And she wasn’t. She wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests, but neither would most folks. Plus, Hartigan was trained to never trust only what he saw. The truth of a person was rarely on the surface. And that kiss… It’d been a while since someone had surprised Ford.
She’d seemed all-business, in her just-perfect dress and shoes. But damn, the heat under the surface still rattled his senses.
“The wedding planner chick?” Gallo sputtered. “Did you see the size of that nose and the general ugh of that face? Do we need to let the captain know it’s time to pull you in for a physical so you can get your eyes checked?”
Ford cut a deadly glare at the detectives who, technically, were his bosses. “Shut up, Gallo.”
The comments pissed him off. Of all the people in the world, they should be the last ones to fall for the whole hot-equals-good bullshit. They were cops, after all. They spent every day neck-deep in cases of people who might be beautiful on the outside but were a fucking radioactive cesspool on the inside. Yet these two morons still only saw the surface, which probably explained why the organized crime task force was circling the drain.
“Come on, you gotta admit the wedding planner is harsh on the eyes, not like that one.” Ruggiero glanced over at the boutique hotel’s reception desk. “You know, she asked about you when we came out here.”
Ford didn’t mean to look over at the hotel clerk, but he did anyway. She was a sexy blonde with big tits and an ass that would bring a sinner to church—the kind of girl his brothers would be chatting up by now. But him? Not a chance.
He wasn’t the charming Hartigan. He was the boring, rule-following nerd who’d become a cop instead of a firefighter and never heard the end of it.
His brothers Frankie and Finian would have fallen at the clerk’s feet. Not him—especially not if Ruggiero and Gallo were the ones saying she was hot for him. They’d pulled so many pranks at the station that the captain had dragged them into his office and reamed their asses more than once for it.
“Like I’m gonna believe you two,” Ford said, looking around the lobby for Kapowski, who’d promised he’d be here if he could.
Gallo held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
Ignoring the obvious setup, Ford brought it back to business. Trying to shame these two into good behavior worked about as well as it did on a dog—momentary remorse followed five minutes later with Rover being snout-deep in the kitchen garbage. Again. “Has Kapowski showed up with the files about the latest Esposito surveillance yet?”
Gallo shook his head. “That would be a negative.”
“And you two are out here waiting on him so you can review it in a timely manner?”
“Fuck no.” Ruggiero held up his glass, clinking the ice cubes in the international sign for another drink. “That’s what we have you here for, son.”
“You’re a real piece of work, Ruggiero.”
“I know.” He flashed a grin, obviously unperturbed by the dig. “It’s why all the ladies love me.”
Gallo laughed loudly. “There is no one who believes that.”
“Tell that to my wife,” he groused. “She’s convinced I’m banging half the nurses at St. Vincent’s.”
Ford didn’t want to touch that, not even with Gallo’s probably radioactive dick. “I’m heading up. If Kapowski ever gets here, you can just have him deliver the info to room two-oh-five.”
Why was he so ready to spend a night working instead of following up with the wedding planner, no matter what Ruggiero and Gallo said about her? Because there was nothing in the world Ford wanted more than nailing the Esposito crime family.
He’d been close, so close, to making a case against the organization. But as his grandpa had always said, close only counts in horseshoes and the backseat of a car. It definitely didn’t count in police investigations, and that’s why he was stuck getting brain rot as the task force’s low man on the totem pole for the foreseeable future. But he wouldn’t be there forever.
Growing up as the odd man out of the seven Hartigan kids, he’d learned early on that it wasn’t about winning the battle, it was about winning the war. Eventually, if he played it smart—which he always did—he’d move up to running the task force. Then, give him two decades and, at fifty, he’d be the youngest police commissioner in Waterbury’s history.
Gallo gave him a questioning look. “You’re staying here?”
“I’ve had two beers,” Ford said, stopping before he sang them song and verse on department policy and the law.
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Ruggiero said and took a drink from the red cocktail straw of the new amaretto sour the bartender had handed him. “Even my grandmother can drive home after two beers.”
“It’s against department policy.” Section forty-two point eight point three, to be precise.
“Fucking rule follower.” Gallo rolled his eyes and turned his barstool back around to face the bar and the giant TV screen showing the Harbor City Ice Knights losing. Again.
“We are law enforcement officers.” Which meant they needed to hold themselves to a higher standard, to put law and order above everything else.
Ruggiero snorted. “That doesn’t mean we have to be know-it-all assholes.”
Ford clamped his mouth shut and hammered the tip of his middle finger against his thumb, counting down from twenty-five because ten wasn’t going to do it with these two.
Once he tapped to twenty-five, he let out a breath. “Just have Kapowski bring up the files if he stops by. We need his detail tonight to pay off. If the tip about the massive drug deal we got was right, the Espositos will be flooding Waterbury with heroin.”
Even Ruggiero and Gallo grimaced at his words.
Despite their general assholery, they knew a lot of people would suffer if they didn’t stop this deal—and right now they didn’t have jack shit on it.
Ford grabbed his key out of his inside jacket pocket and handed it to Ruggiero. “Room two-oh-five. He can leave the files and the key on the desk in my room. I need a shower.”
Ruggiero shrugged, his grimace replaced with a shit-eating grin. “Maybe I’ll have that hot receptionist bring them up instead.”
“You’re hilarious,” Ford said and marched toward the elevators so he could get out of this monkey suit.
If Ford had been one of his brothers, he would have been able to cajole the other men into not being such giant assholes. However, Ford had long ago accepted that he wasn’t like the rest of his family. Brusque. By the rules. No-nonsense. That was him, the boring, dark-haired, odd man out of the wild, fun-loving, rough-and-tumble Hartigans—the guy who had women sprinting away from him after a single kiss. Yeah. He was a real catch.
Chapter Two
Gina’s stomach was still going all woozy whenever she thought back to that kiss, but the wedding reception had finally wound down and the happily-wedded and sloshed couple had disappeared into their honeymoon suite. That meant Gina’s time in hell was done. Thank you, baby Jesus.
She loved her job as a wedding and event planner—really, she did—but nothing was ever as sweet as the moment she walked away from a job well done. In T-minus twenty minutes, she’d be out of these heels and cute-but-not-revealing green dress and back in her own home, with nothing but the creaky silence of the old Victorian for company. She couldn’t wait.
It wasn’t the most exciting life—she owned that—but it was hers, and she was determined to make the most of it. No sitting around waiting on Prince Charming, who only existed in storybooks. Forget that pampered dweeb. What she needed was a handyman who wouldn’t run screaming from her home renovation to-do list. Well, that and more clients for her start-up business. Orgasms would be nice, too, but she’d found her vibrator was a hell of a lot more reliable for that than the few men who’d been in her bed.