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  Dan leaned against the car again, grinning. Whatever Shay had just given Zoe permission for, it ought to be a good show. He hoped it involved something like freeing more little swimmers from Stock’s balls or finishing the nose job she’d started.

  But the little dancer didn’t go near the car. She skipped over to him. Before he could recover from the switch-up, Zoe threw her arms around his neck—and landed a solid kiss on his cheek.

  He froze.

  Rhett and Rebel whooped. El joined them. Everyone else clapped. Even Brynn, who still looked like his cojones on a platter would suit her just fine.

  “You were right, spook man,” Zoe drawled. “That was a kick-ass wedding gift.” She kissed his other cheek, using it as an excuse to murmur into his ear, “But next time, we’ll just kill the chingado, okay?”

  Chapter Two

  “She actually said that?”

  Tess Lesange laughed her way through the question. Number one, the reaction made sense. Number two, it beat having to hide how badly she wanted to jump the bones—and anything else—of the man who dwarfed the little table they shared for a last-minute lunch at Mundo.

  Though they’d agreed to meet only an hour ago, Dan had arrived early enough to snag the table’s location, in a corner deep enough to cloak the right side of his face from the room. As usual, he’d dressed like every other “power government” guy in the place—a concerted effort on his part to blend in as much as possible—though she didn’t have the heart to tell him that would never be possible. The man would command the space around him even if he’d arrived in a gunnysack. But take that natural aura of power, leadership, and animal-attraction sensuality, then slide it all into a charcoal suit, pinstriped shirt, trendy tie, and polished Ferragamos…

  No damn way was this man going to “just blend” in any room.

  Or make her yearn any less to help him dirty it all up.

  She forced herself not to fixate on the poetry of his long fingers, swirling their way around the rim of his beer mug. It was another effort altogether to ignore the glances he got from women at other tables, openly betraying how they’d let their bodies trade places with that mug in an instant.

  Like she was any better than them.

  Not by a single damn iota.

  Friend zone, Tess. You’re solidly there, and you’ll never be anyplace else. Get it through your thick, overstyled head. The man likes little, cute, curvy show dancers, not tall, gawky, a-little-too-weird intel analysts.

  Though she sure couldn’t tell that right now.

  Damn. The man had a gift, a potent one, for making a girl feel like the object of his sole attention, despite the lunch-hour chaos in one of downtown’s hottest restaurants. She might be the one with the office nickname of “the laser,” but she’d never felt like the entire world just went away unless she was with Dan. Though she’d never been in the field a day in her life, she imagined his intense focus was his hugest strength during the life-and-death ops he often regaled her with.

  Never could she have guessed that his friend’s wedding would be added to that list.

  “Yeah.” Dan smirked fully enough to tug at his scar tissue. “Word for word. That’s really what she said.”

  She scooped a chip into the bowl of guacamole between them. “I think I like this Zoe person.” She took a bite out of the bright-green smoodge of heaven. Holy hell, this place made bueno guac.

  Dan chuckled. “She’s a scrappy one, all right.”

  “You tell her that to her face?”

  “You think I’m that dumb? She wanted to put a bullet in Stock’s brain worse than me. ‘Scrappy’ wouldn’t be jamming a bee under her bonnet. It’d stir the whole hive.”

  She flashed a bigger smile. “You were both right not to kill him. He’s under max security watch now. As soon as his…errr…injury heals, he’ll be processed and then prosecuted with anything we can throw at him. Cameron Stock and his empty nut sack will never see the sky free of barbed wire again.”

  Dan returned the grin. “It’ll be good news to tell her after the honeymoon. She and Ironman are honeymooning on Kauai so he can spend a little time with T-Bomb during the trip.”

  Tess pretended to be picky about her next chip, disguising her nervousness about the question she couldn’t evade any longer. “Brynn was there too, right?”

  It was impossible not to notice how his fingers whitened against his mug.

  “Yeah. She was.”

