Born to Darkness by Suzanne Brockmann

much of a con. The mark had to think he was going to screw
you
out of your hard-earned pay.
    Pete’s suggestion made him significantly less likable and more of the kind of sleazebag who deserved his ass handed to him on a platter.
    “I don’t know, man,” Shane said, massaging the muscles at the base of his skull as if he’d had a hard day at the construction site. “You’re pretty good. Let me think about it …?”
    Pete thankfully didn’t push. “I’ll be here all night. But, hey, lemme buy you another beer. On account of your winning and all.”
    Better and better. As long as Pete didn’t follow him over to the bar. “Thanks,” Shane said. “I’m going to, um, hit the men’s and …”
    But instead of going into the bathroom in the back, he went to the bar and slid up onto one of the stools next to the woman with the pretty eyes. She was drinking whiskey, straight up, and she’d already ordered and paid for her next two glasses—they were lined up in front of her in a very clear message that said,
No, butthead, you may not buy me a drink
. She’d also purposely left an empty-stool buffer between herself and the other patrons. And the glanceshe gave Shane as he sat let him know that she would have preferred keeping her personal DMZ intact.
    Her eyes were light brown, but she’d flattened them into a very frosty
don’t fuck with me
, dead-woman-walking glare. It was a hell of a talent. The first chief Shane had ever worked with in the SEAL teams—Andy Markos, rest his soul—could deliver the same soulless affect. It was scary as shit to be hit with that look. Even to those who knew him well and outranked him.
    But here and now, Shane let this woman know that he
wasn’t
scared and
didn’t
give a shit that she didn’t want him sitting there, by giving her an answering smile; letting his eyes twinkle a little, as if they were sharing a private joke.
    She broke the eye contact as she shook her head, muttering something that sounded like, “Why do I do this to myself?”
    Any conversational opener was a win, so Shane took it for the invitation that it wasn’t. “Do what to yourself?”
    Another head shake, this one with an eye roll. “Look, I’m not interested.”
    “Actually, I came over because I saw that you were limping,” Shane lied. “You know, when you came in? I trashed my ankle about a year ago. They giving you steroids for the swelling?”
    “Really,” she said. “You’re wasting your time.”
    She wasn’t as pretty as he’d thought she was, from a distance. But she wasn’t exactly not-pretty either. Still, her face was a little too square, her nose a little too small and round, her lips a little too narrow. Her short hair wasn’t blond as he’d first thought, but rather a bland shade of uninspiring light brown. She was also athletic to the point of near breastlessness. The thug he’d tangled with earlier that evening had had bigger pecs than this woman did beneath her tank top.
    But those eyes …
    They weren’t just brown, they were golden brown, with bits of hazel and specks of green and darker brown thrown in for good measure.
    They were incredible.
    “Be careful if they do,” Shane told her. “You know, give you steroids. I had a series of shots that made me feel great. They really helped, but ten months after the last injection, I was still testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Which was problematic when I tried to earn some easy money cage fighting.”
    She turned to look at him. “Is that it? You done with your public service announcement?”
    He smiled back at her. “Not quite. I did a little research online and found out that that particular drug can stay in your system for as long as eighteen months. I’ve still got six months to kill.”
    “Before you can become a cage fighter,” she said, with plenty of
yeah right
scorn in her voice. “Does that usually impress the girls?”
    “I’ve actually never told anyone before,” Shane admitted.