The Naked Detective by Vivi Andrews

leaning against a slot machine as he waited. He looked utterly relaxed, as if there hadn’t been even a flicker of doubt in his mind that she would return to him. Trust. It seemed to have burst open between them impossibly fast.
    She didn’t know when she had started trusting him, a moment ago, a day ago, maybe a part of her had started trusting him the moment he rang her doorbell. But his trust of her seemed to hinge on that moment in the tank. Sure, she’d done it so he would believe her, but now she was suspicious of that instant faith.
    Nate levered himself away from the slots. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.” He started to reach for her hand again, then snatched his hand back. His eyes scanned her from her flip-flop bedecked toes all the way up to her still-damp hair, as if checking for war wounds.
    Ciara rolled her eyes. “I’m fine . Better than fine. I’m—” Again words failed. This feeling, it was too much. “Come on. We’ve got a necklace to find.”
    She grabbed his hand and dragged him behind her toward the street exit. Ciara felt like laughing, though she didn’t know why.
    She wore his jacket over her dress—the shawl a casualty of her dunking—but as soon as they stepped out of the air-conditioning of the casino, she shrugged it off. The sun hit the skin of her arms and felt delicious. For once she was outside, surrounded by people and not worried about being brushed against.
    Though maybe she should be worried. What if it was only Nate she could touch?
    He hailed a taxi and ushered her into the backseat, careful as he had been all week not to touch her skin.
    “The Borgata, please,” she told the driver.
    Nate climbed in after her. “No,” he said, “let’s go back to the hotel. You can rest—”
    “The Borgata,” she repeated, more firmly. No more invalid treatment. No more hiding.
    There were a million things she’d never done. Too many things. A wild excitement pulsed through her veins. A thousand possibilities.
    She could eat in a restaurant, dance in a club, go to a movie in a crowded theater where the schmuck next to her would steal her armrest. She could fly on a plane. Go to Egypt or Bermuda or Taiwan. She didn’t know why she should want to go to Taiwan unless she was picking up a few sweatshop workers, but the fact that she could changed everything. It changed her .
    Nate wedged himself against the car door, as far away from her as he could get without leaping into oncoming traffic.
    “What are you doing way over there?”
    “Recovering from the heart attack you gave me on the pier,” he snapped. “And trying to figure out how to talk you into going back to the hotel and leaving the jewel thieves to the professionals.”
    “I thought I was a suspect,” she purred, scooting across the bench seat toward him. “Don’t you want my confession?”
    He leaned away, pressing into the door. “You aren’t a crook. I believe you. Now back off, before you give yourself another seizure.”
    Ciara kept her eyes locked on his, slowly shaking her head. “Nate, for the first time in the last decade, I can touch someone without feeling like someone dropped a cherry bomb into my brain. Do you honestly think I’m not going to take advantage of this for every second it lasts?” She reached out and laid her fingers along his jaw. She listened and the touch sang through her, a perfect pitch ringing sweetly, deep inside her rib cage.
    She slid her fingers down, drawing them along the column of his throat, listening as the note shifted with his every breath. Her eyes fixed on his mouth, the delicious masculine curve of it.
    Ten years. She hadn’t been kissed in ten years.
    “Nate,” she whispered. Her upper body leaned forward of its own volition, closing the distance between them. She wet her lips.
    “This is a bad idea. I don’t think—”
    “Don’t think. It’s overrated.” Ciara’s eyelids lowered, but she watched him through her lashes, not wanting to miss a