She shook her head. “The team…”

“There’ll be here for another two hours, and they’ve already had a full night’s sleep.”

Her eyelids moved slowly when she blinked, but she glanced around and shook her head again. Noah didn’t know why he felt protective. Elise could take care of herself, and this wasn’t the toughest case they’d ever worked. But she looked so…vulnerable. Elise Watson, vulnerable? Man, he really was tired.

“Come on. We’ll both call it quits,” he offered. “Have you eaten dinner?”

She shot him a guilty look.

“Lunch?” The last customer scurried past, still glaring with righteous suspicion, despite the fact that they’d willingly handed over his money. “All right,” Noah sighed as he locked the door behind the man. “Grab your stuff. We’re leaving in two minutes.”

“But I need to—”

“They’ve got your cell number, Elise. They’ll call if they need you.”

The lobby hummed with quiet work as the last two tellers counted out their money drawers. Lara laughed at something one of the loan officers said. There were no crises in the offing. No swelling tension.

“I’ll buy you a beer,” Noah said.

“Two minutes,” she said over her shoulder as she hurried away.

The surge of triumph and anticipation that flooded his blood was something Noah chose to ignore, because he did have his pride, damn it, even if it had been so thoroughly battered and bruised by Elise two years before.

He checked in with the guys working the computers in the back room. He called the men in charge of supervising security at the other two branches. He looked over the latest numbers in the forensic investigation. And his heart never once settled back to its normal beat.

Exhaustion made him angry. Or maybe it just made him need…something.

“OH, MY GOD,” Elise groaned. “Oh, God, that is so good.” Pleasure swarmed over her in little pinpricks of relief. Eyes closed, she moaned as she pressed the bottle of golden joy to her cheek.

Noah cleared his throat. “You really needed a beer.”

“You have no idea.” She took another long draw of the bottle, but she was already anticipating the margarita she was going to have next. It wasn’t her fault. She’d settled on a chile relleno, so the margarita was required by federal law.

She let her head fall back to rest against the booth. They were alone here for all intents and purposes. The only people staying at the hotel were working for her, and at the moment they all seemed to be either working or winding down in their rooms. If there was anybody else here, they were hidden by the six-foot-tall walls of the booths.

“Thank you so much for pulling me out,” she sighed. “Sometimes when I get tired, I just get more and more focused, until I can’t see at all. That’s probably what happened in Madison….” Elise regretted the word before it left her mouth, but Noah didn’t seem to notice her hesitation.

“That was a tough job.” He took a swig from his own bottle. Elise watched the muscles of his throat work, strangely fascinated by the rough look of his jaw. He needed a shave. His light brown hair was sticking up where he’d run his hand through it. He looked more like a bank robber than a federal employee. It didn’t help that he’d slipped off his jacket and loosened his tie. As she watched, he began to roll up the sleeves of his plain white shirt.

She wouldn’t stare at his hands. She wouldn’t. Lusting after his hands had gotten her into trouble that first time. His fingers were long, but not slender and pretty. They ended in blunt lines and square nails, and his hands were so wide. Something about the sight of them made her weak and stupid.

She dug a fingernail beneath the label on her bottle, determined to distract herself. “You know, that was my first takeover.”

“I remember. It must have been an awful way to start. That one was hard even on the veterans.”

Lately, she’d been thinking a lot about Madison, and it wasn’t only because she’d worked closely with Noah on that trip. The Madison job had been close to Christmas, too, and the weather had been brutally cold. But there the similarities ended. The Madison bank had been too far gone. There hadn’t been one interested buyer. And Elise and Noah and the rest of the team had been in charge of laying off ninety-three people only two weeks before Christmas. Some of the employees had been angry, but most of them had been terrified.

One of Elise’s most vivid memories was locking herself in the bathroom stall to cry. The other one involved Noah James and his hands. And that straight, unyielding mouth of his. It was softer than it looked. That knowledge only added to the general feelings of sorrow that still clung to her thoughts of Madison.

She sighed hard. “Do you remember the senior teller? She’d just bought her first house. She kept whispering ‘What am I going to tell my kids?’”

“It was bad,” Noah said softly. “But this trip…this trip is better.”

“I’ll drink to that,” she answered, clinking her bottle softly against his and averting her eyes from his fingers curved around the glass. They both finished off their beers just as their dinner arrived.

“Two more beers?” the waitress asked with a wink.

Noah nodded, but Elise shook her head. “A margarita on the rocks for me. And…” The tension still shrieked in her shoulders. “Two shots of Patrón?”

Noah raised his eyebrows in a challenging look, but he didn’t say no. She hadn’t planned on anything more than a tension-breaker, but she was now wondering what Noah James would be like after a few drinks. She couldn’t quite imagine it. A picture of him loose and happy flashed through her mind, and Elise couldn’t stop her snort of laughter.

He’d just opened his mouth to take a bite of his bacon cheeseburger, but he lowered his food. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Frowning, he muttered something like “Nothing, my ass,” and Elise had to stifle another snort.

Then the drinks came. And the shots.

Half an hour later, Elise was laughing so hard that tears leaked from her eyes. “Shut up,” she gasped.

“And the last ones out of the hotel were Tex and some woman twice his age—”

“No!”

He put a hand over his heart. “I swear to God, he stood in the parking lot wearing nothing but his boots and a pair of boxers, completely unselfconscious. As soon as the fire alarm stopped blaring, he started introducing everyone to his ‘friend’ Jeannie, who, by the way, was wearing a bathrobe and a wedding band and not much else.”

“Who was she?”

“I have no idea, but she raced back in with Tex as soon as the fire department gave the all-clear. And that was our trip to Lubbock. Those Texans really know how to run a bank into the ground.”

