Butterface

“Hartigan?” Rocco practically spit out.

Oh. Shit. “You know each other?”

The men ignored her while the women just watched with wide, unblinking eyes.

“Is this what your little task force has sunk to?” Paul asked, taking a step closer to where she stood in front of Ford. “Pillow talk with our sister?”

Crap on a gluten-free cracker. Ford worked on a task force. And her brothers knew him. That meant only one thing. He worked organized crime, and that meant he was all up in her brothers’ business. Judging by the way Rocco’s hands were fisted at his sides and Paul’s not-very-subtle move toward the inside of his suit jacket, things were about to escalate quickly. That she would not have.

Her brothers might be idiots sometimes, but they were her brothers, and she wasn’t going to have them going to jail for assaulting an officer just because she’d been dumb enough to believe that Ford had actually wanted to sleep with her.

“Stop all of this now,” she said, standing as tall as she could. No one paid attention. “He’s not after information about you,” she tried again, her voice rising as panic made her nerves jangly. Desperate to stop this before she couldn’t, she blurted out, “He’s my boyfriend.”

“What?” Rocco bellowed.

Ford stiffened behind her. She couldn’t risk a look back at him to let him know she wasn’t stupid enough to believe what she was saying. If she did, she’d blow everything. She could fix the lie. She couldn’t fix her brothers going to jail, and she’d promised their mom that she’d watch out for them.

“Yeah,” she said in a voice that shook even on that one-syllable word. “We’ve been seeing each other for months.”

“And you’ve known the whole time that he was a cop?” Paul asked, his hand still resting inside his jacket.

Ford made a growl of a sound, and she reached behind her back without looking and grabbed his hand, squeezing it tight enough that even a completely clueless person would know it was code for “shut the fuck up.”

“Ever since I met him.” Okay, not a lie. Not the whole truth, but not a lie.

“I don’t like it,” Paul said, but he moved his hand from being half hidden beneath his jacket to totally in view at his side. “Just imagine a cop at Grandma’s ninetieth birthday party next week.”

“You don’t have to imagine, because he’ll be there.” She could brazen this out. She could. Oh my God, let the earth swallow me up at any moment, please. “I’m a grown woman, and I don’t need your permission when it comes to who I date.”

Rocco’s vein pulsed near his temple. “I don’t approve.”

“I don’t care.” She shrugged, hoping like hell that it looked natural instead of like a jerky movement brought on more by nerves than actual confidence. “Look, I’ve watched out for you two for years since Mom and Dad moved to Florida. Now it’s my turn to have a little fun.”

What she didn’t say—and her brothers didn’t call her on, because despite all the posturing, they did love her—was that she wasn’t normally the kind of person who got to have that kind of fun.

She stared at her brothers, daring them to try to argue. Making the smart choice, for once, they kept their mouths shut.

“Just be careful,” Rocco said as he took his date’s hand and led her down the hallway.

Paul and his date followed suit, with the leggy blonde giving Gina a chipper wave goodbye as they did so. Once the foursome got far enough down the hallway that they hit the end and had to turn left, disappearing from view, Gina let out a sigh of relief. She would have sank back against the wall, but the one behind her wasn’t made of sheetrock, but muscle.

“We need to talk,” Ford said.

She turned and faced her make-believe, not-even-for-a-whole-night boyfriend and shook her head. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

Really, what could she say? Sorry I totally lied about you, but it’s because I didn’t want my idiot brothers sent up the river for punching a cop in the face because of their misguided sense of honor? Yeah, it was time to slink on home like she should have done in the first place.