should I?” He peered at her, making her squirm. “It suits you.”
Counting to ten, she stopped at four. “I doubt you mean that as a compliment.”
“What do you think?”
“That if you consider me mere window dressing, you shouldn’t have a problem sharing what you know about the potion.”
He took off his glasses and polished them with the end of the tie he’d liberated from his shirtfront. His forehead had creased. Without the glasses, he seemed more vulnerable and rather boyishly awkward in his confusion over how to deal with her. She realized that his huffiness was a defense mechanism. And that he had thick lashes, a well-shaped mouth and might be rather sexy if he’d stop acting like a prude.
“I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.” He glanced at her with softened eyes, his brows turning up in the middle. “I’m sure you give pleasure to many people. Your columns, I mean.” His gaze dropped to her body, then bounced back up as he turned a dull shade of red. “It’s just that you have this way of, um—” He put on the glasses and ran his fingers through a short crop of brown hair as he looked away. “You get under my skin.”
“Because I’m so loud and outlandish?”
“You are, but no.”
This time when he looked at her, she saw the naked desire he’d suppressed. A sexual hunger seethed in him so viscerally that she felt it melting into her, too.
But he wasn’t her type! He was quiet and conventional and brainy and dull—
A hot spike of inexplicable emotion went straight through her. “Don’t look at me that way,” she blurted, confused by her reaction. The idea of having sex with Shane should have been laughable instead of disconcerting. “I’m not who you think I am.”
“That sounds like a warning.” He scowled. “So when you said I was the only man who could help you with the lust potion…?”
“Oh!” She blinked a couple of times, trying to resist studying his face as if she’d never seen him before. There’d always been a sort of unpolished manliness about him. A well-hidden potential. Even so, she’d never considered him in that way, at least not seriously.
This time she couldn’t help herself. She looked. And the heat in his dark eyes flowed through her. She could feel her cheeks coloring to match his. “You thought I wanted…”
He thought I was offering to participate in a very intimate lab experiment.
Zoe couldn’t decide whether to be amused or aroused. Objectively, with his lean, rangy body and a face that was all nose and high cheekbones, Donovan Shane was not unappealing. Under the right circumstances, he could melt her like butter. But he was always so stiff around her, verging on antagonistic. Even if that was only a defense, a front to hide his insecurities—and, boy, she knew all about those—there was still no reason for her to be flustered by his hoping she’d give him a jump.
Of course, she’d suspected all along that secretly he thought she was sexy. The signals were obvious no matter how hard he tried to conceal them. She’d simply assumed that he’d go on fighting the attraction to a woman who was obviously not his type.
Apparently he was willing to lose the battle.
To test a lust potion he didn’t believe in?
Which meant his motivation was her.
Zoe was uncomfortable. While she was willing to charm her way in and out of sticky situations, she didn’t want to be responsible for Shane’s interests that way.
And yet…
And yet the way he was watching her made her nerves jangle. She felt like a top that had been spinning tightly in its place and was now wobbling out of control as it slowed.
She set her fists on top of the table. Giving over control wasn’t her strong suit. What she couldn’t manage, she avoided, starting with the day she’d run away from her duties as the last of the Aberdeens.
“I’m looking into the validity of the lust potion,” she said, her voice thick in her throat as she restated her objective to skim by the past few moments of sheer lunacy that might be a mutual attraction, even a potent one. “And I would very much appreciate it if you’d do me this one tiny, little favor and share the results of your tests.”
Shane opened his mouth, but she overrode him. “I know you have the sample. My friend Ethan Ramsey, the newspaper’s crime reporter, was the one who turned the potion over to Detective Arroyo when we first became suspicious.”
“I can’t—”
“But it was mine.” She skipped past the detail that Jag had planted the vial in her purse. “I did the responsible thing by seeing that the potion went to the authorities. Don’t I deserve special consideration?” She brought the tips of two fingers together. “Just a little?”
Shane remained unmoved. “You should have retained a sample. Then you could have taken it to a commercial lab for your own analysis.”
“We didn’t think of that.” She shrugged. “At the time, my friends and I didn’t seriously believe that the potion might be real.”
“You said you had suspicions.”
“That was only because of the officers that swarmed the shop as we were leaving. I guess there had been complaints about the product being a rip-off, so they were checking out the story.” She ground her teeth. She had to persuade him to help her out. “There have been actual symptoms since then, symptoms we can’t explain.”
“Symptoms of lust.” Shane crossed his arms. “Uh-huh. I’ll bet those are hard to come by in your world.”
“I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” If she counted Kathryn and Coyote as evidence.
Shane’s jaw, already firm, clenched even more. “But you haven’t experienced the effect yourself?”
“No.”
He waved a dismissal. “Then it’s all hearsay. That doesn’t cut it for me. Or a court of law.”
“No one’s being prosecuted.” Yet, she added silently, thinking of the cruiser arriving at Jag’s shop. She made a mental note to interview Detective Arroyo about the progress of the investigation.
“Doesn’t matter,” Shane said. “The lust potion is still in police custody. There may be charges pending.”
“The case can’t be very important if you haven’t analyzed the potion yet.”
“Who says I haven’t?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Me.” She glanced around the organized yet crowded room. The tables, desks and shelves were jammed with scientific accoutrements, including computers, microscopes, scales, a centrifuge and several impressive machines that were far more advanced than her knowledge. A large industrial waste can was labeled with a biohazard sign. She was most interested in the racks of beakers and test tubes that sat near a humming industrial steel freezer. “Where is the potion? On ice? Can I see
