seemed to be getting worse and worse. Though, honestly, it might just be that as Rylee got older, she developed a hair-trigger on her bullshit meter. And frankly, she was burned out.
Sometimes she lamented that she hadn’t been born a lesbian.
This was not one of those times.
Dakota fobbed the back gate open and dropped Tank’s lead. “Tank, load,” he said.
And as Tank settled in his crate, Dakota smiled at Rylee.
It was an easy smile, and Rylee remembered telling Neesa that one of the things she remembered about the man who gave her the flowers was that his smile seemed to come easily and sat naturally on his face.
“Dinner. It’s a little bit complicated because I have Tank. Since he’s a cross-trained tactical K9, he can’t be left unattended.” Dakota side-stepped between the two parked vehicles, opened the passenger side door, and placed her bag on the floorboard.
“Lest someone see how beautiful Tank is and think they wanted to steal him?” Rylee asked. “I can’t imagine that going well.”
“That’s exactly the scenario.” Dakota moved to the side and extended his hand to help her as if she were in a ball gown and heels.
“Hold that thought. I want to get the heat on for you.” He shut her door, jogged around the front of the vehicle, climbed in, and got the engine going.
“Ideas about dinner?” he asked. “Specific cravings?”
“What were your plans for tonight?” Rylee asked. If he was going to order a pizza, she had a place with outdoor seating and warming posts.
“I was cooking shrimp scampi at home, salad, and garlic bread. There’s plenty if you’d like to join me for that.”
He was inviting her to his home. She’d known this guy for less than an hour. She kept trying to convince herself that, in such circumstances, out of self-preservation, a woman should say, "No, thank you."
Rylee couldn’t raise a single molecule of concern. A lot of that probably had to do with the way Tank looked adoringly at Dakota. True love and partnership were so evident between the two. Rylee had read a scientific study that said a dog can smell a bad guy.
Tank trusted Dakota.
Rylee, for whatever reason, trusted Tank.
She also trusted Dakota. That was a revelation.
“I would. Thank you.”
“You’re okay with that?” He did a double check in.
And Rylee decided to be honest. “I’ve had a rough couple of days; my nerves have been a little raw. Quiet sounds really nice.”
Dakota threw his vehicle into reverse. “I’ve been a shadowy quasi-witness to some of your week. I’ve seen you wearing a lot of different emotions on your face.”
“Yeah, that’s right, you have.”
“Counterfeiters, heart attack victims, gropers, then you decided to shake hands with the creature from the Black Lagoon.” He sent her a broad grin.
“Ha. Yeah. That was pretty awful, and probably the whole scenario came about because my nerves are shot and my brain was glitching. So it’s interesting to me that all the frenetic energy I’ve been wearing seemed to just flow away on our walk to the car.
The calm I feel around you and Tank is really nice.
Thank you. But to answer your question: yes, I’m completely comfortable having dinner with you tonight.
If you can say scampi instead of chili, then you probably know your way around the kitchen, and I’m not in danger of food poisoning. ”
Dakota eased into the bumper-to-bumper traffic.
“So what’s worrying you most?” Dakota asked.
“One of my biggest concerns right now is that we’ve had three deployments, and three times we were hit with counterfeit money,” Rylee said.
“The damaging effects to the morale of our teams as they find out about this new danger are going to be something WorldCares needs to navigate. If I can tell the teams that you caught the bad guy, it will help. You are going to catch the bad guy, right?”
“I’m going to do my darndest.”
“Did Jasper mention surveillance tapes to you?” Rylee asked.
“Last night he said that you had the tapes and offered to let us put them through an AI system, and we wouldn’t do that.”
Rylee twisted in her seat, adjusting her belt across her chest. “Do you mind my asking why?”