“So I heard.” The way Luke said it, or maybe it was the look he gave her as he said it, sent a thrill of anxious warning down her spine.
“What do you mean, you heard?”
“Good news travels. Also, our office manager? She’s friends with yours.”
Faith dropped her face into her hands.
“Did you really tell Janice Estes that if she wasn’t careful, she could be arrested for mishandling evidence and as an accessoryafter the fact? And that you’d gladly testify against her because the way she’d handled Thad Baker’s case constituted a gross miscarriage of justice?”
Her face still in her hands, she could only nod.
“And”—Luke was clearly enjoying this—“did you also tell an agent that if you had to get the ATF report directly from the ATF after you’d asked him for it three times, you would see to it that he spent the rest of his career in Alaska?”
She moaned.
Luke’s howl of laughter bounced around the room.
“It isn’t funny.” She whispered the words. This was worse than Dale calling her into his office. People were talking about her. Telling their spouses over dinner about the unstable agent who lost it today.
“Faith Malone, I could kiss you.”
That got her attention.
FAITH’S HEADPOPPED OUTof her hands like a jack-in-the-box.
And Luke was standing right in front of her. He hadn’t meant to say he could kiss her. Not that he didn’t want to kiss her. Or that he hadn’t thought about it. A few times. Maybe a few hundred times.
Her eyes were huge in her drawn face. Stress and something else, maybe embarrassment, surely it wasn’t fear, warred in them.
Perhaps the kiss remark had been inappropriate. She was a coworker, in a sense. A professional. A federal agent.
He leaned closer, but not too close.
“I would never kiss you if you didn’t want me to. I would never disrespect you that way. It just came out of my mouth.” He couldn’t bring himself to lie and say that he hadn’t meant it.
“I know.”
Did she sound disappointed? Maybe that was his imagination messing with him. He took a few steps back to give her plenty of space, and the sigh that escaped her lips was definitely one of regret.
The faintest pink tinged her cheeks. “My ... my outburst this morning . . . ” It was clear to Luke that Faith was trying to pull the conversation away from kissing and back to the case. “It was unprofessional.”
“It was brilliant.” Luke held out a fist, and she gave him the most half-hearted bump in the history of fist bumps. “Why are you upset?”
She shifted her position on the table, her legs swinging. “It’s hard enough to be a female in this world, Luke. I don’t need to add ‘maniacal’ or ‘hysterical’ or ‘prone to temper tantrums’ to my resume.”
He couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “All you added to your resume today was a subheading under your name that reads ‘Do Not Mess with Me,’ and that’s not a bad thing. I’ve been yelled at plenty of times for doing something stupid. Sometimes that’s the only way to get through to people. Let it go.”
She was smiling, but she was definitely not letting anything go. Her grip on the table proved it.
“Fine. What if I change the subject? I have news.” He couldn’t wait to tell her what he’d learned about Thad’s cousin.
“Okay.” Before Luke had a chance to speak, Faith’s phone rang.
“Hold that thought.” She glanced at the phone, her finger hovering over the screen for two more rings.
“Are you going to answer it?”
“I haven’t decided.” She took a long breath, squeezed her eyes closed, and tapped the screen. “Yes.”
