Butterface

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.

“Come on, you gotta admit the wedding planner is harsh on the eyes, not like that one.” Ruggiero glanced over at the boutique hotel’s reception desk. “You know, she asked about you when we came out here.”

Ford didn’t mean to look over at the hotel clerk, but he did anyway. She was a sexy blonde with big tits and an ass that would bring a sinner to church—the kind of girl his brothers would be chatting up by now. But him? Not a chance.

He wasn’t the charming Hartigan. He was the boring, rule-following nerd who’d become a cop instead of a firefighter and never heard the end of it.

His brothers Frankie and Finian would have fallen at the clerk’s feet. Not him—especially not if Ruggiero and Gallo were the ones saying she was hot for him. They’d pulled so many pranks at the station that the captain had dragged them into his office and reamed their asses more than once for it.

“Like I’m gonna believe you two,” Ford said, looking around the lobby for Kapowski, who’d promised he’d be here if he could.