“We’re Facebook friends,” she reminded him. She frowned. “You still don’t have an internet presence, do you? Well, except for your email at work.” She rolled her eyes. “All business.”

He mopped up the spilled coffee, aware that his heart was turning cartwheels. Grace was the love of his life. She’d been engaged to his best friend, Mike Johns, a police officer in Houston, where Colter had also worked at the time. When Mike was killed in a bank holdup, Grace went a little crazy and signed on with a missionary society to go to South America.

They never told anyone, least of all Mike, but there had been an unexpected passionate kiss between them before Mike died. They were dealing with the guilt when he was gunned down. It split them apart at a time when Grace needed consolation desperately. She found it in her church work, rather than in Colter. Overseas, she’d been in an airplane crash. Colter had pulled strings to find out that she was all right, that she’d suffered only minor internal injuries. He’d written to her, but her reply had been offhand and breezy, not the stuff of romantic fiction. Since then, years ago, he hadn’t had any contact with her.

“You should get out more,” Brenda said.

He raised both eyebrows. “I get out every day, chasing down criminals,” he pointed out.

She gave him a mock glare. “You should date.”

He made a gruff sound. “Women today,” he muttered, looking her over. “Tattoos, green hair, overbearing, oversexed...”

“Oh, for those long-ago days of women in lacy dresses, fanning themselves on the porch while they sipped lemonade,” she said in a simpering tone.

He glowered at her. “You know what I mean.”

Actually, she did. He’d taken out a woman who’d worked in public relations and been shocked to the back teeth when she actually tried to seduce him in a theater. She liked kinky sex.