Topaz Dreams Read Online Free Page A

charges against you for
assault if you will do the same. Now, if he can be persuaded not to sue
the agency—"
"What?" Steve's voice went up an entire octave from the beginning to the end of the word. "That bastard pulled a knife on me!"
"And
you had a gun. Why the hell didn't you just point the damned thing at
him and say, 'Drop it, scumball! like anyone else would would have?"
With a wave of his hand, he referred to the men sitting beyond the
closed door of his office.
"I did."
"And?"
"He laughed and
made a graphically explicit suggestion of how we could better spend our
time together. Actually, I was considering the agency's public image,
as you're always reminding me to. I figured disarming and subduing the
subject was preferable to blowing his brains out."
"Disarming him?
You undoubtedly accomplished that with your first highkick. I suppose
you're going to tell me that subduing him required your administering a
concussion, three broken ribs, a smashed kneecap, and an arm fractured
in two places. And this has nothing to do with our precarious public
image dammit!
"The man pulled a deadly weapon on you. If he refused
to drop it, you could have shot him, according to the book. You have
been preached at before about putting yourself at risk unnecessarily.
When your father died, he left you his half of this agency because he
believed you could take his place. I need a partner I can count on to
stay alive until I get ready to retire. Hell, Steve, I've seen you pull
the trigger when you had to and you're not squeamish about it. So it
has to be that you get some kind of perverted pleasure out of beating a
man senseless. Don't you dare smirk at me, girl!"
Steve worked the
muscles of her face into a semblance of seriousness. Lou was the only
person alive who could get away with talking to her like this without
getting a taste of her temper in return. She respected and loved him as
much as she had her father.
Her inheritance of the partnership did
not alter the fact that Lou was technically her superior, but she
managed to remind him of their lifelong acquaintance whenever she felt
the need to soften him up. "C'mon, Uncle Lou. The guy was a real
lowlife."
Lou's ears turned a bright shade of red. "When you are in
this office, you address me as sir. What do you think your father would
do to you if he knew about the kinds of scrapes his precious daughter
gets herself into all the time?" Dokes shook his head slowly and let
out a frustrated sigh.
Steve tried to look contrite and decided
staring at her lap was as respectful as she could manage. Lou was wrong
about her father, but only because he chose to raise the dead man to
sainthood rather than remember him as he truly was. Actually it was her
dad who had taught her how to cuss, and who had remained a maverick
until the day he was killed.
He would not have been ashamed of her.
She had turned out just the way he had raised her, to follow in his
impressive footsteps as the meanest, son-of-a-bitchin' private
investigator on the West Coast.
Dad had also taught her to keep
quiet once Uncle Lou started reminiscing about the good old days, when
the two men had begun their careers together in the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.
One thing Steve could count on: once Lou got going
about her father and some case they had worked on together, he dropped
all pretense of lecturing her for her unprofessional behavior and other
misdeeds. She only needed to listen with one ear; she had heard all the
stories a hundred times. They had replaced the bedtime stories other
kids heard when they got tucked in at night. And Steve cherished every
one of them.
She had always been more than just Daddy's little girl;
she had been his protegee. Her mother had been the calming influence
between the two explosive tempers and had always taken equally loving
care of them and her quiet son.
Because her father told her it was
necessary, Steve had kept her nose in her school books, and when the
other little girls were