He took his sunglasses off and hung them from his shirt pocket. The distracting grin made an encore appearance, but his eyes remained serious. “You don’t have a deceptive bone in that first-class body of yours. You say what you think, but even when you hold your tongue, your feelings show. Your cheeks turn the prettiest shade of pink when you’re sparked up. Those big, hazel eyes go to green. And your mouth? Your lips do that thing they’re doing right now. I bet you think pressing them together like that says ‘Don’t fuck with me,’ but I’ll tell you a little secret, choux.” He leaned so close she felt his breath on her ear. Tiny hairs along her neck stood at attention. “It makes me want to fuck with you. Badly.”
He backed off so abruptly she nearly jolted. “I’d play poker against you any day, but no, you wouldn’t have been my first choice of partner to go into a situation where success hinges on our ability to deceive people.” The corner of his mouth tipped up another notch—a red flag for her temper. “Lucky for you, I’ve come ’round to realizing I’m a skilled enough bullshit artist to cover for both of us.”
“What you are, Swain, is full of shit.” Wasn’t he? When the job required playing a role, she would play it convincingly. “Just because I didn’t pretend to like you during training doesn’t mean I can’t pretend to like you, cooyon. I can pretend just fine, when the need arises.”
His lips stretched into the full grin. The cocky-ass grin that worked her last nerve and a few too many of her hormones. Her temper slid out of her control like a nylon rope through a sweaty fist. With a little grrr of warning, she gripped the front of his shirt, yanked him toward her, lifted onto her toes, and sealed her lips to his.
He groaned—a short, reactive sound of shock she found insanely satisfying. Then he groaned again—longer and rawer. The sound vibrated over her lips and reverberated inside her, working down to a place perilously low in her stomach. Instinct overran temper and caution. She opened her mouth to the sensations, delved with her tongue to chase them. Her fingers sank into the short hair at the nape of his neck and held fast.
The move provoked a low growl from him. A big hand splayed across her back. A strong arm hauled her up against a solid expanse of chest. Though she braced for an onslaught, he drew her in with unnerving gentleness, his tongue seducing hers with luxurious strokes, his lips exerting mind-melting suction to coax her deeper. She held onto his biceps for balance and inched higher onto her toes as he slowly savored her tongue from base to tip. Warm breath mingled with hers when their mouths slid apart. She opened her eyes and stared into blue so intense it deepened to black at the perimeter of his irises.
From somewhere far away, she heard the sound of applause and catcalls. Their classmates and instructors, eyewitnesses to her little demonstration of deceptive abilities. Swain kept his arm locked around her, holding her close, his eyes searching her face. Suddenly afraid of what they might see, she brought her chin up. “I think I proved my point.”
He took his time releasing her. She let him because she refused to look anxious. “That was a damn good point, choux. Any time you want to prove it some more, I’m available.”
“You couldn’t handle it, Swain.” With that, she pivoted and walked across the lot toward—Jeezus, Eden—her parents. Oh, and her boss. Outwardly, she kept her strides even and her demeanor calm. But inside? Inside she knew the real lesson learned had been on her part. She still distrusted smug, self-satisfied Marcus Swain, but he was 100 percent correct about her acting ability. It wasn’t that good. The chemistry that exploded whenever her mouth met his was real. All too real.
“Ready?” she asked when she reached the rented Chrysler Pacifica where her parents waited to drive them to the restaurant Shaun and Ginny had recommended for their celebratory lunch.
Her father cocked one dark eyebrow at her from over the roof of the vehicle. “Sure you don’t want to invite your friend to join us?”
She stepped up into the open rear seating area of the Pacifica and pressed the button to slide the door shut.
“I’m sure.”
Chapter Four
“Not a bad first week’s work, noob.”
Swain tossed another armload of old roof shingles toward the dumpster below. As debris rained into the metal bin, he straightened and clapped dust off his work gloves. Dirty, sweaty, back-breaking work was what it w
as, but he offered his foreman, Junior Tillman, a laugh before lifting the brim of his battered Saints ball cap and letting the stingy breeze cool his brow. Junior, mildly sunburned across his short nose and wide cheeks, lifted his Century Construction cap in a similar attempt to catch the breeze. “Noob? I’ve been tearing off roofs and putting ’em on since I was fifteen.” His work experience would support that, if Tillman opted to check the references he’d furnished as part of his cover identity. Twenty-six-year-old Michael Swain had spent his summers working construction before joining the few and proud of the United States Marine Corps. Only the founder of Century Construction, Tyler Longfoot, was privy to his real identity and true purpose for joining their crew. As far as anyone else knew, he was distant kin to Longfoot, looking for a steady job closer to his fiancée’s family in Ohio.
