Shame on Him (Fool Me Once 3)

He rests his hands on the hood of the car, caging me in. “Can I just say, watching you hand him his ass on a plate was so fucking hot.”

I stare up at him, my heart beating so fast I’m sure he can hear it. This morning I hated him and couldn’t stop thinking about all the ways I wanted him dead. Now that I’ve kissed him, all I can think about are his lips.

He starts to lean toward me and I feel butterflies in my stomach, my excitement at getting to kiss him again at an all-time high.

The sound of a car door slamming from another part of the garage cuts through the silence. Dallas shakes his head and moves away from me, the moment gone. “I better go. It’s getting late and I need to make some notes on Miles.”

Trying to hide my disappointment, I quickly look away from him. “I have to go too. I have an early court case in the morning.”

Why do things feel awkward now? Maybe we’re better off hating each other.

“I’ll swing by your office later in the afternoon and we can go over our notes,” Dallas tells me as I toss my purse inside the car.

“Are you sure you still want to work with me? If Miles goes through with his threat, you could get fired.”

Dallas shakes his head in disagreement. “He’s not going to do anything. He’s guilty of something and he knows it. Even if he didn’t kill Richard, he still tried to blackmail him. We both know he’d be disbarred if that ever got out. I’ll meet you tomorrow and we’ll go over everything and see what we missed. You’re not getting out of working with me that easily.”

He closes my door once I’m inside and I watch him walk over to his own vehicle. I still don’t trust that Miles won’t go right to the police and tell them what Dallas and I are doing, but for now, I’m going to trust Dallas and just hope I didn’t mess up both of our careers.

CHAPTER 13

True to his word, Dallas showed up at the office the following evening. I had almost given up hope after not hearing from him all day and was calling myself all kinds of a fool for borrowing another one of Paige’s outfits. The short black-and-white plaid skirt and long-sleeved black sweater that hangs off of one shoulder reminds me a little bit of a Catholic-school uniform. According to Paige, that’s the point. She seemed to think Dallas wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything but kissing me when he saw me wearing this. Obviously she was wrong. We’ve been sitting here for two hours poring over our notes and he’s barely looked at me.

I really am an idiot. He’s probably regretting everything that happened in my parents’ driveway. He knows kissing me was a bad idea for so many reasons, not the least of which is that we have a murder to solve, which should take precedence right now.

Since when did I turn into this pathetic woman who dresses for a man and worries if he wants her?

Since I was kissed by a man like Dallas Osborne, obviously.

“So we know Miles has an alibi for the morning Richard was shot, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he didn’t have something to do with it,” Dallas states from his chair on the other side of my desk, pulling me out of my thoughts.

I watch for a moment as he reads over my notes and adds them to his. I made a few calls earlier and had found out Miles was in court the morning Richard was killed.

Getting up from my seat, I bring both of my arms above my head and stretch, closing my eyes and groaning as I work out the kinks. We’ve been sitting in the exact same spots for so long that my entire body is stiff as a board.

“He could have hired someone to kill Richard. Can you look into his bank accounts and see if there were any big transactions around that time?”

Dallas doesn’t answer me. I open my eyes, drop my arms back to my sides, and see that he’s staring at my stomach, not blinking. Glancing down, I realize my sweater inched up while I was stretching. I quickly tug it back down and turn away.

“Do you want some coffee? I’m going to make some coffee,” I ramble as I walk to the kitchen in the back of the office.

I glance over my shoulder as I pull the coffeepot from the machine and catch Dallas quickly looking away from my bare legs. He mumbles something to himself that I can’t decipher and then rubs his palms down the front of his face a few times.

What the hell am I doing? Who cares if kissing him was the most exciting thing that’s happened to me in thirty-plus years? What does it matter if he regrets it and wants to keep things all business now? I’m an adult, for God’s sake. I don’t need to rely on anyone to make me happy. My life is finally going the way I want it to. I don’t need a complication like Dallas Osborne. We’ll just chalk up yesterday’s make-out session to a result of heightened emotions after that disastrous dinner with my parents.

With a firm resolve to pretend like nothing ever happened between us, I finish setting up the coffeemaker and walk back over to my desk while it brews. Not ready to sit down again in my uncomfortable chair, I grab a file from next to Dallas and go over to Kennedy’s desk, hopping up on top of it and crossing my legs.

“What about the day Andrew Jameson was shot? Did we check and see if Stephanie and Miles had alibis for that day?” I ask, flipping open the file and reading through the notes.

“Son of a bitch, I can’t do this,” Dallas suddenly mutters.

I look up from the file in confusion to see him jump up from his chair and pace back and forth in front of me.

“If you’re tired, we can stop and pick back up in the morning.”