Actual Stop (23 page)

“You keep looking at your watch,” Rico said. “You got a hot date or something?”

I smiled ruefully. “Yup. PT tests in the AM.”

Rico made a face. “That sucks.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So you’ve got to get going, then?”

“’Fraid so.”

Rico looked sorry to hear that but didn’t argue.

“Wait, you can’t go,” Paige interjected loudly, her volume just this side of a screech. She’d had a huge lead on me in the drinks department and then had attempted to keep stride once I’d joined the fray, so she no longer had any concept of indoor voice versus outdoor voice.

“Sorry, sweetie. Early day tomorrow. I need to get some sleep.” I failed to mention that sleep as a concept had been largely elusive recently and that chances were the trend would continue. It seemed counterproductive.

“But…” Paige’s brow wrinkled in an adorable frown, and she was obviously struggling to come up with a reason I should stay.

I continued to watch her in expectation, and Rico and I exchanged amused glances.

“You and Rico have to dance first,” Paige proclaimed matter-of-factly, obviously proud that she’d succeeded in her task.

I blinked. “What?”

Paige nodded, and her sage facial expression contrasted with the dazed look in her big blue eyes. “Yup. You guys gotta dance. I picked a song and everything. I’ve been waiting.”

“Paige, honey,” Rico said, his voice measured with patience though he was obviously trying not to laugh. “This isn’t really a dancing kind of a place.”

Paige shrugged, completely unconcerned. “So what?”

Now Rico’s brow furrowed. He was clearly trying to think of a compelling argument.

“I wanna see you guys dance,” Paige went on. Her eyes fell on someone standing just behind me. “Tell ’em.” She put her tiny hands on her slim hips and glared from the newcomer to Rico to me and back again.

I glanced over my shoulder and smirked when I realized Paige was ordering around Allison, who’d just wandered into this conversation and was completely clueless.

She looked to me for help, but I just shrugged. With her reappearance, I was suddenly too busy battling my conflicting feelings concerning her—unlocked and freed from their confines by the copious amounts of alcohol I’d consumed, no doubt—to really take much interest in the discussion.

“You should see these two dance,” Paige told Allison, apparently tired of waiting for a response from any of us. “It is so fucking hot!”

Allison raised her eyebrows at me, a small, almost indulgent smile stealing over her oh-so-kissable lips. She appeared intrigued, and a blush rose to my cheeks.

When Rico and I’d first been paired together for that undercover op in the Counterfeit Squad, I’d learned he had four older sisters. They’d enlisted him as a practice dance partner from the time he could walk. Rico told me he hadn’t really minded. He got along well with his sisters, and he’d found dancing actually fun. And after he’d grown up a bit, all the little preteen girls in his class at school had practically swooned when he’d revealed he had some serious moves.

I’d taken my fair share of dance lessons as a kid, too, and had gravitated toward styles with a lot of flair, like salsa. While I could perform other steps and had, in fact, tried just about every type of dance around, I preferred the fast ones with a lot of movement and twirling.

Rico and I discovered rather quickly that we moved well together, and the result of our inadvertent pairing for that assignment had been a lot of interesting dance combinations. We became something of a club favorite with the patrons and bartenders and eventually garnered the attention of the club’s owner. The relationship we’d built with him and some of his employees had led them to trust us enough to let slip little details concerning the non-club-related activities occurring on the premises. Together with the information we’d gathered during independent investigation as well as tips from another confidential informant, we had all the probable cause we’d needed to get a search warrant for both the club and the owner’s residences. After that, it’d been a done deal.

Rico and I hadn’t had much of an opportunity to do a lot of dancing since the operation ended. On the rare occasion we did go out together, the music generally didn’t lend itself to what I’d classify as actual dancing—bopping, writhing, grinding, flailing, and swaying maybe, but not dancing—and the atmosphere was always less than ideal. I mean, most of our after-work outings were held at some version of an Irish pub, and who really felt comfortable doing a merengue in a place where people habitually did shots and flung darts around? Not me.

“You dance?” Allison murmured out of the corner of her mouth. She definitely sounded amused.

