Page 40 of Fastest Kill

Frederica wanted a shower. She wanted silence. She wanted, annoyingly, to feel Dario's hands again, big and hot and braced at her waist, while she kissed him like she had something to prove.

Her keycard nearly snapped in half between her fingers as she shoved it into the slot. The light turned green, and she shouldered the door open hard enough to make it bang against the stopper.

The door closed behind them with a soft, final click, and it was just the two of them and her pulse drumming in her ears. This had to stop. She had to pick a fight and get him mad so she wouldn't go near him. Her hands balled into fists, hating herself before she even started.

Dario tossed his jacket onto the small sofa, and his tie after it.

"Well," he said. "That was⁠—"

"You could have been shot."

It came out sharper than she meant, the words knifing across the small space between them. He blinked once, then leaned against the back of the sofa with his arms folded, eyebrows arched.

"But I wasn't," he said mildly.

Frederica slammed the security chain across more loudly than necessary. Her hands needed something to do that wasn't aiming for his throat. Or his belt. Not necessarily in that order.

She turned on him. "I said a distraction, not flipping tables and screaming. You drew every gun in the room."

He shrugged. "And every eye."

"That's the problem." The volume of her voice climbed, adrenaline refusing to let go now that the job was over. "You painted a target on your chest, Colleoni. They could have dragged you into the police station, where I would have had to come and break you out."

His expression didn't flicker. "It worked, didn't it?"

"That isn't the point."

"The point," he said, pushing off the sofa slowly, "is that in the time it took me to be loudly and charmingly unbearable, you got that pretty little box out of the place you had been cornered into, didn't you? I saved your ass, just like in Crete. You're welcome, Spartana."

She wanted to hit him. She wanted to kiss him again. She wanted to wipe that lazy certainty off his face and also press him back against the wall and see exactly how lazy he was when she had her hand between his legs.

"It was unnecessary," she snapped instead. "I had it under control."

"Ah, sì, of course." His mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Frederica Alesci, who is never surprised, never cornered. Who definitely didn't need a diversion when the head of security suddenly showed interest in why one of the waitresses looked like she could snap him in half and decided to go find her. Just be a big girl and admit I saved your ass."

She had the graceless realization that he had seen more with the guard than she thought. He had been across the hall, playing drunk idiot, and somehow still knew why the guard's plan had deviated. He always saw too much.

"My ass," she said, every word flint, "is none of your business."

He took another step towards her, and the air pressure in the room changed. She could feel him, his body heat, before he was even within arm's reach.

For a split second, she thought that was it. He would back off, deflect with a joke, go shower, and leave her be. This stupid fight over nothing would be over, and she could go be embarrassed in her room.

Dario's eyes dropped, very briefly, to her curves under the too-tight dress, and when they came back to her face, his mouth moved faster than his judgment.

"Trust me, Spartana, saving your ass doesn't even make the top ten things I want to do to it."

Silence. He seemed to realize what he'd said about half a second after she did. His eyes widened minutely. The words hung in the air between them like a live wire.

Frederica's pulse went somewhere high and reckless. "Is that so?"

The left corner of Dario's mouth twitched, slow and wolfish, like he had decided there was no point pretending he didn't know what the stupid fight was really about.

"Pretty sure," he said.

Her breath felt too big for her lungs. She didn't fuck colleagues on active operations. She didn't let herself get driven by adrenaline into bad decisions with men who smiled like sins and kissed like...like he did.

Frederica could list all the reasons it was a bad idea. She just couldn't remember any of them while looking at him.