  “So what was her take on things? Did you let her know what you were up to in advance?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah. Damn.” He glanced up, almost bashful about it, giving her a glimpse of his piercing blue eyes. Gut flip number ten thousand—for today alone. Those twin blues could sear her like the purest heart of a flame, meaning her system didn’t know whether to shiver or overheat. Screw it. She went for both.

  “Oh, dear,” she muttered. Liar. Thank God for the chips. Something for the hands to do besides betray her schism of excitement. “Trouble in paradise?”

  She could only hope.

  No. No, she couldn’t.

  Therese Odette Lesange, you are going to hell. In handcuffs. And flip-flops. Ugly ones, like the kind they sell at the hotel pools. The disgrace of plastic flowers and cheap rhinestones shall follow you throughout eternity.

  “You could say that.” Dan didn’t look comfortable about the admission. Nor did he look heartbroken. “She pulled the plug.”

  Yesssssss.

  Straight. To. Hell.

  “Pulled the plug? In what way?” Wow. She had no idea she could play this stupid. It was sort of scary.

  “As in, pulled the plug,” Dan reiterated. “Broke it off.”

  Ohhhhh, yesssss.

  In crappy flip-flops.

  “Oh, my God.”

  He cocked his head, going into let-me-see-if-I-can-freak-you-out-with-the-scars mode. “Oh, come on. You’re not that shocked, Ruby, and we both know it.”

  Tess grinned. Sneaky charmer had her at the nickname. He was the only one who called her that—whom she let call her that—and since it was the deepest intimacy she’d ever share with him, it was special.

  “Fine. I’m not rushing to catch the Twitter feed on it, okay?”

  There was a great follow-up to that, wasn’t there? She couldn’t remember—not after he retaliated by softly tugging on one of her dark-red curls. She’d gone for a new shade yesterday, Rose Temptation, which was darker than the usual tint that simply enhanced her natural color. The result was more startling than she thought, and she’d expected Dan to pop a joke involving Strawberry Shortcake, Jessica Rabbit, or both. Instead, he’d been pretty fascinated, an energy she didn’t remember from the other times she’d opted for the retro, tube-curl hairstyle.

  And maybe she was reading too much into everything he said and did now. Because hell, that had never happened before.

  “But…” He canted his head the other way. “You’re still surprised, aren’t you? Really surprised?”

  She let out a careful breath. “I suppose I am.”

  “Why?”

  Shit. Did the man have to punctuate everything by yanking on her curls? As he did it again, his knuckles grazed the side of her neck. Heat radiated from the contact, permeating her with a thousand sparks, forcing her to lick her lips before concentrating on coherence.

  “I guess…well…the two of you have been at it for a while. I assumed everything was going great.”

  And because it was easier than contemplating any different. Dan in a relationship was much less painful to think about than the Dan of a year ago, dating a different woman every month, none of whom had been her. Of course, a year ago, they’d also been work pals who barely spoke. Hadn’t stopped her nonstop fantasies about the man. The fire and his disfigurement had changed everything between them—for the better and the worse.

  The better? Dan talked to her about everything now.

  The worse? Dan talked t
o her about everything now.

  Including the one big “everything” she’d suspected almost from the day she’d met him—that he was a lifestyle Dominant, as dark and kinky as desert summer days were long.

  Like he hadn’t given her enough to envision already.

  Like she hadn’t dreamed of giving herself over to a man in the exact same way, in the exact same scenarios he described—which had become only memories to him since the accident and his recovery. She’d always listened eagerly, eventually slipping in enough questions that Dan must know she was curious about this stuff. But by the time they’d arrived at that level of disclosure, he was hot and heavy with Brynn Monet—meaning lunches like this usually ended with her driving back to the office with a racing mind and soaked panties.

  Yay.

  Dan’s snort brought her back to today’s daily dole-out of frustration. “‘Going great’?” That’s really what you thought, eh?” He grunted hard. “Guess that depends on your idea of great.”