I studied her. Was she was teasing me? It was tough to tell. “A little.”

“There’s this song,” Paige slurred her words. Clearly none of us needed to be present for this conversation. She was evidently hell-bent on driving it whether we actively participated or not. “It’s kind of old, but it was on the radio the other day, and the second I heard it, I thought, ‘Rico and Ryan would look smokin’ if they danced to that.’” She blinked at us expectantly.

“I’m not really dressed for dancing, Paige.”

Paige’s bleary eyes looked me up and down. She waved one hand dismissively. “You look great.”

I held up one foot and hitched up the leg of my jeans a little to show her my shoes. “I’ll probably break an ankle in these.”

“Ooh, those are cute! Where did you get them?” Paige frowned. “Wait, what did you wear on your sting?”

I tried not to smile. “Lower heels. And it wasn’t a sting.”

“It wasn’t? Are you sure?”

“We don’t use the term ‘sting.’”

“I thought everyone used ‘sting.’”

“You’ve been watching too many old cop dramas,” I told her. Rico put a hand over his mouth to hide his grin.

Paige looked to Allison for confirmation as though she didn’t trust me to tell her the truth.

Allison shrugged. “I’ve never heard any of our guys say it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the FBI did.” She met my eyes for an instant and beamed at me before her attention returned to a very serious Paige, leaving a bittersweet ache in my chest.

“I’ll tell you what.” I was determined to finish this discussion and not above looking for any way to placate her into dropping the subject. “I’ll hang out for another half hour, okay? If the song comes on, let us know. Maybe we’ll dance to it.”

Paige nodded happily and stumbled into Rico. She seductively ran her hands over his chest and then threaded them behind his neck. She tilted her face up to his, wordlessly asking for a kiss. Rico’s eyes danced as he complied.

Smiling wistfully at the display, I turned to give them a moment of relative privacy and ended up face-to-face with Allison, which made my heart thud wildly out of control. It was awkward for me to be standing next to her while near such a display of adoration and love as Rico and Paige were putting on, and I didn’t know what to say. So I shoved my hands into my pockets and looked toward the bar where Keith was animatedly telling a story.

My scalp tingled, and I heard a definite ringing in my ears as the sensation of déjà vu threatened to overwhelm me. I’d never been particularly suave in this type of situation before. I sure as hell didn’t know how to act now.

Once upon a time, Allison and I had been a normal, happy couple. Well, sort of. No, not exactly. We’d gotten along well enough, and we’d never lacked for passion, but for reasons I was never able to get her to confess, she’d wanted to keep our relationship a secret. As a result, I’d spent a lot of nights just like this one, standing next to her while feeling as though we were emotionally miles apart. And that was on good nights. More often than not, we’d spent the evening on opposite sides of a room, each pretending the other didn’t exist, though I was always aware of her presence the way you can always tell where the sun is even without looking directly at it.

At first, her attitude hadn’t bothered me. I don’t want everyone in the entire agency to know my business either. And, let’s face it, we’re worse than adolescents sometimes. We all spend so much time together it’s inevitable that after a while familiarity takes its toll, and conversation degenerates into gossip.

Unfortunately, as time wore on, I’d become less able to hide my feelings for her, to say nothing of actually being inclined to. So what? I was in love. I’d gotten her desire not to express extreme PDA when we were out with the work crowd, but to get pissed because I touched her on the arm? Smiled at her? Tried to have a conversation? That, I hadn’t fully understood. And her aversion to almost any amount of interaction with me in a public place had done more than just anger me. It’d fucking hurt.

She’d expected me to walk an extremely fine line, too, because if I didn’t pay any attention to her at all—which frankly had eventually just became easier for me than constantly policing my actions—she’d accused me of ignoring her and had become upset. But if I’d looked at her for a fraction of a second too long, well, she’d gotten annoyed then, too. I couldn’t win.

