Okay. Forget about it. Of course she noticed. Of course she remembered!
“Yep.” She nodded, mesmerized by the gold flecks rimming the green around Dan’s pupils, reminded that he smelled like the air after a thunderstorm…rich and clean and electric. “Civilian Penni DePaul.” She snapped him a saucy salute with her ice-cream cone. “At your service.”
And then he didn’t just smell like a thunderstorm, he looked like one too. His expression turned so violent, she would not have been surprised if lightning bolts shot from his eyes. His jaw ground so hard she fancied she could hear the enamel on his teeth cracking like thunder. “If those fuck-sticks fired you ’cause you”—Fuck-sticks? That was a new one—“broke protocol that night and stayed out past that ridiculous curfew,” he ground out, “then I—”
“No.” She was quick to cut him off. “It wasn’t that.”
“What protocol?” Zoelner asked, looking back and forth between them. “What curfew? What are you guys talking about?”
“The midnight curfew the Secret Service enacted after that clusterfuck”—now clusterfuck she knew very well—“in Colombia, where a bunch of their agents got caught with ladies of the evening in their hotel rooms,” Dan spat.
“Ladies of the evening?” Zoelner smirked. “Is that for the benefit of our mixed company, or have you been reading historical romances again?” The idea of big, bad Dan “The Man” Currington with a Georgette Heyer novel in his hand made the corner of Penni’s mouth twitch.
“You’re missing the goddamned point,” Dan growled. And there he went again, Mr. Growly Growlerton.
“Which is?” Zoelner asked.
“That the Secret Service thought it could tell its own agents when it was bedtime.”
Zoelner turned to her. “And I take it you broke your curfew?”
“I did,” she admitted, still coming to terms with what breaking her curfew that night had meant. “And it saved me from the incendiary device the terrorists had planted under my hotel bed.” But it’d left her the sole survivor among the Secret Service agents who’d been on The Assignment.
“Hot damn. That was a lucky break,” Zoelner mused, eyeing her curiously. Then, “If you don’t mind me asking, what caused you to go against protocol?”
She glanced over at Dan, remembering how they’d been seconds away from getting down and dirty in his hotel room. That night they’d finally given in to the chemistry that’d been bubbling between them. No, on second thought, it wasn’t chemistry. It was astronomy. Because she’d been the moon to his earth, seduced into his orbit by the sheer force of his gravitational pull.
“Ah.” Zoelner nodded sagely. “I get it.” He rubbed a hand under his chin. “And that explains more than you know.”
“What do you mean?” She stuck out her tongue to catch the stray drop of ice cream that threatened to roll over her fingers.
“Nothing,” Dan cut Zoelner off, his eyes zeroing in on her tongue like a sniper taking aim at a target. Heat instantly washed down her body from the top of her head, making her toes curl inside her boots. They’d resumed their usual position now that her heart was no longer taking up the space. “And back to the point, which is…” He made a rolling motion with his hand. “You’re no longer with the Secret Service?”
“I’m not.” Now they were getting down to brass tacks.
“Why?” he demanded. “What happened?”
“Well, I—”
“Never mind,” he quickly cut her off, causing her brow to furrow in frustration. “Why you’re out of the Service is less important than why you’re here now. ’Cause if you’re not part of some attempt to apprehend Winterfield, then you’re in Cusco to…” Again with the rolling hand.
“To talk to you.” There. She admitted it.
“To me?”
“To you.” Inexplicably, the song sung by the Mad Hatter and the March Hare in Alice in Wonderland skipped through her head. A verrrry merry un-birthday… To me!… To who? Oh, you! And like the Mad Hatter’s conversation, this one seemed to be all over the place.
Finally, Dan asked, “Why?”
Okay, so she hadn’t exactly planned to say this in the middle of a busy Peruvian square, much less in front of an audience, but the way things were going, if she didn’t take the opportunity to tell him what was in her head, what was in her heart, and—
Penni-pie, just pull up your big-girl panties and do it! Her father’s advice echoed through her head, ever the voice of wisdom and reason.
She screwed up her courage and blurted, “Because I—”
“Holy shit!” Zoelner spat, cutting Penni off. She blinked over at the man. Damnit! He had the worst timing. “You two look alive if you want to stay that way.”