paths. This Donata was a woman with a mission and Sean thought any guy would be damn lucky to have her on his side.
Except he didn’t want a professional partner. If she wanted to partner in other ways, however…
“Heard and understood. I appreciate the honesty when we—”
“You ready for some more?”
“What?” He blinked.
“Honesty.” Cool purpose gleamed in her eyes and Sean got a mental picture of her heading up a boardroom instead of a police investigation.
That mental picture lasted about three seconds before being replaced by one of Donata naked and in his bed, his fingers exploring the soft terrain beneath the hummingbird tattoo.
“Su-sure.” He loosened his collar before he remembered he wasn’t wearing a tie. Damned if a Mets batting jersey could strangle a man, but somehow, his managed to do exactly that.
“Focus on this case is important to me and I’m having a hard time finding it with you and me working on it.”
Of all the things he might have expected her to say, this would have been the farthest from his mind. She couldn’t honestly be…flirting with him?
“Are you coming on to me?” He’d gotten rusty at interpreting signals from women in the years since his wife had left him, so chances were good he’d read Donata wrong. But since he’d never had enough finesse to muddle through blindly when asking a direct question could clear up everything in an instant, he figured he had nothing to lose by confronting her.
“Just the opposite.” She fidgeted with the long blue ribbon dangling from the bow where her sweater was tied closed. “I’m asking for your help in keeping our interaction as impersonal as possible given our…unusual history.”
The way she said it made him wonder how much of those hours they’d spent together she remembered. When she had refused to call a lawyer and he had been hell-bent on interrogating her anyway. There had been anger, resentment and undeniable sparks.
“No one at that precinct gives a crap about the past. Cops are only interested in your present and future and what you’re bringing to the table that will help catch crooks.”
“Perhaps I’m less concerned with what my colleagues think than what I think.” She released the ribbon and the satin fabric swung like a delicate pendulum for a moment before coming to rest on the snap of her jeans.
The sight of that sleek fabric pointing the way south on Donata’s voluptuous body would have distracted him under the best of circumstances, but now when he was trying to navigate his way through her cryptic words…his brain seemed to short-circuit.
“I’m not getting it.” The scent of her—darkly sexy and warmed by the heat of her skin—drugged any remaining sense right out of him. “You’re going to have to spell it out for me, Donata, because I’m not following you.”
“Then let me make it clear as crystal.” She swept aside the hem of her loose sweater to cock a hand on one denim-clad hip. “I’m not even sure I like you, Beringer, but there’s something undeniably sexual in the air when we’re in the same room and I want to avoid that at all costs.”
Okay, this he could understand. Something sexual? Yes ma’am. This was finally making sense.
“You don’t mean sexual in the negative sense, right?” He just needed to get this one last point straight because no way, no how, would any woman accuse him of something like harassment again.
Thinking hot thoughts wasn’t a crime. Just so long as he didn’t act on anything without two thumbs up from the woman in question.
“No. I mean sexual in the distracting sense and I’ll tell you right now I’m not going down that path with any man who knew me back in my questionable youth.”
Her eyes were so cool and remote that he couldn’t reconcile her overtly sexy exterior with the uptight words.
“I met you four short years ago. Hardly during your childhood.” Reason clamored through the haze of lust in his brain, urging caution.
“But you saw me in the setting of the criminal underworld.”
“You were working undercover.”
“As an informant, not a paid detective. Big difference in respectability, don’t you think?”
A knock sounded at her door before he could pick apart how ludicrous it was for her to write him off because they met under inauspicious circumstances. But then, he was too rocked by her admission that he distracted her to process anything else with much speed.
“Yes?” Donata answered the door after peering through the peephole.
A middle-aged woman wearing a long caftan waited on the threshold, a mug of something steamy in one hand and a FedEx package in the other.
“Sorry to interrupt.” The woman peered over Donata’s shoulder to take a visual inventory of Sean and for a moment she seemed to forget what she was saying.
Obviously, his charm still worked. Just not on the right woman.
“That’s okay, Charlene. Did you need anything?” Donata’s clipped tones were completely at odds with the sweet words she used to employ around her old boyfriend.
“Oh. Um, yes.” The woman thrust a box through Donata’s doorway. “One of your deliveries came to my door by mistake.”
Thanking her, Donata took the package and closed the door even though the woman clearly had been angling for an invitation inside.
“Do you do this to every woman you meet?” Donata hissed out a breath between her teeth, somehow finding him at fault for her neighbor’s nosiness.
“I’m sure she just wanted to know who you were hanging out with these days.” Although, judging by Donata’s quick squashing of any attraction between them, maybe there wouldn’t be any hanging out involved.
“Yeah, tell me another one.” She squinted at the box and frowned. “The shipping label doesn’t look right.”
He looked over her shoulder but didn’t see anything unusual.
“There’s no bar code. No return address.” She spoke softly to herself as she reached for the pull-tab to open the package while Sean sought a way to get their conversation back on track.
He needed to leverage information from her on this case, convince her to let him proceed applying pressure in non-traditional venues because he couldn’t allow the scumbags who’d hurt his sister to walk away.
“Oh God.”
Donata dropped the manila envelope she’d pulled from the FedEx box.
“What?” Instantly on alert, Sean shifted his attention to her. He bent to retrieve the padded envelope and noticed her hands shook as he set it on her coffee table.
He wasn’t rude enough to look inside the package, but he was curious enough to note the corner of one document stuck out
