“It is. You surprise me. The way you look doesn’t always match up with the things you do … I’m never sure what to expect.”

I pushed my ponytail over my shoulder and slid out of the booth. He followed my lead after throwing a wad of bills on the table to cover the check. I melted a little on the inside when he took my hand. It seemed like such a normal thing for a guy to do for a girl he liked and so against the way he had behaved toward me up until this point.

“I get that a lot, you know? Like the way I look should have anything to do with anything—ever.” He rubbed his thumb along my wrist and my pulse jumped in response to the simple caress. “My mom is really beautiful and it’s never brought her anything but trouble.”

“If she looks like you, I can see that.”

I scoffed at him as we stepped off the curb. “People thought she was my sister or my friend when I got older. The guys in high school used to hit on her all the time, and I wanted to die. She just laughed it off. She was good at handling the attention; she was also really good at letting me find my own way when it became clear I wasn’t going to follow in her glamorous footsteps.”

He was watching me like every word I said held parts of my soul in it. Maybe it did. Sometimes it was easy to forget about all my mom’s wonderful attributes and get lost in her overzealous quest for Mr. Right.

“What do you mean?”

I smiled a little thinking about my mom showing up at soccer games in six-inch heels and in full hair and makeup. I shrugged a shoulder and told him, “She just let me be me and never questioned it. When I told her I wanted to follow Dom to the Police Academy, she didn’t miss a beat. She was worried about my safety but she never questioned whether or not I could do it. She just told me to go and be the best cop I could be and look fabulous while doing it. She’s always been supportive of anything I wanted to take on, and since it was always just me and her, having her approval was important to me. It still is.”

“I like the way you look.” He said it like it was obvious, and maybe it was. But coming from him it made my insides flutter and tiny pieces of my heart want to burst out of my chest and put themselves in his very dangerous hands. “But I like the things you do, the way you act, the things you say, and the way you are even more. You could have mousy hair, acne, and crossed eyes and still be completely beautiful by just being you. Your mom knew that, that’s why she just let you be.”

I had to stop, even though we were in the middle of crossing the street, to look at him to see if he was serious. He was good with words, had a way of saying things that I think he knew I wanted to hear—hell, that any woman would die to hear—but it was there, stamped on his too-handsome face, that he meant everything he had just said. I had to clear my throat before I could respond.

“That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me, Asa. Especially since I haven’t been very fond of myself lately.” He shrugged it off like it was no big deal, like he hadn’t just given me more than enough reason to throw common sense out the door and go ahead and fall completely in love with him. He always had exactly the right words to use. No wonder he had been such a good con man. Pretty words out of that too-pretty face made you want to believe they were the truth.

“It’s true.” His voice was a little gruff and he shifted uneasily from foot to foot as we got back to the Bar and stopped in front of the 4Runner.

I tilted my head back so I could look up at him. “I like who you are, too, even if you don’t.”

“Not much to like, Royal. I keep telling you that and you just don’t want to listen.”

“You’re wrong.” I knew he was. He bent down and pressed a light kiss to my lips. He tasted like pancake syrup and coffee, and when I kissed him there were so many things I liked about him I could literally drown in them. When his lips touched mine it was the only thing that felt certain and real in my otherwise unsteady life. I wanted to tell him that watching him torture himself over things he couldn’t ever change had given me the perspective I so desperately needed, but I knew enough to know we weren’t there yet. I put a hand up on his bristly cheek and stepped up on my tiptoes so I could put my lips next to his ear. “But if you want, we can go back to your apartment for a little while and I can show you what I like the very best about you.”

Since I was stretched out all along his tall form, there was no missing the way his cock reacted to my words behind the fly of his jeans. I was going to have to figure out a way to get him to see that even though he had all kinds of broken parts that were ugly and misshapen on the inside, there was enough of him that was salvageable and really beautiful to make this thing between us work and for it to flourish into something solid and lasting. He might have been a criminal in the past, but now I was the one that wanted to steal something from him and keep it for my own … he was going to put up a fight once he realized I was after his heart. After all, it was my job to capture the bad guy … only this one I wasn’t planning on letting go of.