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grin.
    “You’re—”
    “Persistent, yes I know. It’s one of my few good points.” Angling away, he faced out onto the street and lifted a hand to hail an oncoming cab, the on-duty light fortuitously shining. The driver skidded toward them, rolling up to the curb.
    Cole turned back to the blonde. Nibbling her bottom lip, she still seemed undecided. The last time he’d been so completely enthralled, his obsession had been his first C4 explosive. The high he’d gotten from dismantling it had been unlike anything he’d felt before or since. For a flicker of an instant, it occurred to him to wonder why continuing their . . . encounter had become so goddamned important. Challenge, he reminded himself, the fleeting yet heady thrill of victory, a distraction from another otherwise endless-seeming night, nothing more.
    He reached out and opened the bright yellow door. “So what’s it going to be?” Heart drumming, he waited, knowing that despite everything she might well walk away.
    She hesitated and then took a step toward him. “I hate bananas, and my name is Sarah.” Brushing against him, she ducked and climbed inside.

    Cole, her rescuer, surveyed her metal ice cream dish with definite disapproval. “Single scoop, plain vanilla, huh? I wouldn’t have figured you for a vanilla girl.”
    The gleam in his eye told her the double entendre was entirely intended. Determined to give as good as she got, Sarah smiled back. “Every flavor has its charm. Sometimes plain vanilla is exactly what I’m in the mood for.”
    He cocked his head to the side, his deep blue eyes fixing on hers. “And other times?”
    “I like all the flavors.” Deliberately, she ran her tongue along her lower lip, savoring the last trace of sticky sweetness. It was what Martin liked to call her “money shot,” and it always worked, only this time there were no cameras honing in for a close-up—only one pair of ocean-blue eyes.
    He swallowed hard, the corded muscles of his throat working. The table hid their lower bodies, but she’d bet her AVN trophy he was hard. “All, huh?”
    “Pretty much, yes.”
    “Me too.”
    His comment snapped her back to sanity. God, she was flirting! It had been so long, she’d almost forgotten what it felt like. For the past decade, sex had been her job, a very public, very commercial act performed before a director, production crew, and rolling cameras. Private courtship rituals, the subtle interplay of sensual advance and retreat, seemed a relic from a kinder, gentler, bygone time—or maybe not so bygone after all.
    Pull it together, Halliday. This isn’t courtship. It’s breakfast—bad for you breakfast—with a semi-drunk dude .
    Drunk, semi-drunk, or stone-cold sober, Cole was altogether too sexy to dismiss as anything other than one hundred percent primal male. Tall, broad-shouldered, and built, dark-haired and blue-eyed, he was hot enough to be a porn star, better looking than many of the name actors with whom she’d worked. Other than offering his hand in exiting the taxi, he hadn’t made a move to touch her and yet she felt every stroke of his gaze like a physical caress. Sitting across from him at the Formica-top table, the neon lights overhead searing in their brightness, she was intensely aware of her nipples hardening and her sex moistening. Watching him butter another piece of dry, white-bread toast, the tops of his big, broad-backed hands dusted with black hair, she couldn’t stop thinking how those hands might feel palming her breasts and playing in her panties. The fantasy landed a delicious staccato beating between her thighs.
    And then he had to go and ruin it all by asking, “Have we met before?”
    Fuck! She shook her head. “No, at least I don’t think so.”
    She added the qualifier to throw him off. She couldn’t yet put her finger on it, but he had . . . not a cop vibe but something similar, maybe some other area of law enforcement, for all that he wore a designer tuxedo and