Caught by Surprise by Deborah Smith

she’d never have. Millie rose quickly, feeling miserable and trying to hide it. “I’ll be up front, taking care of business.”
    Brig rocked on the back legs of his chair, assessing her through slitted eyes. His voice was droll. “I can sleep easy, then, knowin’ that you’re lookin’ after me.”
    She smiled thinly and left the room. What would he do if she went wild and ravished him? Would it be the end of her career as a deputy, or the beginning or her career as a wrestler?
    Weekends were relatively tame in Paradise Springs, and it wasn’t unusual for a deputy to spend the night tossing paper airplanes at a geranium hanging across from the registration desk. Millie was surprised when the phone rang at two A.M .
    She took the caller’s frantic message, then ran back to the cell block. The light was on in Brig’s cubicle, and she heard him playing the guitar. Millie slid to a stop by the door. He was stretched out on his bunk, the guitar resting on his stomach.
    “I have to break up a domestic fight,” she told him. “Just wanted you to know.”
    He got up quickly. “Let me go with you.”
    “No, no, no.”
    “I’ll stay in the car. Dammit, Melisande, it’s not safe for
anyone
to take on something like that without backup.”
    So he still thought of her as
Melisande
. Millie was so stunned and so pleased that she stared at him speechlessly. Resistance melted inside her. “Only if you
promise
to stay in the car.”
    He crossed his heart solemnly. “Swear on a kangaroo’s hop.”
    “Is that considered binding by anything other than a kangaroo?”
    Brig shrugged. “It’s the best I can do.”
    She felt reckless. “All right, let’s go.”
    The night wind gusted with the promise of thunderstorms. Lightning drew yellow streaks as crooked as a witch’s fingers clawing the sky. The Hideaway Trailer Park on the outskirts of Paradise Springs was a quiet, middle-class place ordinarily, but tonight it seemed sinister. Alarmed neighbors stood outside a sleek blue double-wide trailer, their clothes and hair whipping in the wind. After Millie cut the patrol car’s engine, she unlatched the restraining strap on her gun holster.
    Brig was a large, soothing, and deceptively relaxed presence in the seat beside her. When she opened the car door, he didn’t offer any patronizing cautions, but instead said gruffly, “Hurry back.”
    “Faster than a kangaroo’s hop,” she replied. Millie caught the white gleam of his smile before she left the car.
    He watched her go up the steps to the trailer door, her curly blond hair buffeted, her small body swaying when the wind hit it. She knocked on the door and a stocky, disheveled woman threw it open. Millie stepped inside and shut the door behind her.
    Brig cursed softly and dug his fingers into the car seat in order to keep himself from following her. In his culture men protected women, and this situation strained his tolerance to the breaking point. Besides, this wasn’t just any woman, this was Melisande, the most aggravating, stubborn, mixed-up woman he’d ever met. She didn’t know how to ask for help when she needed it—and that scared him.
    He waited five minutes, then ten, his concern growing Fifteen minutes after she entered the trailer he heard a muffled scream. Brig was already out of the car when the trailer door opened. The interior lights silhouetted the stout husband of the brawling pair. He held a rolling pin in one hand. The milling neighbors hurriedly moved back from the threat.
    Brig raced out of the darkness, leaped to the top doorstep, and broadsided the husband. Screams rose from the crowd. The man fell backward into the trailer’s living room, with Brig on top of him. Brig glanced around, saw no one else, and grabbed the front of the sweaty sport shirt his victim wore.
    “Where’s the deputy, you bastard?”
    The man was breathless from the fall. “Bathroom.”
    Brig jerked the rolling pin from his hand and threw it under a couch. He