Sex & the Single Girl by Joanne Rock Page B

time—while she narrated a drunken man’s actions to the party on the other end of her connection. It sounded like Brianne was asking if she should intervene in the situation.
    Aidan could hardly keep quiet. “If he doesn’t make it out the door under his own power in another minute, I’ll run him off.” He didn’t like the idea of Brianne playing bouncer to a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound biker with spikes strapped around his wrists. Besides, it would probably do him some good to get a breath of air that didn’t involve Brianne’s darkly complex perfume.
    Brianne covered the mouthpiece of her headset with one hand and glared at him in the dim light of the security board in her office. “I don’t think so, Maddock. Thanks anyway.”
    Had she always been this bristly? Even now in her crisp white man’s shirt and shorter-than-short black sequin skirt, she had a cool, hands-off look about her before she said a word.
    â€œYou’re running a one-woman show here, Bri,” he shot back as he switched screens on the monitors to check out the action on the street in front of the club. Still no signs of Mel Baxter. “Can you really afford to turn away offers to help out?”
    â€œI can when they come from a man who’s only interested in dragging the club’s name through a little more mud.” She uncovered the mike on her headset and told her partner she’d check in later then clicked off the connection.
    â€œI offered to kick out a drunk. You don’t have to make a federal case out of it.”
    â€œ You obviously want to.” Brianne tossed aside her headset and opened the top of her computer display. “That’s the only reason you’re here, after all—to make your federal case and then ride off into the sunset ahero. Of course, it doesn’t matter to you that you could be costing four women their livelihoods and their dreams for the second time in one year. As long as you get your conviction, who cares what happens to the club, right?” She spared him a glance over her shoulder, her red hair dancing around her shoulders like a fitful flame as she moved. “So do me a favor and don’t pretend to care what happens around here before you pull the rug out from under us.”
    She went back to tapping away at her computer keys, her breathing measured and regular and totally unruffled while he was still over here choking on his freaking shallow gulps of air so as not to inhale too much of her damn mess-with-his-head perfume.
    The whole day had been an exercise in professional and sexual frustration. Mel’s trail was cold—possibly thanks to his stepdaughter’s smooth maneuverings— and Aidan’s superiors grew more agitated with the situation with each passing day. And instead of focusing on his work, Aidan was more in tune with Brianne’s every movement in the chair beside him, every breath she took and every slow uncrossing and recrossing of her mile-long legs.
    He’d watched video camera feeds of half-naked women shimmying across the stage in the Moulin Rouge Lounge all night, their painted nipples poking through the white feather bras they wore with their white skirts. Brianne, on the other hand, was encased in a forbidding expanse of starched white dress shirt, yet he could envision her breasts more clearly.
    And as if that weren’t bad enough, he’d been plagued by memories of her long-ago racy propositionsever since they’d finished their exploration of the hotel and plunked into their seats in her office.
    When she’d been giving him the grand tour, she’d shown him the tacky Sweethearts Suite decorated in chocolate brown and pinks, the bedspread a nightmare of bright candy wrappers and peppermint sticks. Instead of thinking like an agent and gleaning details to apply to his case, Aidan had been swamped with a vision of eighteen-year-old Brianne in her candy