Ultimately, the entire situation became too much for both of us. I’d been on edge all the time, worried I’d somehow do something to make her mad. But underneath all that, so much more was tearing me apart. I’d been sad that we couldn’t just be happy together and devastated that she seemed ashamed of us—ashamed of me. I’d been angry I couldn’t just accept her wishes, because I felt I was pushing her to overreact somehow. And I’d also been pissed off at her for putting me in that situation to begin with. Why the hell couldn’t she just freaking relax?

In the end, we’d fallen apart. I think there’d been too much fighting, too much anger, too much resentment, too much pain between us by that point. I hadn’t been able to see any way to fix it, and Allison clearly hadn’t wanted to. She’d shattered me and never once looked back.

So here we were again, in a setting so familiar that pangs of the old anxiety were tying my nerve endings in knots and making me regret that I’d ever agreed to come. Why had I thought this would be a good idea? I hadn’t known what to do years ago. What made me think I’d have a better clue now?

Allison rested one of her hands on my forearm. The sparks her touch inflamed in me lit a path straight to the most sensitive points of my body, and I stifled a gasp. Confused by her action and my own reaction, I looked into her eyes, hoping for answers.

“Relax,” she told me softly. She squeezed my arm before letting go.

My thoughts reeled. I hadn’t meant for her to see how uneasy I was. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“That mind-reading thing. I told you before, it’s creepy.”

Allison chuckled. “Well, you’re not that hard to read.”

I sighed, mildly irritated. “For everyone?”

Allison shook her head. “I don’t think so. Just for the select few fortunate enough to know you well.”

Time to deflect. “Oh. And you think you know me well, do you?” I cocked my head to one side playfully.

“Well enough to know what you’re thinking about right now.”

“Oh, yeah? And what’s that?”

“Do I really have to say it?”

I scoffed. “You can’t because you don’t know.”

Allison leaned in so her lips pressed right up against my ear, making me shiver. “You were thinking about kissing me.” Her tone radiated confidence.

My jaw dropped. That was the first time she’d acknowledged my attraction to her since before we’d split up. I hadn’t expected that. It also hadn’t been remotely close to what I’d been thinking.

“I was not!” My protest was a little shrill as I tried to come up with a way to convince her she was wrong. My face was on fire.

Allison’s lips quirked in a barely contained grin, and her eyes sparkled. “You are now, though, aren’t you?” She blew me a playful kiss and sauntered over to the bar, putting a little extra sway into her hips as she walked.

Game. Set. Match.

Once I’d finally recovered, I let my own lips stretch into a grin. Ooh, she was so bad. She was also right, damn it all. Now that she’d brought it up, I was thinking about kissing her, as well as a host of other things, all of which involved my lips and her body in varying stages of undress.

Okay, I was still incredibly attracted to her. I might not have wanted to be, but facts were facts, and I needed to face them. With one offhanded quip, she could still light a fire in me that threatened to rage unchecked until I was reduced to embers.

I’d been fighting that realization for several days now. Despite the few fleeting looks and brief touches, I’d been convinced she saw me only as a coworker and former lover. And it’d seemed pointless to dwell on something that would never come to pass.

Now, however, I wasn’t so sure. Most people didn’t say things like that to people they weren’t drawn to. Well, not unless they got off on making people want them for mere sport. Which I knew Allison didn’t. So, part of her must still desire me. My heart stuttered, and I looked at her with new eyes as she headed back my way with another round.

Granted, the timing could’ve been better. I was literally just coming out of…well, something, but she knew the score there. I certainly hadn’t hidden the situation. Besides, wanting to go to bed and wanting to rekindle a romance were two different desires entirely. One didn’t necessarily lead to the other.

How would I feel about that? If she and I were to fall into bed tonight—not that I was expecting us to—could I be content with just sex? Would I be able to handle making love to her, only to have her walk back out of my life? And what if she wanted to stay? Did I even want to go down that road with her again? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t trust her not to shatter me once more.

“Thinking about kissing me isn’t supposed to make you all broody.” Allison handed me another water.

I blinked and shook my head, then accepted the offered drink and took a long swallow. I glanced around. It wasn’t like her to be so open with these types of discussions when coworkers were lurking nearby. “It’s not that.”

She took a sip of her own drink, her face serious. “What’s got you so tied up in knots, then?”