Page 4 of Falling for Carla

“Maybe they’ll be so impressed with my takedown technique they won’t care. They’ll just applaud.”

“Good luck with that,” I said. “Law enforcement doesn’t like being sued for brutality.”

“I’ll keep that in mind and point my ass at the camera if someone’s filming. They’ll be too distracted to hit ‘record.’”

“You do have an amazing ass.”

“Thanks. I do the squat challenge, remember?”

“Yeah. I do. My thighs still hurt thinking about the time you got me to try it,” I said grimly.

“Put that on your dating profile—weak thighs. Too lazy to do squats.”

“I don’t have a dating profile, but if I did, I’d definitely use the word squat as much as possible. Anything that reminds my potential soul mate of toilets is perfect.”

On that note, she parked in the student lot nearest the criminal justice building. “Thanks for driving,” I said.

She hugged me. “See you later,” she said. “I’m done at two, but I can hang out till your classes are over.”

“Mine are over at one-fifteen but I’ll be in the library if you need me.”

“The law library?” she said with an eye roll. “You’re the only person I know who isn’t pre law that hangs out there.”

“They’ve got the most detailed information about suspect rights and due process. I really think we need a more thorough course in the substance of that, not just procedure,” I told her.

“So serious. You’re going to be the boss in no time, probably as soon as you get out of the academy,” she said.

Brenda was so supportive of me, that it just made me want to prove her right.

CHAPTER 3

DRAKE

The coffee mug was just stage business—something to make me look casual as I observed my students before class began. This was graduate level criminology. Not for the weak.

I prided myself on going into the psychological patterns of career criminals more than my criminal justice colleagues did—they were more firmly in the camp of ‘read them their rights and follow the rules’ rather than considering their motivations, their goals. In my experience on the force, it came down to having a deep understanding of your suspect, no matter how disturbing that might be.

It meant I had to dance on the dark side at times, put myself in their shoes and think what course of action might make sense to them. They weren’t really that different from the cops on the force, although there were officers who’d gladly try to kick my ass for saying it.

Perps weren’t animals. They were people who were made desperate by their desires or their trauma or both. They made choices that were illegal, damaging, often cruel. But they weren’t beyond the realm of possibility for any of us. My students would have to face that fact.

I could tell by looking at them which ones were going to fold and quit the class two weeks in. These were the ones who either had weak stomachs or had a dark side they were afraid to examine. People who watched too many Marvel movies as a kid and thought they could just go in with guns blazing, all pure morals and the American flag waving behind them as they took down the bad guys.

That was entertainment, and reality was never that cut and dry. I could already pick out four students who wouldn’t last a month. While tradition would have us believe that it was women who wouldn’t be able to cut it, three of those I knew would quit happened to be young white guys. The frat boy type who’d never known or seen what true struggle was.

Startled, I stopped in mid-sip of coffee. There was a woman in the front row taking out her laptop for notes, slipping a lock of hair behind her ear. She had captured my attention, a toughness around her jaw and lips that made it clear she was here to stay.

Those little boys sitting in the back might fold under pressure, but she’d go the distance, her expression seemed to say. Her determination was quiet, not for show, but it was so obvious to me. She’d be a challenge in class, I thought with a half-smile, and I looked forward to it.

It wasn’t often even at the graduate level to get a student that cared enough to think seriously about the topics outside of an assignment they had to turn in. I felt a spark of excitement to have her in class.

I felt another kind of spark too, more like a blazing arrow hitting me in the gut. For the first time in my entire career, I wished someone wasn’t a student. She was about the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Black, unruly hair, fiery dark eyes. Her smooth olive skin made my mouth go dry. I got a flash, a split second, of tracking my palm down her bare arm, how that would feel. I could have groaned as my pants tightened painfully as if I’d been seventeen again and getting hard when I glimpsed an attractive woman. Attractive didn’t begin to cover it.

She glanced up as if she felt my gaze on her. She met my eyes, and she didn’t smile. No ingratiating grin like most students would give me, the ‘please like me and don’t be too hard on me’ look, submissive and hopeful. There was nothing haughty in her gaze, but nothing pleading either.

Steady and determined, it still sent sparks ripping through me. I wouldn’t even let myself think about what my body was telling me. I was the professor, and she was a graduate student, completing her master’s degree in a couple of months if she had qualified for this class. It was a damn shame I hadn’t seen her after she graduated, I told myself. Because if we were in a bar, if we were in line at the dry cleaner, I would have approached her. I wouldn’t have been able to help myself. I’d been around long enough to know that chemistry wasn’t something you ran across every day, especially not a reaction like this.

Suddenly I wasn’t looking forward to being her teacher after all.