Bending the Rules by Susan Andersen

and strode to the door. He hadn’t spent all these years rising above his genes just to cave in now. But he stopped with his hand on the doorknob to look back at her, raking his gaze from her chocolate eyes, to her round breasts that pushed against a surprisingly worn-atthe-seams gray hoodie, to the slice of Nordic pale skin showing between the jacket’s hem and the hip-band of its matching drawstring pants, to her sock-clad feet.
    Then he sent it in a reverse journey back up until he was once again looking directly into those startlingly dark eyes.
    She might have won this round, but he had a little news flash of his own. “I’ll stay the requisite fifteen feet from your minithugs or pack my paintbrush. But I’m putting you on notice, Ms. Calloway. This is it. I don’t give a flying…flick who you know. You ever go over my head again or jeopardize my ability to do my job and there will be consequences. Count on it.”
    And seething in places he’d never allow to show, he let himself out the door.
     
    H EART RACING like an Indy 500 contender, Poppy watched the door softly snick shut behind de Sanges and abruptly buckled at the knees, lowering herself without grace to sit on the hallway floor. Her kneecaps wavering in front of her face, she braced her elbows against them and lowered her head into her hands. “Holy shitskis. Holy, ho-ly shitskis!”
    She couldn’t believe the bluff that had come out of her mouth. As if she called in personal favors from the mayor—and people of even more influence—all the time!
    A sputter of hysterical laughter escaped her. As if, indeed. No, the only one in the Sisterhood with political clout was Ava. Who, it turned out, had talked to her uncle Robert, who played golf with His Honor the Mayor most Wednesdays—and all without so much as a hint to Poppy that she planned to do so. Poppy had been as surprised as de Sanges to hear from the mayor’s office that her proposed project was on after all. And although she’d been thrilled at the thought of having an opportunity to help those three kids, she hadn’t been lying—she had felt kind of guilty about Ava going over the detective’s head for a second time. But only until he’d opened his mouth and threatened to intimidate the teenagers. That had shot her empathy straight to hell.
    Yet with or without the sympathy factor, she really, really wished she hadn’t touched him.
    Because. Lord. Have. Mercy.
    She didn’t know what it was about him, but she only had to lay eyes on him and she got such a visceral reaction she didn’t know what to do with herself. She hadn’t felt this strongly about Andrew, and she’d had a three-year relationship in college with him. Such an unprecedented response to a guy she didn’t know and didn’t much like the little she did know shook her up. And that pissed her off. Never a stellar combination, which she had proven by promptly getting off on the wrong foot with him the minute she’d opened the door and seen him on the other side.
    She’d thought she was being so clever to treat his arrogant high-handedness over her door chain as if it were a concerned command from her father.
    But it hadn’t been clever at all; it had been stupid. Because she’d looped her arms around his neck and she had damn near whimpered at the heat that pumped off his long, hard frame, at the starch and soap scents she’d smelled emanating from his collar that made her want to bury her nose in his neck. His angular jaw had been bristly beneath her fingertips, making the full cut of his lips look contrastingly soft—until they’d suddenly gone hard with some unnamed determination. Whereupon she’d all but leaped out of range like a scalded cat.
    She hoped he hadn’t noticed, but he didn’t strike her as the type who missed much.
    Her subsequent embarrassment, combined with his unemotional threat against her teens, was undoubtedly what had given her the stones to look him in the eye and lie like a