Page 22 of Love Me Darkly
He felt her lips part in a smile. “A conference call, dude? Really?”
Mateo winced. “I really did have a call.”
The words sounded pitiful, even to him. But what else could he say to her?
“I’ll accept that even though I know it’s bullshit.” There was no frustration in her voice, only amusement. “Anyway, I took that as a sign that you weren’t interested.”
“In what, exactly?”
“In me.”
Oh, he was interested in more ways than one. More ways than he cared to admit. Still, he had to come up with some reason for his odd behavior.
“I didn’t think you wanted some old guy hitting on you,” he replied, which wasn’t exactly a lie. Not knowing her age didn’t make him uncomfortable so much as it made him aware of his own mortality. She seemed so full of life and vitality, and he woke up most mornings feeling as if he’d been beaten in his sleep.
She reared back to look up at him and laugh. Her expression told him she found him ridiculous.
“Old?” she yelled over the music. “You can’t be older than forty!”
“Forty-two,” he corrected, pulling her back against him. That scent of hers was wrapping itself around him, overcoming the odors of sweat and liquor permeating the air.
“Not old,” she murmured. Her hands had found their way inside his blazer, and now skimmed his sides toward his lower back.
He tensed but didn’t pull away. “Older than you.”
“I’m a grown ass woman, Mateo.”
The way she was writhing against him left no question that she was every bit a woman. Her hips rolled and her hands tightened at his back, pressing him tighter against her. His every nerve ending lit on fire, the flames licking at him from the inside.
“On top of that,” he said, struggling for words, for coherent thoughts. “I’m not going to be in town for long. I don’t want to lead anybody on.”
“Yeah, about that. You never actually told me what kind of work brought you to New Orleans.”
“I can’t really say.”
“Ooh, mysterious. You really know how to keep a girl’s interest.”
He snorted a sarcastic laugh. “I promise, I’m not that exciting.”
“I think you could be exciting … if you wanted to be.”
“I don’t have time for excitement.”
“The job?”
“The job.”
“Well then, what can you tell me?” she snapped, finally seeming to grow frustrated with him. “You show up here, you watch me, you turn up in my neighborhood and flirt with me, you ditch me in the middle of a coffee date, you come back here and flirt with me some more, you watch me?—”
His hands tightened at her waist, choking her words off on a gasp. He jerked his head back until they were eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose.
“Yeah, I watched you. I couldn’t take my fucking eyes off you.”
The words were spilling out before he could weigh them and calculate the advantages and disadvantages of letting them fall off his tongue. He wavered on the line between telling her the truth and keeping her in the dark for the sake of his investigation. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her, demand she tell him how she was involved with Suede, Wilson, and Morrison. Whether she even knew what that smoking purple drink was named after. Whether she had ever watched anyone butcher a prostitute’s womb before draining her of all her blood.
“You’re stunning,” he rasped. “But that’s not why I can’t stop watching you. I can’t stop watching you because you’re clearly in over your head.”
She flinched as if he’d doused her with cold water. “What do you mean?”
