Her gaze slid off to one side. “Well, I, uhh, play some computer games to wind down after a hard day at work.”
“Get out! Which ones?”
She named a couple of the popular ones that millions of players congregated on, but not the overtly violent ones. No surprise. Like him, she saw the results of violence often enough in her work not to find it entertaining.
“We’ll have to get online together sometime and adventure,” he declared.
She blinked, looking downright stunned. “You play computer games?”
“They’re good for my reflexes and the dopamine dump of defeating bad guys helps me deal with stress from the job. Next time I’m online, I’ll text you.”
“That would be fun,” she responded doubtfully.
“I guess we have a second date lined up, then.” Color him possibly more surprised than she looked. She was so not his type. He was a flannel-shirts-and-fishing kind of guy. She was a big-city woman all the way, sleek and polished…way out of his league.
He reached for the file folders she held out to him and glanced up at her in time to catch her staring at him. She looked away fast, and rosy pink climbed her cheeks. She was blushing? For him? Well, well, well. Not completely immune to his charms, after all, was she? Glad to know he hadn’t completely lost his touch with the ladies. He’d been starting to wonder after her continuous cold-shoulder treatment.
After another hour or so of slogging through files, he called for another break, and this time didn’t ask her what she wanted. He merely opened a bottle of beer and passed it to her. She sipped daintily at it, which made him grin.
“You’re supposed to just tip it up and slug it down,” he commented.
“If you’re a sweaty from working outside on a hot day, maybe. I drink for the taste of it, not to get plastered, thank you very much.”
“Let me guess. You’re a wine-cooler type,” he said dryly.
“Actually, I like a good single-malt scotch.” She added, “To sip. And to savor.”
“Okay then. Good to know. I gotta say, I’m surprised.”
“I grew up in the Colton house. It was what the adults drank and what my older siblings snuck into when the adults weren’t looking.” She shrugged. “I used to ask to try it when I was a kid. Developed a taste for it over time.”
“Your mother drinks whiskey neat?” he blurted. He’d met Lilly Colton, and she didn’t strike him as a hard-liquor, hard-drinking woman. For one thing, she was a nurse. For another, she seemed the type to put kale in her smoothies and work out five days a week. For a woman with six grown children, she was fine looking and in great shape. Yvette reminded him a lot of Lilly, in fact. Yvette had her mother’s auburn hair and porcelain skin. But where Yevette’s dark brown eyes had come from was a good question. Both Fitz and Lilly Colton had blue eyes.
“When my mother drinks, which isn’t often and takes something or someone literally driving her to drink, she has been known to toss back a shot of scotch.”
“I’ll be damned. You Colton women never fail to surprise me.”
Their gazes met and that…something…passed between them again. A spark. Awareness.
Cripes. Who’d have thought he would find anything at all in common with this sophisticated, classy, intellectual woman, so unlike down-to-earth him?
That pretty pink color was climbing her cheeks again. He smiled a little at her and damned if she didn’t smile back. Her gaze dropped to where their hands nearly touched on the file folders. Sonofagun. Yvette Colton not only knew how to flirt but was doing it with him. Well, go goose a moose.
She put aside her half-full beer and went back to work. “One last box,” she announced. “With both of us working, we can kill it off tonight.”
He had more paper cuts than he cared to count, and his eyes were crossing before she finally passed him the last folder, more like three hours later than two.
“Whew!” he exclaimed. “That was a bitch. How many folders did we pull out with personal information in them?”
“Only about thirty,” she answered. “A far cry from the five hundred or so we started with.”
He held out his closed fist and she stared at it in obvious confusion. “Fist bump?” he suggested.
“Oh.” She shook herself a little. “Right.” She reached out with her delicate, girly fist and touched her knuckles lightly to his big, callused ones.
“I hope you don’t punch with a fist like that,” he commented teasingly. “Didn’t one of your brothers ever teach you not to stick your thumb inside your curled fingers?”
“They didn’t teach me much of anything. The triplets were always more interested in each other, and my oldest brother, Tyler, was much older than me. I was mostly a nuisance to be tolerated by him.”
He reached out and uncurled her fingers, guided her thumb to one side and recurled her fingers gently. “There. Now you’re ready to properly punch someone.”
“Good to know?”
He smiled lightly. “You never know when you’ll need to haul off and defend your honor.”
“This is Braxville. It’s not exactly the wild, wild West.”
“Take it from me. It has its dark underbelly. I would know.”
She met his smirk with one of her own. “In case you forgot, I work for the same police department you do. I’m as aware as you are of the crimes that take place in this town.”
So prickly, she was. Like a cute little kitten with its claws out.
“I didn’t forget that you work for the department. It’s just that you don’t get out of this dungeon much. You don’t roam the mean streets like I do.”
She laughed, and the sound was rich and warm. It welcomed him to join in with her, in sharp contrast to her usual cool, distant demeanor. He tilted his head to one side, studying her as her humor faded.
“What?” she demanded.
“I’m curious about you.”
“Nothing to be curious about,” she retorted quickly.
