The police let us go after questioning us both separately. I find Lucas waiting for me in the lobby of the station. He looks relieved when he sees they gave me some plain clothes to change into. He rushes toward me, cupping my face on either side and leaning his neck to look into my eyes. “You okay?” he asks

A small smile pulls at my lips. I lean my head forward to rest on his scruffy chin. “When I’m with you.”

He wraps me up in a hug. I close my eyes, relishing in how it feels to be crushed by his embrace, how easy it is to forget that someone out there might actually want to hurt me, that I could be in danger. It all feels so unreal when I’m with Lucas, like nothing could make it past his protective strength.

As if reading my mind, he runs a hand through my hair and sighs contentedly. “I won’t let anything happen to you, darlin’. Not a thing.”

“Not even good things?” I ask with a mischievous smirk. I pull back to look up into his eyes.

“I said I won’t let anything happen. Good things? You can count on those because I’m going to make them happen.”

“I’ll take that,” I say, biting my lip. “So… have you thought of a plan?”

“Sort of,” he says. He lifts up his thumb and forefinger, dangling a set of keys before me.

“What are those?”

“Our escape plan.”

I narrow my eyes. “I don’t understand.”

He looks around a little suspiciously, then moves me closer to the wall where there are fewer people within earshot. “Think about it. Ronnie and his goons could be waiting outside right now. If they saw the news story, they would’ve seen us get taken away in police cruisers by S.W.A.T. So what’ll they expect?”

“For us to walk out of here eventually?”

“Yeah. They’re going to be looking for us on foot. Know where they won’t be looking for us?”

“Please tell me this isn’t going where I think it is.”

“Driving a police cruiser,” he says with a wicked grin.

“Lucas!” I whisper urgently. “You can’t be serious. Stealing a police car is like… They’d probably dig the electric chair out of storage for that.”

He puffs dismissively. “Probably just a felony or something. But that’s only if we get caught. Don’t worry. We’ll ditch the car way before they can trace it back to us.”

I cover my face with my hands. “I’m in love with an insane person. It’s official.” My heart clenches and my stomach feels like it just froze over. Did I really just drop the “L” bomb by accident? I peek out at Lucas from between my fingers, afraid of what I’ll see on his face.

He’s grinning like an idiot. A gorgeous, handsome, idiot. “Hot damn,” he says, sounding far more country in that moment than I’ve heard from him yet. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you just professed your love for me.”

“Stop,” I whimper, wanting to curl into a ball and throw myself down a drain somewhere so I can just drift out to sea and forget this ever happened.

“Oh hell no. Not a goddamn chance in mother-lovin’ hell am I going to stop now. If you wanted to get rid of me, you just made a big mistake, darlin’.”

I chew on my lip, watching him and loving how the excitement is written so plainly on his face. “Is that right?”

He hooks his hand around my waist, pulling me into him and making me feel so small and fragile in his powerful grip. He plants a tender kiss on my lips, letting his touch linger as long as he pleases before pulling back and smiling crookedly. “Damn right it is. Now c’mon. We’ve got a cop car to steal.”

I look to the ceiling and shake my head, because I know I’m about to go along with this insane plan.

“Now the trick here is we just have to look like we know what we’re doing. Pretend you’re supposed to be here, and no one will question us. Okay?”

“That doesn’t really work.”

“Not with that attitude, it won’t. Trust me. Just follow my lead.”

Sure enough, Lucas has no trouble looking confident, and he starts casually walking toward an elevator that’s definitely in an area of the police station meant for official use only. I don’t know if it’s dumb luck, or if he’s really right, but no one so much as gives us a second glance. I have to force myself to step into the elevator because it’s crowded with four men and a woman in police uniforms. Lucas doesn’t even hesitate. He leads me in, turns around, and crosses his hands in front of his waist.

“Mind pressing the basement for me?” he asks the woman who stands closest to the buttons.

I give him an incredulous look, but his only response is the faint flicker of a smile on his mouth. The crazy bastard is enjoying this… I really must be out of my mind to go along with this. My heart is thundering so hard in my chest I’m legitimately afraid I might pass out.