  She leaned in, resting an elbow on the table. The move was for caution, not flirtation. Sure, honey. You just go ahead and keep believing that—especially with what you’re about to let slide from your “virginal” little lips.

  “You already know what my idea of ‘great’ is.”

  He tilted his head again, as if he’d yanked the cord on the lightbulb inside it. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “I suppose I do.”

  “Then why do you sound so stunned?”

  “Do I?”

  His head dipped lower as his grin inched higher. The little-boy-bashful look was one of his hottest moves before the burns. Now, he used it to hide those scars—like Tess even remembered they were there by this point.

  “Okay,” he declared, “so now that we’ve gone there with the conversation… How are things going with the FetLife guy?”

  The question affected her like a physical shove. She returned to her original posture, grabbing the chance to regain her composure.

  She’d walked right into this one, hadn’t she? That was what she got for meeting the man for lunch, knowing he’d wear a suit, which would in turn make her forget her own damn name, let alone that if she went for the subject of kink, he’d bring up the lifestylers’ version of Facebook, which replaced prompts like “mood of the day” and “favorite movies” with “favorite fetishes” and “hard limits.” Dan had encouraged her to form an FL profile about two months ago, after she’d finally confessed that a lot of reading, research, and soul searching had led to the conclusion of wanting to explore the Dominant/submissive lifestyle more deeply.

  She remembered the day he’d made the recommendation to her. He’d seemed wistful—and that wasn’t a surprise. By that point, she’d known he hadn’t stepped foot into a BDSM dungeon in over a year and that Brynn was digging her heels in about ever giving it a try.

  The situation had never met Tess’s approval. To be more accurate, she was incensed. But some of that was due to her baggage, not Dan’s—shit that would likely take her a lifetime to figure out. From the outside, life in the Lesange household made Mattie, Viv, and her the envy of all their schoolmates, raised in an atmosphere that appeared the epitome of “Parisian hip”—though in reality, was a gilded cage of limits and bigotries. It was all so insidious, she’d never seen any of it clearly until a few years ago. Who the hell had the right to throw sludge on another person’s choices, unless it was dangerous or stupid? And going priss-prude on a man like Dan Colton, who offered to be a patient guide into the subtleties of the D/s dynamic? Instant induction into the stupid column. When she’d said as much, Dan had chuckled and called her “cute.”

  Cute.

  Brynn was giving the man vanilla sex in a handful of positions, and Tess got “cute.”

  You need to be grateful for what you do have with him—a hell of a lot more than what you dreamed of having in the first place, right? Don’t mess with the goodness, Tess. Not now.

  It was the same reasoning she’d used to finally open the FetLife page—but so far, with the results she now relayed to Dan. “Honestly, they’re going nowhere,” she muttered, though managed a laugh to set up her next revelation. “I’m not sure why the guy called himself a Dom. Every time he loaded a new profile photo, he’d message to ask me if his butt looked big.” She giggled as Dan nearly spat out his beer. “Sorry. Should’ve warned you that was coming.”

  He shot up a brow. “Euphemism intended?”

  “Probably.”

  The brow descended. “Fuck. Sorry about that, Ruby.”

  She shrugged and smiled as the waiter delivered their lunch. Beef enchiladas for him, Ensenada chicken for her. “Well, don’t cry me a river,” she quipped, spooning some sauce from her plate to the ridge of the big flour tortilla. “A wise man, who happens to like a little food with his salsa”—she eyed the three salsa dishes mounted next to his plate—“once told me this process might take a while.”

  “Sounds like the idiot didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “Oh, sure he did.”

  “Oh, no, he didn’t.”

  Whoa. Commander Colton is in the house. Only she couldn’t figure out why. When his direct order of a statement came accompanied by an incisive gaze, she gulped down some more tea. Cleared her throat. Drank again. Yet he still stared. What the hell was going on? Or was nothing going on? Wouldn’t be the first time she’d read too much into his actions just because she longed for it to be so.

