Before he had a chance to take another swig from her bottle, Kari laid claim to it, her lips lightly touching the rim as she tilted it back.
“Good,” she pronounced once she’d swallowed. “Ken has fake hair,” she reminded him matter-of-factly, as if she was talking about an actual living, breathing being instead of an iconic doll. “I never really liked Barbie’s boyfriend.” She held the bottle out to him again. “Don’t worry. I won’t get in your way.”
“Especially if you’re not there,” Esteban agreed flatly.
Kari shook her head. What the hell had the Chief gotten her into? “You are a hard devil to get close to,” she commented.
Now she was finally getting it, he thought. It was about damn time. “Not hard,” Esteban corrected. “Impossible’and I like it that way.”
She laid it out for him, although she was certain that he’d already figured this out on his own. What did he hope to gain by playing this little charade out? Did he think this was going to “put her in her place”? Establish their hierarchy in relation to one another?
“Well, it’s either partner with me or hit the road, and I think you’ve invested too much time into the job to just walk away. At the very least, you’d have to start all over again somewhere else.”
He paused his ongoing communion with the bottle she’d brought. His own’the one he’d opened tonight’was now empty and he wasn’t finished drinking. He was still standing. “I really don’t care what you think, Ms. Cavanaugh.”
“It’s Detective Cavelli-Cavanaugh,” she corrected him, deliberately slurring just a bit for his benefit.
Her apparent inebriation was, for the most part, staged. The drinks she’d been taking from the bottle, now that they had both forgone the niceties of actual glasses, were deliberately exaggerated in appearance. In reality, it all amounted to very little alcohol going down. Kari had no intention of getting drunk’and it wasn’t because she was worried about the regretful events that might consequently follow once she reached that state. Rather, it was because she just knew that if she couldn’t appear to hold her liquor, he would have even less respect for her than he did now.
And the point of this entire confrontation was to get Esteban to have a decent amount of respect for her, not less.
“Hell of a mouthful,” he muttered, referring to her hyphenated last name.
Kari smiled at him, the kind of smile that hinted at secrets being held back. “Yes,” she told him, “Actually, I am.”
“Think a lot of yourself, Cavelli-Cavanaugh, don’t you?” he asked, mocking the extralong name.
“Not a lot,” she assured him, then added, “just my due. And you can pick one of my last names to use. Just be consistent.”
He stared at her in stunned silence for a moment. And this time, when the laughter came, it was heartier and not quite so full of animosity. He’d already had more than his fair number of shots before this beautiful, ornery woman had descended on him bearing a liquid peace offering. He’d lost count by now just how much he’d consumed.
The upshot of it all was that, while he wasn’t feeling any more receptive to her now than before, the hostility that he did have’not so much against her as against the fact that he was being barred from continuing the work that had been his sole reason for living these past few years’was morphing into something else.
Something equally as strong and, from his somewhat detached point of view, equally as useless.
Something that, he was fairly certain, had he not been on his way to total intoxication, he would have been unaware of.
Namely that he felt attracted to this annoyance with the sexy legs. Not mildly or conveniently attracted, but teeth-jarringly, mindlessly, intensely attracted.
For the past three years, he had conducted his one-man crusade to bring down the men behind his half brother’s drug overdose’and his stepfather’s subsequent prison sentence’to the exclusion of everything else. This exclusion included not tending to any of his other needs beyond occasionally eating and sleeping...and he only paid nominal attention to those two things so he’d have enough stamina to continue working. Everything else’searching for creature comforts, entertaining desires of the flesh or even, moderately, of the soul’had been so completely neglected that they were just shut out as if they didn’t exist.
But they did.
And now, for some unknown reason that utterly confounded him, he felt a flare of desire in this woman’s presence. A flare of desire that didn’t just evaporate the way he’d fully expected it to, but went on to spread like a wildfire through his veins.
To spread and feed on itself, and before he knew it, this raging desire threatened to take possession of him entirely.
Esteban was staring at her as if he hadn’t seen her before, she thought, as she tried to understand what was happening. Was that the alcohol at work, or was he just trying to intimidate her into leaving?
It’s not that simple, partner. You can’t get rid of me that easily.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he barked at her.
“You already said that. Have we run out of conversation so soon, throwing us into some kind of verbal reruns?” she asked wryly.
He had no idea what the hell she was talking about. He just wanted her out of here. Now.
“No, you really shouldn’t be here,” he told her. But even as he said it, he drew closer, like an imminent danger from which there was no escape.
He was so close now that when he uttered his warning, she could literally feel his words on her skin, words that were wrapped up in his warm breath.
The lethal combination made her heart quicken. Had she been completely sober, and not slightly tipsy as she was right now, a red flag would have shot up for her instantly.
As it was, the flag did go up, but it went up in what felt like slow motion’and once it was up, it seemed to wave in a rather happy, lackadaisical manner.
Truth be told, she was far more fixated on the sensations erupting between them in the wake of this moment of unexpected physical closeness. “And why shouldn’t I be here?” she asked him, raising her chin a bit to defiantly punctuate her question.
Or maybe, she silently reconsidered, she wasn’t being defiant. Perhaps she was merely flirting with him.
Or at least the bourbon was, she amended.
Esteban realized in frustration that the words needed to explain why it was imperative that she go now seemed to have escaped him. But then, he’d always been a man of action rather than words anyway.
Even back when his world had been incredibly sheltered in comparison to his life now, he was more prone to doing than talking.
So rather than search for words that wouldn’t come, and an explanation that refused to present itself, Esteban showed her why she needed to leave.
More roughly than he’d intended, he took hold of her cheek with one hand, keeping her in place as he brought down his mouth on hers.
This kiss was meant to scare her away.
Instead, what he actually managed to accomplish was to scare himself away’but not before he took the so-called “warning” he was issuing to its full conclusion, devouring her the way a starving man devoured his first meal in countless days. Except that for Esteban, it had been countless months, not days. Countless months that had stumbled their way into years without his complete recollection of that empty journey.
Pleasures of the flesh hadn’t been important to him at the time.
Now, though, something seemed to be stirring within him....
This