Butterface (The Hartigans #1)(3)
Then, almost as soon as it began, he lifted his head and stepped back, breaking the connection.
Dazed, she released his tuxedo jacket and looked around, catching sight of herself on the giant screen. Her face was flushed and her eyes hazy. She pressed her fingers to her still-tingling lips. She looked like a woman who’d been kissed senseless, which made sense because that was exactly what had just happened.
Thankfully, the videographer—whom she would not be subcontracting out to again—moved on to another couple.
Just when she thought the whole situation couldn’t get any more awkward, she and Ford were left staring at each other after the crowd’s attention turned to the next couple being projected onto the screen. Ford’s tux lapels were wrinkled, which just made the fact that his bowtie hung undone from around his open collar hotter, as if he’d just had a quickie in a linen closet. He’d probably done that at some point in his life. Gina had read about it. Did that count?
Nope. Not at all.
Ford cleared his throat. She tried to smile, but her mouth was so dry her lips sort of stuck to her teeth. Oh God, this wasn’t completely uncomfortable at all.
She should say something, preferably something smart and witty, like…her brain went totally blank. She had nothing. Who were these women who always said the right thing at the right time, and how could she learn their ways? Maybe there was an online class for the socially inept?
Ford rubbed his hand across the back of his neck. “Sorry about that.”
“What?” Oh, brilliant, Regina. You should be teaching a snappy banter class.
He shook his head. “I should have known something was up when Ruggiero and Gallo slipped the video guy money and then hightailed it out of here.”
“Well, it’s over with now,” she said, pulling herself mentally together. “Thank God.”
“Can I buy you a drink to make up for it?”
And there went all the work she’d done to get her brain back online. A drink? With her? This hot guy and her? In a heartbeat, her brain waves were all static and nothingness. Of course, that’s the exact moment when words came out of her mouth anyway: “It’s an open bar.”
His half-smile faltered.
Shit. He’d probably been trying to not be an asshole about the whole thing, and she’d given his peace offering the middle finger. Smooth move, Regina.
She took a quick step back, desperate for escape before she made a bigger idiot of herself. “I’ve gotta go finish up some things.”
His gaze dropped to her lips as he started to tap his finger and thumb together again. “Maybe another time.”
Like that was gonna happen. Women who looked like her didn’t end up with hot guys like him—especially not when the him in question was a cop and her family had ties to the we-never-met-a-law-we-didn’t-want-to-break Esposito family. Her overprotective brothers would lose their shit if she even hinted at dating a cop. Yeah, Ford Hartigan was straight up only jilling off material.
“Doubtful,” she said, turning and not running but walking away from the scene of her latest humiliation as fast as her kitten heels could take her.
…
What in the hell were you thinking to slip her the tongue, Hartigan? Have you totally lost it?
Finally escaping the never-ending wedding reception and still wondering just how bad his kiss must have been for the wedding planner to have blown him off without a second thought, Ford walked through the hotel lobby, searching for the chuckleheads who’d made the whole Kiss Cam thing happen.
Shocking absolutely no one, he spotted detectives Johnnie Gallo and Tony Ruggiero at the hotel’s bar, sipping amaretto sours through cocktail straws like sorority girls at happy hour.
Like the jackasses they were, Gallo and Ruggiero raised their glasses in salute as he approached.
“Feeling all hot and bothered there, Hartigan?” Ruggiero asked, his shit-eating grin as wide as his ass, which had seen four thousand too many doughnuts. “Or did you come for some bleach Chapstick to sterilize your lips?”
He and Gallo bent over on their barstools and slapped the shiny bar as they laughed. And this was the brain trust that ran point on the Esposito case for the organized crime task force. Or as he liked to think of it: bear claws versus cannolis.
“She’s not bad-looking,” Ford said, hoping like hell this conversation would end with that.
And she wasn’t. She wouldn’t be winning any beauty contests, but neither would most folks. Plus, Hartigan was trained to never trust only what he saw. The truth of a person was rarely on the surface. And that kiss… It’d been a while since someone had surprised Ford.
She’d seemed all-business, in her just-perfect dress and shoes. But damn, the heat under the surface still rattled his senses.
“The wedding planner chick?” Gallo sputtered. “Did you see the size of that nose and the general ugh of that face? Do we need to let the captain know it’s time to pull you in for a physical so you can get your eyes checked?”
Ford cut a deadly glare at the detectives who, technically, were his bosses. “Shut up, Gallo.”
The comments pissed him off. Of all the people in the world, they should be the last ones to fall for the whole hot-equals-good bullshit. They were cops, after all. They spent every day neck-deep in cases of people who might be beautiful on the outside but were a fucking radioactive cesspool on the inside. Yet these two morons still only saw the surface, which probably explained why the organized crime task force was circling the drain.