First Class Killing by Lynne Heitman

tastes, she was the most vivid of all, mainly because there was so much of her. Up close, she was several inches taller than I had expected and bountiful in every sense. Handfuls of platinum blond hair framed her face and cascaded glossily down past her shoulders. Her breasts, full and meaty and freckled, overflowed the low-cut top that tried to hold them back. Her waist was small, her hips generous, and all the features of her face boldly outlined—eyes in black liner and mascara and lips in bright red.
    It was hard to break through the blur of tequila except to know that she was there, right in front of me, and she’d caught me at exactly the wrong moment.
    “Sweetie…” She reached out and took my hands in hers, then curled to the left and winked back at me over her shoulder. “Are you following me?”
    I started to move again to the beat, mostly because she did but also because if I didn’t, my nerve endings, already crackling and hot, might overheat and melt me into a puddle.
    “I saw you in Pittsburgh, you know.” My stomach clenched, thinking about her staring in the dark through that camera lens. She couldn’t have seen me. She couldn’t have. “I saw you at the airport with your little friends, Tristan and Irene.”
    “I was working a trip,” I said. It was hard to talk in the crowd. I kept getting bumped and shoved, and we had to lean into each other to hear. “Why would you notice who I’m with?”
    “I notice everything. What I don’t see, people tell me. What they’re telling me about you is that you’re asking a lot of questions, trying to get close to me.” She put one hand back on my hip and started an upward slide to forbidden territory. Unlike Tony the Actor, she knew how to keep her eyes where it counted—on mine. “Do you want to get close to me, Alex Shanahan?”
    I did a quick spin, pivoting away from her. When we were facing each other again, I moved in closer but took both her hands in mine before she could put them where she wanted.
    With no hands for grabbing, she began to use the rest of her body, rubbing her hips against mine. “You don’t like to be touched, do you?”
    “Not without permission.”
    “I don’t ask permission.” She snapped her hands away and, before I had a chance to react, clamped long fingers around my wrists, holding them with just enough pressure to make me aware of the bones underneath. She paused for a few hip swivels, long enough to let the new dynamic sink in. Then she pulled me close enough to put her lips to my ear. Her breath against my skin was so hot it felt cold. The smell of her perfume, sweet and heavy, floated around us. “Do you want to get close to me?”
    The music was so distant that all I could hear was my breathing overlapping with hers, and then all I could feel was the tip of her tongue, wet and warm, tracing the edge of my ear. I tried to turn my head away, to fight her off, but she was strong. She held me where I didn’t want to be, which seemed to excite her. I stopped straining, because I could tell it was what she wanted. I also knew I couldn’t win.
    “This is close enough,” I said.
    She backed a step away, and we were facing each other again. “No one gets close unless they’re invited, sugar, and someone like you with your tight-assed, don’t-touch-me-I’m-so-much-better-than-you attitude will never be welcome in my company. So, fuck off.”
    When she finally released my hands, my fingers were numb.
    Of the several thousand things that bothered me about the encounter—hell, about the whole evening—I realized as I stood and watched that what bothered me most was what Angel was doing now. She was dancing with her eyes closed, so certain was she that she could put her tongue in my ear and I wouldn’t come after her.
    Just before she was about to disappear into the crowd, I stepped forward, reached in, and pulled her out by her very solid upper arm. I pulled her close enough to whisper in her ear, which I could