Still smiling, Elise sipped the last dregs of her margarita and resisted the urge to order another. The shot had been too much. The second round of tequila had been way over the line. She needed some sleep. She needed to regroup. What she did not need was to get sloppy drunk with Noah James.

But she had found out what Noah was like under the influence…he was exactly the same: controlled, quiet and handsome as hell, though he did smile a little more.

Those occasional smiles were killing her.

She remembered now what had led her to kiss him in the first place. Watching his hands. A few drinks. A few of those rare smiles and she’d been melting all over. Just like she was now.

But at least now she knew better. A few smiles did not mean that Noah James wanted to be jumped. What a shame. It was the least he could offer for being so stubborn on every single job.

The last time they’d worked on the same team, he’d publicly defied her orders that he discipline one of his team members. They’d fought that out in her office and reached a tentative truce, but…

Elise frowned. “Hey, did you tell Michael Valdez he could fly home tomorrow?”

“Yes. The bulk of his duties are over and his mom is having surgery.”

“Don’t you think you should’ve at least run it by me?”

“I meant to. I got distracted by the embezzlement.”

“The embezzlement.” She rolled her eyes. “Why are you always such a pain in the ass?”

“Why do you think I’d make up missing funds?”

“That’s not what I meant. It’s just…everything. I feel like you’re always fighting me, and I don’t know why.”

“The flight was canceled, Elise. I had nothing to do with that. What should I have—”

“You stole my promotion,” she bit out. Silence followed her words. Even the quiet music playing in the background seemed to pause. Elise held her breath as Noah leaned back and picked up his empty beer bottle.

He rolled it in his hand. “That was a lateral move, not a promotion.”

“It was my job.” She leaned forward to glare at him, but her anger only made him smile.

“Obviously it wasn’t.”

“Everyone knew how much I wanted it.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I didn’t know anything about it. I just knew I needed to get the hell out of D.C.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, so it had nothing to do with me?”

His gaze flew up to meet hers, and her breath hitched at the brightness in his pale blue eyes. Hot emotion flamed in their depths, but she couldn’t decipher it. “Nothing at all to do with you,” he murmured.

He was lying. He was lying, but she didn’t know what she’d done to make him so mad he’d interfere with her career. “Damn it, Noah. I don’t know why you did it, but I needed that job.”

“You didn’t need it as much as I did.” His jaw was so tight that his mouth hardly moved when he spoke, and Elise was tumbling through anger and confusion. What had she ever done to him? She was the one who’d left Madison humiliated.

“I needed it,” she said again, “because the rest of my life was going to Colorado. My boyfriend took a job in Boulder in June. Or should I say ex-boyfriend? He broke up with me because I couldn’t move with him!”

Her words rang in the small confines of the booth. She’d raised her voice. Maybe she’d even yelled.

Noah’s eyes narrowed slightly. He cocked his head and studied her face while she tried to control her breathing. “So,” he said thoughtfully. His eyes narrowed further. “Was this the same boyfriend you had when you kissed me two years ago?”

Elise gasped and sat up so quickly that her elbow banged hard into the edge of the table. “Excuse me?”

“Because he didn’t seem that important to you then.”

“You… I can’t believe you’d bring that up. I—”

“And since you were both willing to choose a job over the relationship, I can’t pretend to be prostrate with regret. Sorry, Elise. I guess that relationship wasn’t meant to be.”

Her mind spun like a top, buffeted from all sides. She was outraged and insulted and hurt. But she was also reeling because he was throwing her own lie back in her face and she didn’t know how to respond. She hadn’t had a boyfriend when she’d kissed Noah. She’d made that up to save face, but now it seemed like a juvenile response to an adult situation. Oh, sure, I’m dating someone, too.

So on top of everything else, she now felt stupid and small.

Elise grabbed her purse and slid out of the booth. “Charge it to Room 207,” she growled.

“Elise,” he said, but his tone was half-hearted. She kept moving.

Unbelievable. They’d been having a meaningful conversation, and then he’d pulled that out. Her stomach burned as if he’d stabbed her with a real knife instead of a metaphorical one. He’d dismissed everything she’d built with Evan as if it had been nothing.

Almost the same way Evan had dismissed the life they’d built together. The way he’d so simply proven that work was more important than love to both of them.

Elise was such a failure at love that everyone could see it, from inside and out.

She wiped a tear from her cheek before she stepped out of the dimness of the bar and into the bright hallway that led to the elevator. She was terrible at relationships, but she was good at her job, and she’d be damned if she’d let one of her people see her crying like a little girl.

Her father and her uncles had raised her to be tough. Once she’d turned five, her dad had told her she wasn’t a baby anymore, and she’d agreed. She’d lived for her dad’s pride and approval, and even when she’d broken her arm playing peewee football, she hadn’t cried. But being a woman was so much harder than being a kid. Kids were allowed to throw themselves into situations and fall flat on their faces if they failed. But as an adult…she had no idea how to navigate relationships. Throw yourself in or hold back… She’d tried it both ways and neither had worked.

But she was thirty-one years old. She had to figure it out soon, or she’d live her whole life lonely. That was another reason she’d been so desperate for the Denver job. She needed a big change in the worst way. Most of her Saturday nights over the past year had been spent with her uncles. Elise was turning into an elderly man.

She slipped into the thankfully empty elevator and tipped up her head to keep more tears from falling. God, she didn’t know what was wrong with her. The holidays or the weather or…the tequila.

Elise immediately felt better. The tequila had exposed her maudlin side. She could not fall into the trap of drinking with Noah James again. The man was a menace, sliding past all her defenses like an assassin. Did he have this effect on other women?