  “Errrm…I’m lost.” At least it was the truth.

  Dan didn’t let up on the stare. Not helping, screamed her frazzled nerves.

  “Men can be idiots, Ruby.”

  That was what she got worked up about? She made up for it with a hard snort. “You said it, not me.”

  He loaded up his fork but didn’t bite. Instead, after blowing out more air through his nostrils, he stated, “That ‘wise man’ told you it would ‘take a while’ because he didn’t think you were completely serious about finding a Dom.”

  She felt her brows reach for her hairline. “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. That’s so.”

  Forget frazzled. She was miffed. “What? Because he thinks he knows me?”

  “Well, yeah. Probably a little more than most people.”

  “Well, screw that.” She stabbed into her own food. “And screw you.” Oh, how you once wished. Thank God for the friend zone now. “I appreciate all the things we’ve talked about, okay? But I meant it when I said I’ve been reading about the lifestyle on my own. Believe it or not, ‘Laser’ Lesange knows how to apply herself to more than spreadsheets, satellite shots, and classified intel.”

  “Okay, okay.” He reached over, grabbing her hand before she could think to yank away. “Men? Idiots? Remember?”

  Damn. Was she really just thanking God for the friend zone? She took it back. Immediately.

  Skin-to-skin, the man was even harder to view on a platonic plane. His hand surrounded hers in heat, strength, and command. She looked at their entwined fingers before lifting her stare back up to his face. God had given the man an incredible face. If he’d been born fifty years ago, his long-lashed eyes, aquiline nose, and forceful jaw would’ve been splashed across movie screens from beneath a white Stetson, chasing bad guys alongside John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Every time she saw him again, even just a half hour ago in front of the restaurant, her breath caught and her heart stopped.

  And yeah, that was even with the scars.

  Who the hell was she kidding? The scars were just another giant crank on her libido. The mottled strip of skin was like Wayne’s strut and Eastwood’s cigar, a signature symbol that proclaimed much deeper waters than the surface—a much more dangerous message than the placid outside. You really want to fuck with me, man, after seeing what I’ve taken already?

  Shit. What were they talking about again?

  “Idiots.” She grabbed onto the one word she remembered before her logic had decided to feed itself to her lust. “Yeah, well…that might be an exagg
eration. At least sometimes.”

  “Well, not this time,” he said, humble and soft. “Put that together with a guy who’s been in the lifestyle for six years and seen more than my fair share of subbies who dive into it for all the wrong reasons, and you end up with a guy who looks at things cynically.”

  She took a bite—using her other hand. She was going to enjoy the crap out of the physical connection to him, even if it was only from wrist to fingertips. “That’s understandable,” she conceded. “Kind of like bringing in civilian consultants on cases, who then think we’re all Sydney Bristow and Jason Bourne.”

  “Wait.” His forehead crunched. “I’m not Jason Bourne?”

  “Smartass.”

  They laughed together. And that, she concluded, was the end of that—

  Until he squeezed her fingers tighter.

  The ruby has officially melted. The second grasp confirmed what the first couldn’t. He hadn’t reached for her just to prove a point. He wanted to be holding her like this.

  Dry out your panties, girl. Holding hands in a public restaurant is a long way from stepping into a play room together. Would you really let the man tie your ass down to a spanking bench right now—after he admitted to privately bankrolling an off-books op to catch a bastard before nearly flaying the man open for the Red Rock vultures?

  Her heart answered that before her head could. And that answer was no relief for her dilemma.

  I’d trust him with my life right now if I had to.

  So letting him work some Dominant magic on her bare ass? There was a no-brainer.

  As she allowed her mind to rev with that daydream, she was conscious of wetting her lips again—but very little else. Even Dan’s voice was dim and distant until he all but yelled her name.

  “Huh?” she stammered. She took in his face, still filled with rugged intensity, and gave up on walking out of here with anything less than a soaked pussy. Juuust great. “What?” she snapped.