“Yeah? You think you could get the drop on me?” Amused, I look her up and down. “You’re lookin’ at two-hundred-forty pounds of grade-A Marine Corps male, sweetheart. You’re what, a buck ten, tops?”
She says, “First of all, you’re shit at judging a woman’s weight. I haven’t been one hundred and ten pounds since junior high school. More to the point, I’m an expert in Krav Maga. Not that I’d need it to lay you out.”
I prop my hands on my hips and grin at her. “Really. You got something more effective to take me down than the lethal hand-to-hand combat system developed by the Israeli Defense Forces? I can hardly wait to hear it.”
Looking right into my eyes, she calmly answers, “Two things, actually.”
“C’mon. The suspense is killing me.”
Her smile could melt steel. “My tits. If I unzipped my jacket right now and showed you the girls, you’d definitely be distracted long enough for me to bury a knife in your chest.”
She slings her laptop bag over her shoulder, grabs the handle of her suitcase, and jerks her chin at the rest of her bags that I’ve already unloaded. “By the way, all that gear can stay in the car. I won’t need it until we set up a COM center at Miranda’s.”
Still reeling from the mention of her breasts and the image it conjured—the accurate image, because I’ve seen her in all her bare-assed glory coming out of her shower—I ask, “You’re not worried about leaving your precious computer equipment in the back of my truck in a public parking lot all night long?”
“Give me a break, jarhead. I know an armored car when I see one. Someone would have to use a fifty-caliber machine gun to get through the amount of ballistic composites you’ve got on this thing.”
Should’ve known she’d notice the mods on the Hummer. She notices everything. “Thought you said it wasn’t safe.”
“Oh, it’s safe when it’s parked. It’s only a death trap when you’re behind the wheel. Has anyone ever told you that you drive like a twelve-year-old with ADD who forgot to take his Ritalin?”
Then she sashays away, hips swinging. I throw my head back and laugh, because goddamn she can give as good as she gets.
I stop laughing when I realize how much I like it.
A little flirtation is one thing. But I know how fucked a man’s judgment can get when he’s distracted by a woman. I’ve seen it before. When the friendly jabs become serious attraction and your concentration is shot because all you can think of is getting her beneath you in bed, that’s when mistakes happen. And in my line of business, any mistake could be deadly.
I’ve already seen how easily this particular woman can snap my self-control. The kiss in the restaurant was proof of that. I’ve never done anything remotely like that before, suffered an instantaneous, lust-fueled brain blackout, and I should be worried about it.
I should be, but I’m not.
Which is a problem.
Watching her walk through the sliding doors of the hotel, I resolve that there will be no more flirting. Until this job is over, I’ll be strictly professional. I can’t afford to be otherwise.
Now I just have to convince my dick to get with the program.
Seven
Tabby
At five a.m., I finally give up the battle with insomnia and rise from bed.
I go for a run, trying to wipe all thoughts of the past from my mind and focus on the task at hand. Finding S?ren Killgaard. Or, more precisely, getting him to find me. It won’t be hard. But Connor isn’t going to like what I have in mind.
Not that I’m going to tell him what it is.
There’s only one thing in this world I value more than my privacy, and that’s my sanity. It took me years to regain my mental footing after what happened between S?ren and me, years of therapy that forced me to take a hard look at myself and the way I’m wired, but it only took Connor Hughes a single evening to unravel all those years of work.
It only took him a single kiss and I was undone.
In front of everyone in that restaurant, in front of those two ridiculous, simpering girls staring at him from the bar, undone.
And I don’t even like him.
I don’t understand it. It makes no sense. There’s no logic to what happened to my body when he put his mouth on mine, the sheer electric jolt of pleasure I felt, right down to my toes. It was only a moment of utter madness, but I was shaken to my foundations, and still am.
“Stupid,” I mutter. I pump my arms and legs faster, driving myself hard until I’m drenched in sweat.
By the time I return to the hotel, the sun is rising, the birds are chirping, and I’m slightly less inclined to take off someone’s head. I go around the back, skirting the main lobby because the rear stairs are a more direct route to my room, and pass the pool. Someone else is up early, swimming laps with powerful, efficient strokes that make hardly a ripple in the surface.
When the swimmer ascends the pool steps and rises from the water, I stop dead in my tracks.