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Huh.
“Come on. You won’t even talk to me, and you’re always staring like you’re trying to classify my faults. You obviously disapprove of me. Maybe you think I’m flighty, or I talk too much? Or I only got this job because I’m Caleb’s sister? Maybe I’m not smart enough to be your partner, and I should go back to the office where I belong?”
He shook his head slowly, holding her gaze with those blue eyes of his. Eyes the color of the night sky in Alaska, dark and fathomless. Just looking into them sent her back there, reminding her of what it had been like to give everything she had and still come up short.
“Well, you don’t like me.” That much she knew for certain. She’d known it since the first day he came into the office, when he’d had to wait ten minutes for his appointment with Caleb. She’d greeted him pleasantly, and he’d responded by backing away from her like a vampire threatened with a crucifix.
His quizzical expression briefly made him look like his old self again. Then he nodded.
“See? I just need to figure out why.”
This time, the shake of his head was so exaggerated, she could feel the exasperation coming off him in waves.
“What?”
Sean sighed, making her feel about six years old. He clicked a few times, typed something fast, and turned the laptop so she could see it from where she stood a few feet from the bed.
I like you fine, Katie.
Now he was just messing with her. Wasn’t he? Or being polite?
Only Sean wasn’t the type to be polite for the sake of convention. He’d proved that to her time and time again.
“Then why won’t you talk to me?” The question came out small and weak, and she cursed herself for caring. Her best self wouldn’t care. Parisian Katie would tell this distant, disapproving stranger to go to hell.
Sean frowned again, only this time his expression was less shuttered than she’d ever seen it. Vulnerable. When his lips parted on an inhale, hope rose in her. She took a step toward him. He would tell her what the problem was, and they would fix it together. Everything would be fine.
In fact, for one strange, confusing moment, she thought everything might be better than fine. That she and Sean could be—
She didn’t know what. Something.
She sat down on the bed again, facing him this time, and watched his pupils dart from her eyes to her mouth and down her body, then back up. Cataloging her. Looking for reassurance? Trust?
She reached out and put her hand on his knee, trying to give him whatever it was that he needed, but the touch was wrong. Not reassuring, because her palm landed a few inches too high, and his thigh was really hard. And hot from the laptop. Hot from his body. Hot.
Sean’s nostrils flared, and then before she could even get used to that or think about what it meant, he flipped his computer shut and dropped it to one side and leaned toward her, covering her hand with his own. His eyes locked with hers, and her heart gave a painful kick as she recognized on some level deeper than reason that she’d had him wrong from the get-go.
He didn’t hate her at all.
“What?” she asked him. “What did I do?”
She didn’t mean regarding the case. She wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, except maybe that she couldn’t have ignited that look in his eyes with one hand on his knee. It was impossible. As though she’d wandered into opposite land.
He loomed over her. He was a looming sort of man, taller than her, bigger in every dimension. She could smell him, warm skin and dark beer, and when she breathed in that smell it went places in her body she’d never invited it.
Secret, smoky, yearning places.
Sean leaned closer, until his mouth was close to her ear and his own palm was braced on the bed right beside her hip, so his forearm pressed against her side almost all the way to her waist.
So much contact, when before today there’d been a black hole between them.
“Nothing,” he whispered.
The way he said the word—as if it were in a foreign language, or he were reading it off a card. Delivering it to her. She shuddered.
She didn’t know whether it was the sound of his voice or something else. The way his lips almost brushed the side of her face when he spoke. The sound of him breathing right beside her, shallow and fast. The poised tension in his broad torso.
Maybe it was his weight pushing down on the mattress, his hand covering her fingers, which had at some point started digging into his hard-muscled thigh without her permission.
