The tequila burns away any remaining nerves and, somehow, when she perches on a stool. I take off my jacket and lean on the bar, as close to her as I can get without being on top of her. We’re back to where we left off. It shouldn’t feel this easy after all this time.
“LA treating you all right?” I ask.
She picks up the empty pint glass she had in her hand when I arrived and sips though it’s nothing but ice in the bottom. The straw lingers on her pouty bottom lip.
She sets down the glass.
“It’s…a lot. Sirens, traffic, too many people who think they’re starring in their own movie.” Her laugh is humorless. “Still, go big or go home, right? My mom might not be so impressed if it wasn’t big-city crime.”
Freya mentioned more than once that her mom is her hero. Impressing her was something she never thought she’d do. She felt mediocre by comparison, especially after what happened at her last job.
Despite feeling unqualified to approve on behalf of a district attorney, I do. “The LAPD is a grueling academy. I’m sure she knows that.”
“You should have seen me in the three-hundred-meter sprint.” She laughs, shaking her head at herself.
The sound sticks with me, settling somewhere in my rib cage.
She beams wide, but her eyes are half-mast. “Not a good look, me running like that.”
So why does my mind immediately disagree?
Freya has curves. Real ones. And even though I know she was dressed appropriately at training, my brain rewrites the memory anyway—those curves in motion, slow and lethal, like something pulled straight out of Baywatch.
Christ. This woman is the definition of voluptuous.
She shakes her head. “Thank goodness before I left here I started going to the gym at Monarch Hills with Lara. High school basketball was a long time ago, and my body felt it. But…” She flexes her arm. “Look at these guns now.”
I squeeze her bicep and struggle to take my hand back. “Impressive.” She’s damn cute like this. So proud of herself. Confident. I love it for her.
“I saw you were top of your class with your scores, too.” I try to get my mind to think of anything but touching the rest of her body now.
She slaps my arm playfully. “You were checking up on me?”
“Maybe.” I shrug.
Her eyes narrow. “You did not.”
I let the silence answer.Of course, I checked up on her.
Her laugh is bright and disbelieving, and she reaches across to place her hand on mine. “That’s either really sweet or mildly obsessive.”
I throw her a crooked smile. “Let’s go with sweet.”
She takes her hand from mine, picking up her glass again for another nonexistent sip, looking up at me coyly with the straw still in her mouth; the sultry look in her eye tells me that wasn’t her first tequila shot or her first pint of whatever.
All the playful smacks, the way she hugged me, that look in her eye… It’s spelling trouble.
“You ever miss it, Anton?” She says my name like it’s her favorite word, and my dick twitches. “The adrenaline?”
“Sometimes.” I take a pull of my beer. “Then I see what it does to people who don’t walk away from it.”
“You haven’t really walked away yet. Not for real,” she says. “You’re still protecting people.”
“I’m not in the thick of it like you are. Not anymore.”
She side-eyes me, knowing full well that my PI company, Shadow Justice, has had a few dangerous situations outside the cheating spouse cases. She leans ever closer, and now, I barely hear her whisper over the jukebox. “Somehow I think you’re a magnet for danger.”
I lean in even closer as if we’re sharing a secret. “Yeah? Is that a good or a bad thing?”