“See? That right there. You don’t want people getting to know you. When someone makes an overture, you push them away immediately. Why is that?”
“I do not!”
“Honey, I’ve been coming down here with evidence for the past year, and I don’t know one, single personal thing about you. Not one.”
“I told you not to call me honey,” she mumbled.
“Fine. I don’t know one damned thing about you, Miz Colton.”
“My mother is Miz Colton. Not me.”
“Can I call you Yvie, like your sister does?”
“No!”
She was working so hard to distract him—which was informative in its own right. She really didn’t want anyone to get close to her. But he wasn’t a detective for nothing. He wasn’t an easy man to distract from his main objective, once he had one. And right now, he wanted to know more about her. “All right, Yvette. Tell me something no one in the department knows about you.”
“This is work. It’s not like I’m going spew every detail of my life to my colleagues. That would be wildly unprofessional.”
“I get that. But we’re not in the FBI, and this isn’t Quantico. It’s Braxville. Everyone knows everybody else. It’s a tight community. And here in the department, we’re family. But you hold yourself separate from the rest of us. Do you think we’re not good enough for you?”
“Of course not. That’s absurd!”
“Then what’s the problem?” he persisted. Why he felt compelled to poke at this particular bear, he had no idea. But she’d bugged him ever since she’d come to work here. She was a mystery surrounded by a riddle wrapped in an enigma. Maybe it just went against his detective’s soul not to understand what made her tick.
“I’ve got no problem. I think the problem may be yours, Reese. Perhaps you’re just nosy.”
He laughed
easily. “Of course, I’m nosy. I’m a detective. It’s in the job description.”
“Well, I haven’t committed any crimes and I’m not under investigation, so you can just take your nose and poke it somewhere else. In fact, you should go home. I didn’t realize how late it was.”
“We can look through the thirty files—”
“Go on. Get out of here. Scram.”
Huh. This was a novel sensation. It wasn’t often a woman kicked him out of anywhere. He stood up, collecting the remaining pizza. “You want the leftovers?” he asked gruffly, holding the box out to her.
“No, thank you.”
“Cool. I’ll have it for breakfast in the morning.”
“Yuck,” she muttered under her breath. “Bachelor food.”
“I suppose you have eggs benedict, toast points and fresh-squeezed orange juice every morning?”
She snorted. “Hardly. I’m lucky to remember to drink a cup of coffee sometime before midafternoon most days. I’m so busy with these two cases that I barely have time to eat or sleep, let alone cook.”
“I know the feeling,” he responded fervently. The whole department had been working overtime to try to solve the baffling mystery of two dead bodies hidden in the walls of a building decades ago and to investigate the arsenic poisoning of a half-dozen Colton Construction employees.
He headed for the door and was almost through it before she called out softly, “Thanks for the help with the files. And thanks for the suggestion on how to sort them.”
Wow. He didn’t expect her to be civil after she gave him the toss like that. Strange creature, Yvette Colton. Cross between a fuzzy bunny and a prickly porcupine. Which he supposed made her a hedgehog. Good thing he liked hedgehogs.
CHAPTER 3
Yvette rolled out of bed Thursday morning feeling inordinately cheerful. What was up with that? It was a cold, gray day outside—that raw in-between of not quite cold enough to snow, but miserably cold and wet. Felt like a storm was coming. And the forecast on her phone bore that out. Temperatures were supposed to fall through the day and snow should roll in, tonight. But she still bounced out of bed full of energy and excited to get to the office.
Weird. Since when was she jonesing to dive back into the overwhelming workload piled up everywhere she looked? As she finished putting her hair up into a loose, attractive style, French braided in big chunks on the sides and ending in a messy bun at the nape of her neck, she reached for makeup and froze, staring at herself in the mirror. What was she doing? She never gooped up for work. Yet here she was, primping as if she was getting ready for a hot date.
Reese. This was all his fault. Him and his bedroom eyes.
What was wrong with her? Since when did one tiny scrap of attention from a man send her into orbit like this, crushing like a fourteen-year-old? He wasn’t even a man she would have chosen, left to her own devices. More often than not, he was insufferable and infuriating, forever telling her how to do her job and not minding his own business. A wannabe cowboy, for crying out loud. He was basically everything that drove her crazy in males of the species.
Although, to be fair, he was also a walking advertisement for procreation. The kind of man who would give a woman beautiful children…
Whoa. Full stop. She was only twenty-five years old. She had years to go before her biological alarm clock started jangling warnings to get busy making babies. She didn’t even want a serious relationship right now, let alone a permanent one. Her New Year’s Resolution had been to get out. Go on a few dates. Not go looking for true love and forever after.
But it would be nice to feel this sense of excited anticipation a little more often. To look forward to trying new restaurants, checking out local hangouts, having the occasional adventure. Her life since she’d gotten back to Braxville had settled in a routine of pure drudgery. Work, sleep and more work. When had she gotten so boring?