“You’re new to us,” Junior replied and slapped him on the back with the affable vigor of someone who didn’t think twice about the fact that the recipient of his friendly abuse stood next to a twenty-foot drop. Thankfully, Junior topped out at five-ten, and, though built like a bull, he had neither the height nor intention to take the new guy down. Instead, he walked to the extension ladder and swiveled onto it with the innate grace of a man who performed such a move as regularly as he got in and out of bed. “Come on down, and I’ll write out your first paycheck. You got plans tonight with that girl you can’t stop talking about?”
Swain shoved his work gloves into the back pocket of his jeans and followed the other man down. “She’s my fiancée, Junior. Pretty sure I’d get my balls cut off if I talked about other girls.”
The foreman laughed as he led the way to the brown portable site office. “You got a point, there, I reckon. She made it in okay?”
He nodded and stepped to the side to give Junior room to get around to the business side of the small, cluttered desk angled into a corner of the narrow office. “Yep. She made it from her sister’s place in Cleveland just before noon and has already claimed the entire bedroom closet as her own.” All basically true. Due to administrative differences between their respective agencies around start dates and pay periods, he’d come on board a week before Eden. Consensus had been he should go ahead and get set up. Eden had driven in earlier today from her parents’ place in Virginia rather than the home of a nonexistent sister in Cleveland. According to the text she’d sent, she had claimed only half the closet, and he’d bet his first paycheck her half would be measured down to the millimeter and marked accordingly.
Their semi-furnished cottage dressed in weathered white paint in a decidedly blue-collar section of town boasted a small eat-in kitchen, one bedroom, one basic bath decked out in light green tile, a tiny upstairs room the landlord called a nursery and they’d be calling an office, and a front porch draped in morning glory, decently sized for drinking with a few friends. It fit the bill for their profile as a young, social, financially limited couple, and it wasn’t going to cost the departments much in the way of a shared expense, but ideal as it was, he wished he could have been there to see Eden’s face when she’d bounced up the rutted dirt driveway to their “love nest.” Something told him Ms. Eden Brixton, summa cum laude from Vanderbilt, hadn’t spent much time on the wrong side of the tracks. Unlike himself, who had ridden drastic highs and lows in living conditions throughout his formative years, tied mostly to Romy’s uneven success executing various scams and avoiding legal or other fallout therefrom.
Junior finished writing out the check and handed it across the desk. “I’m thinking you two will be busy tonight making up for lost time, but if you get an itch to spend some of that paycheck in a social way, head over to Rawley’s Pub. They have live music on Friday nights, and that draws a good crowd. A little drinkin’, a little dancin’. Me and my better half, Lou Ann, like to get down there and blow off steam after a long week.”
“Thanks.” First opening he’d had, so they’d definitely be taking it. He folded the check and gave it a quick kiss before he tucked it into the pocket of his jeans. “Might as well kiss it goodbye now, ’cause my girl likes to run through it just as fast as I can earn it.”
Junior laughed like a truck horn. “Boy, I feel that. Take it easy, Swain.”
“Yeah. Maybe we’ll see you at the pub. Later, boss.”
On his way to his truck, he texted Eden—like any man with the love of his life at home would do—and gave her his ETA. Although he wanted a shower and change of clothes the same way an orthodontist at a Vegas convention wanted a hooker, he factored in a stop at Boone’s Market to cash his check, then drop some of it on a six-pack and a bunch of flowers—like any fool hoping to get laid would do. In a town as small as Bluelick, curious eyes lurked everywhere, and optics mattered. But somewhere around the time his tires kicked up dust on the drive leading to their house, he admitted his anticipation to be home had little to do with a shower or clothes that didn’t reek of sweat and tar. He wanted to see Eden. In the ten days since she’d kissed him in the parking lot of the Baptist church after rescuing him from Romy and Romy’s latest mark, she’d taken up way too much of his headspace. Yes, part of his cover this week involved telling anyone who would listen all about his chouchoute—how her sexy laugh had grabbed him by the balls the first time he’d met her; how she hated the nickname, but he sometimes used it anyway because he liked the way temper brought out the green in her eyes; how she could shop circles around any woman he’d ever known. And other than the last part, of which he had no personal knowledge, the rest rang true. As was the fact that he’d missed her…well…fucking with her.
Careful, Swain.
Yeah. Yeah. Physical attraction, reluctant admiration—at least on his part—and gut-level disdain—at least on her part—added up to some powerful chemistry. The trick was to use it to their advantage during this assignment, then walk away with no literal or figurative scars when it ended.
Story of your life, cooyon. No need to worry ’bout a thing.