The woman gives him a smile that makes me want to throat punch her, then pushes the button. Eyes off, a voice inside me growls. He’s mine.

I would laugh at myself if I wasn’t on the verge of a panic attack. Listen to me. First I tell a guy I’ve known a little over a week I love him, now I’m getting ready to go postal on a police officer just for smiling at him. Still… She should keep her eyes to herself.

“You guys hear about the naked jean terrorists?” asks Lucas.

My back goes rigid and my eyes bulge. Is he fucking serious? I nudge him as subtly as I can, but his grin only widens.

To my surprise, his question is met with laughter from everyone in the elevator. I have no choice but to join in the laughter, but in my current state I can only manage a wheezing, confused kind of high-pitched whine. Thankfully, one of the officers has such a loud laugh that my own is drowned out in the small space.

“Yeah, man,” says an officer with a mustache. “Fuckers were picking people off with pairs of fucking jeans from fifty stories up. Absolutely classic.”

“We should see if they want to sign up to be a sniper for the force,” adds another man. “Could use that kind of guy on our side.”

“Yeah,” agrees Lucas, and I can tell from the way his grin is growing that he’s about to say something absolutely stupid. “I guess accuracy is in his genes.”

There’s a collective pause, then another burst of raucous laughter.

The door dings, and all the officers file out, clapping Lucas on the back as they go. When the doors close again and we’re by ourselves, I raise my eyebrows at him and give him as hard a shove as I can. “In his genes? You almost got me arrested for murdering you in front of an elevator full of police officers.”

Lucas chuckles, leaning against the back railing of the elevator. “I thought it was jeanius.”

I can’t help but laugh. “I can’t even…” I say, shaking my head and following him into the parking garage full of police vehicles.

“How do we know which car the keys are for?”

“It’s got one of those clickie things,” he says, holding the keys in the air and pressing the button a few times until the tail lights burst into life on a cruiser not far from us. “Jackpot. C’mon. Let’s go.”

I know I should put a stop to all of this before it gets out of hand, but in so many ways it already has, and the more time I spend around Lucas Tate the more I think he’s closer to a force of nature than a man. He wills it and it becomes truth. If he wants to steal a freaking police cruiser and drive out to the country with it, he’s going to do it. If he doesn’t want to get caught in the process, he won’t. It seems so easy to believe it when I can set my eyes on him, but as soon as I close them, it’s like the spell is broken.

I don’t want to stop believing in him, though. The complete sense of peace I feel around him is as intoxicating as a drug, and I never want to lose it, so my feet move before my brain even gives the okay, and the next thing I know, I’m hopping into the passenger seat of a stolen police car.

“This is beyond a bad idea. You know that right?”

He turns the key in the ignition. “You keep telling me that, but here you are,” he says, flicking his eyebrows up casually.

I sigh, buckling myself in and bracing myself for what’s to come. “Here I am,” I say to myself.

“Well, if there’s one positive to this insanity, it’s that I’m now less worried about your brother and his friends trying to kidnap me and more worried about the police coming after us because we’re stealing one of their cars. How did you even get the keys, anyway?”

“Well,” he says, pulling out of the parking garage, where a group of onlookers are standing with members of the press--I can only assume they are hoping for a chance at the illustrious jean assassins.

Just as we take the corner, I notice a familiar face in the crowd. Ronnie Tate. He’s standing with his hands in his pockets against the cold of the night, watching the door intently and with so much violence in his eyes that I’m sure everything Cynthia told Lucas was true. Every bit of it.

“Did you--” I start.

“Yeah,” says Lucas grimly. “That was him.”

I shiver, crossing my arms around myself and sinking a little lower in the seat. “So, tell me how you got the keys. I need something to take my mind off that look on his face.”

“Right,” Lucas says, who looks to be regaining his composure with some effort. “They asked me their questions, and then they told me to head back to the lobby. One of the guys was going to walk me down there, but I told him I had to take a leak. He told me it was down the hall, so I did a little exploring when he left me on my own. Didn’t take long to find a place with a bunch of cubicles and computers. I poked around a bit, made some smalltalk, and found a pair of keys sitting on someone’s desk. Snagged them and left.”