When she’d lived in Washington, DC, she’d done something fun pretty much every weekend. She’d visited museums, gone to the theater, hiked, biked, hung out with friends…and she’d had tons of friends in DC. Here, she had her family. Her sisters. And both of them were head over heels in love and too involved in their own relationships these days to spend more than the rare free moment with her. Not that she blamed them or even begrudged them their delirious happiness. But she’d come home and more or less turned into a hermit.
She opted to wear a simple white Oxford shirt and a pair of khaki slacks today, lest she look like she was trying entirely too hard. Stomping into a pair of fleece boots, she grabbed her puffy down jacket. A certain chill that her furnace couldn’t quite knock out of the air in her house announced that the cold front was already here.
She’d spent so long fussing in the bathroom that she had no time to stop for even a cup of coffee this morning on her way to work. Ugh. She was going to be stuck drinking the acidic sludge the beat cops brewed up and euphemistically called coffee.
The morning briefing was just breaking up when she arrived at the police department, and officers milled around being social before they headed off to their various assignments.
“Yvie!” her sister called out from across the jumble of desks in the squad room.
She made her way over to Jordana’s desk, which butted up against Reese’s, so the two faced each other. Her affectionate and outgoing sister, so unlike her, gave her a hug. “You look fantastic, sis. Any reason for getting all shined up?”
She frowned. Count on Jordana to call way too much attention to her. “Can’t I put on a little makeup without getting the third degree around here?”
“Okay, okay.” Jordana threw up her hands. “Never mind.”
Reese arrived at his desk and set down a steaming mug of coffee. “Hey, Yvette.”
She started to smile at him but stopped herself in alarm when she remembered her nosy-as-heck sister was standing there observing the two of them.
On cue, Jordana looked back and forth between them shrewdly. “How’d your date go last night?”
Yvette stared. “How on earth do you know about that?”
“Oh, I’m the one Reese lost the bet to.”
“What bet?” she asked ominously. She started around the end of the desk to confront Reese. Surely, this bet thing had been his idea.
Jordana chirped behind her, “I bet Reese that I could beat him at darts. Loser had to come back here and help you dig through files last night.”
She reached Reese and glared up at him. “You lost a bet? That’s why you helped me last night?” Hurt and betrayal swirled in her gut. It had nothing to do with liking her? Or flirting with her? Or just being decent? It was some stupid bet?
And here she was, painted up like a clown for him because she’d thought he actually liked her. Might even be interested in her. But no. She was a freaking pity case! Humiliation roared through her.
He shrugged down at her. “What does it matter? We got a lot done.”
Self-control had never been her strong suit in life. In fact, she was downright impulsive by nature. Maybe that was why she cocked back her fist, hauled off and punched him in the stomach as hard as she could. Which wasn’t actually all that hard because she was puny, and his abs turned out to be made of tempered steel. Her fist basically bounced off his stomach.
But pain still exploded in her metacarpal bones all along the back of her hand, a sharp reality check in the face of having done something colossally stupid. She stared up at Reese in horror as he stared down at her in shock.
More furious at herself than at him, she ground out, “Thanks for teaching me how to make a proper fist. Jerk.”
She spun and marched out of the squad room, her face on fire. Silence had fallen all around her, and her face heated up with every step as she crossed the broad space amid stares from everyone.
* * *
Reese stared after Yvette though
tfully. Normally, he would not take the least bit kindly to anyone up and slugging him. But he’d seen something in her eyes just before she’d hauled off and hit him.
Hurt.
She’d thought he brought pizza and offered to help her because he liked her. And she was hurt to think he’d only done it because he lost a bet. And as she’d turned away, he’d seen something else. A glint of shame in her dark eyes as they’d brimmed with sudden moisture.
Aww, hell. Tears were his personal kryptonite when it came to women. Now he felt bad. She was right. He’d been a thoughtless jerk. The second his partner brought up the bet, he should have made it clear immediately that he’d enjoyed working with her last night. But he’d been so startled by the violence of her reaction and the quickness of it that it didn’t occur to him to correct her impression until just now.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Truth was he had only helped her because of that bet. But he’d had a nice time with her. Enjoyed getting to know her a little. He’d definitely enjoyed slipping past that cool-and-distant exterior of hers.
A low, angry sound like a threatening cat might make in the back of its throat made him look up sharply. His partner had moved over to stand exactly where Yvette had just been. Damned if Jordana’s hand wasn’t curled into a fist, too. Cautiously, he kept his abs flexed. She snarled, “What did you do to my baby sister?”
“Whoa, there, Jordana. Slow down. Nothing happened between us. I didn’t lay a finger on her. I only came over here and helped Yvette sort through Markus Dexter’s work files. I swear. You can go down and look at the boxes we went through.”
His partner’s threatening stance eased slightly, but her fisted hands still didn’t fall down to her sides.
Lord, these Colton women were firecrackers.
“Go ask her if you don’t believe me,” he added desperately, eyeing Jordana’s clenched fists cautiously. “Nothing happened.”
She stared at him a moment longer and then nodded once, tersely. He stepped back quickly and changed the subject. “So. Where are we with tracking Dexter? Any hits on his credit cards?”
Harlequin Romantic Suspense December 2020 Box Set Page 26
