He’d been a rock star in another life, she was convinced. She purposely let out a breath and leaned back, reminding herself he was just a guy. A flawed guy at that, though certainly none of his flaws happened to be showing at the moment.

He walked across the lawn with an unhurried, easy stride in all his scruffy gorgeousness and opened the limo door, letting in the chilly April afternoon air. With one hand on the roof, the other on the door, he bent down, peering in through his Prada sunglasses, merely arching a brow when he saw her.

Couldn’t blame him. They weren’t exactly on speaking terms.

His unruly sun-kissed light brown hair was either styled messy today on purpose or he hadn’t bothered with a comb. His face was scruffy with at least a day-old beard so she was going with the no-comb theory. He should have looked sloppy and unkempt but nothing about him ever looked like anything less than God’s gift. She’d seen him in uniform, in designer suits, in work-out gear, in all sorts of things, including absolutely nothing, and he always looked perfect.

Especially in the nothing.

“Hey,” he said in that low, slightly raspy voice of his, the one that never failed to immediately put her back up.

And/or turn her on.

“Hey yourself.” He wasn’t limping, and he sure as hell didn’t look exhausted. The opposite, she thought a little breathlessly as his deceptively lazy gaze raked over her from head to toe. Deceptively, because behind that beach-bum facade of his lay a sharp-as-hell wit.

Given their . . . tense relationship at the moment, she didn’t smile.

And though he usually smiled at anything female, neither did he.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Always. How about you, Princess? You ready to do this?”

She’d asked him a million times not to call her that. It drove her crazy, which was of course why he did it. “We need to talk.”

“Sorry,” he said with mock regret. “But we don’t talk. We fight. And I’m not in the mood.”

He hadn’t been “in the mood” since what she called the Mishap.

The Mishap Never to Be Talked About.

Except . . . except Wade got along with the entire world, and she had to admit it was disturbing that they didn’t. Couldn’t. Fact was, the two of them rubbed each other the wrong way, always had, and there was nothing to be done about that now.

Nothing.

She had a job to do. They had a job to do. So she swallowed the little ball of nerves in her throat, reminding herself that as the estrogen quota in a world of testosterone, she’d made her place by being cool, calm, and implacable, just as her father had taught her.

Tough and composed.

No weaknesses.

None. And on the whole, it worked for her.

Ninety-nine percent of the time.