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guys are working with the people in the cave, it’s going to get around that some dude in a superexpensive fairy-repelling iron suit only the FBI can afford questioned them. You may get information, but whoever killed Steven will also know that someone’s on his trail. Right now, I think it’s safer for everyone involved if you’re not seen at the docks.”
    “I’m not planning on being seen. Not unless I have to be.”
    “Then let’s make sure you don’t have to be. Let me go home and—”
    “But you look fine.”
    “Fine?”
    “Yeah. Fine,” he snaps, suddenly very interested in the brick wall behind me.
    “Fine as in, I’m not going to make anyone run screaming? Or fine as in, able to seduce informationfrom men who have no doubt been instructed not to talk?”
    He finally makes eye contact, but I wish he hadn’t. “Fine as in, you’re a good-looking woman in skintight jeans and no bra who looks like you just rolled out of bed after being fucked. Repeatedly.”
    Woah . That wasn’t what I was expecting. At. All.
    I don’t know how to handle that tone, that tone that says he’s noticed that I’m not wearing a bra and still thinks I’m good-looking and wonders who’s been making me look just-been-fuckedish.
    My mouth opens, but I don’t know what to say. All I know is that the way he said the F word makes me want to do it. Right now. On the ground by the stinky Dumpster. Screw Cane and Stephanie and anyone who walks out the door. Any sacrifice or embarrassment would be worth feeling Hitch’s skin against mine. Just one more time.
    “So believe me.” He’s looking at the wall again. I’m glad. “You’ll be fine.”
    “Okay.” I clear my throat and make a serious face and pretend I’m not thinking about my hands on his skin or his hands on my ass or how good it would be to be wrapped up in Hitch so tight he could never let me go again.
    You’re the one who let go. You’re the one who let him assume the worst and walked away.
    Whatever. Even if I’d told him the truth, he wouldn’t have believed me. His face when he walked in our house that morning said it all. He was positive I’d willingly banged his brother’s brains out. He’dheard Anton’s version of events; he wasn’t interested in hearing mine. Or what I remembered of them, anyway.
    That night with his brother is still a blur. A horrible blur, that ends with me waking up bleeding and hurting and so ashamed I can’t stop being sick. Maybe it was the Jack Daniel’s I drank the night before that made me toss cookies for an hour. Maybe it was something Anton slipped into my drink to make sure I was “the dirtiest lay he’d ever had” that turned my stomach inside out.
    I’m guessing the second option, but it’s only a guess. And a guess about something that happened six years ago means nothing in the here and now.
    No matter how he looks at me or what I feel, there’s no future for me and Hitch. We can’t even be friends. It’s impossible to be friends with a man who makes you want to bang him in front of a Dumpster with a few husky words.
    “Are you sure Stephanie’s okay with you doing this?” I ask, driving the truth home with a sledgehammer.
    “I don’t want to talk about Stephanie.”
    I ignore the warning in his tone. “Why? Because she hates that you’re risking your life while she’s back in New Orleans knocked up and waiting to see if the father of her child is coming home? How do you think that makes her feel?”
    His lips curl and I see the increasingly familiar disgust for me lurking beneath his smile. “And you care because . . . ?”
    “Why wouldn’t I care? About your wife and baby?”
    “My fiancée,” he corrects before he realizes what he’s doing, that he’s emphasizing that his future with Stephanie isn’t set in stone.
    When he does, I watch the knowledge that he’s slipped flicker across his face, followed closely by fear. Fear that I’ve noticed he has a problem calling Stephanie