I shake my head. “Are you sure you’re a cowboy and not a thief?”

“You’d be surprised how much cows are like people. Walk into a herd of cows like you’re nervous or you don’t belong and you’ll spook them. You might even catch a hoof in the crotch if you’re unlucky. But if you take to it like you belong there? They won’t pay you any mind. It’s natural.”

“Who would’ve thought being a cowboy prepares you to be a thief.”

“You know, you never told me what the hell made you get into being a matchmaker.”

“I wish I could say it was inspiration or something romantic. To tell the truth, it was just because it’s what my mom did. I don’t think I ever thought of it this way, but it might have been my form of rebellion against my dad. He would never admit it, but I think part of the reason he divorced my mom was because she was a matchmaker. It embarrassed him. He must’ve thought he could change her when he decided to marry her, but my mom isn’t the type to be bullied. If anything, she just got more extreme as I got older and things got worse between them.

“She was always talking about auras and she was really into astrology, of all things. She’s your classic hippie, but a few decades late on the trend.” I laugh a little just remembering some of the goofy outfits she wore, but it was endearing, at least to me. She has toned it down quite a bit now that she’s getting older, but it’s still not unusual to see her in a tie-dye shirt or wearing bell bottoms. “Anyway, I guess I took part of both of them in the end. I followed in my mom’s footsteps to make her proud, but I think part of me wanted to impress my dad with the way I modernized it and handled the business end of things. The irony is I only ended up pissing them both off.”

“Damn,” says Lucas. “They don’t know how lucky they are to have a daughter like you. Once this shit all calms down, you show me where they live and I’ll set them straight.”

“What, with your fists?”

“What do you think I am, a barbarian? No. With my wholesome country charm and absolutely wicked puns.”

“Oh God. You know, my dad actually would love you. He’s the worst with puns.”

“Second worst,” says Lucas, proudly.

“It would be a close competition,” I concede.

“So what about now?” asks Lucas. “Is it still what you want to do? Matchmaking?”

I look out the window, chewing on my lip as I watch the city pass us by. “I think so. Before I took the contract with Cynthia, I had pride in what I do. I can look back on my career, and even if I haven’t made a lot of money or grown the business like I wanted, I know I’ve helped people find happy relationships. When you think about it, what’s more important than that? If I can say I made people happy, I think that should make me happy.”

“You don’t sound so sure,” he says with a wry smile.

“No,” I say as I think about it more. “It does make me happy, what I’ve done. I just need to make sure I don’t let anything get in the way of what matters most again. Taking Cynthia on as a client was a mistake, and it’s one I’ll have to live with but never repeat.”

“A happy mistake, some might say,” adds Lucas.

I grip his thigh. “Good point. But I guess we still have to wait and see if this happy mistake will have a happy ending.”

“What, you thinking about Ronnie? Don’t you worry about him.” Lucas gently pulls my head toward him, kissing my hair without taking his eyes from the road. “I’ve cooked up a little plan for him. We’re going to handle this shit once and for all.”

“You’re not going to kill him, right?” I ask, feeling a creeping dread turn my chest cold.

Lucas laughs. “No. He may be an asshole, and he may even deserve it. But fuck, you really think I’d kill my own brother? I’m just going to make sure he can’t mess with us anymore.”

“Are you going to break his legs?” I ask.

Lucas raises an eyebrow and gives me a sidelong look. “Damn, girl. Maybe I should just let you loose on him. Sounds like you’ve watched enough mobster movies to take care of this.”

I blush. “Sorry. Can you blame me? I went my whole life without ever seeing more of a gun than the part that sticks out of a cop’s holster. Now I’ve had rifles pulled on me and your mysterious brother is stalking us with the hope of kidnapping me. I guess the only source material I have to pull on for how you handle something like this is movies.”

“Don’t worry, darlin’. I’ll take care of everything. All you’ve gotta do is trust me.”