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Elliot rubbed his suddenly sweaty palms on his jeans and followed ‘Lydia’ (he would bet his badge that wasn’t her real name) into the hotel room, studiously not looking at how her ridiculously short skirt hugged her curves and accentuated her long legs.
The motel room door closed behind him and she spun around at the sound of the lock clicking into place, teetering for a moment on her alarmingly high heels.
Her eyes…something about them reminded him of a doe caught in headlights, just for a second then it was gone. Her wide smile was back.
“I’m all yours, Elliot. Well, for the next hour anyway.” She dipped her chin coquettishly, looking up at him behind fake eyelashes, and biting her lip.
He shifted his weight, unsettled by not being able to work out how which part was real – the shyness or the bravado? He took a breath. “Look, we don’t have to…we could just talk if you like.”
She snorted and tossed her purse on the bed. “What’s with the Pretty Woman routine?” She narrowed her eyes. “You’re not some kind of creep are ya?”
He didn’t want to spook her. Her posture had stiffened. He tried to relax his own shoulders in response, dropping his jacket to the bed and kicking off his boots, pretending not to notice how her eyes followed his every move. “Because I want to talk?”
She rolled her eyes and tossed her long dark hair over her shoulder. “Because you’re lying to me from the get.”
As she moved closer, Elliot’s eyes trailed down her body before he was able to stop himself. She stopped just a couple of feet away. This close he could see her eyes better, they didn’t look nearly as bold as the image she was trying so hard to project. He could faintly smell her perfume, light and floral, making him want to close the rest of the distance between them.
She batted her eyelashes, and let her own gaze wander. “Honey, you obviously want to do a lot more than talk.”
He cleared his throat, a flush spreading across his chest. He’d known her a matter of minutes and she could see right through him.
She lifted her hand and for a heart stopping moment Elliot panicked, wondering if she was going to grab for the straining bulge at the front of his jeans that he was strenuously ignoring until now. But instead her fingertips just traced gently along his belt for a moment before dropping away.
Her eyes gentled at his flinch. “Sorry,” she breathed, then seemed to shake herself, the brassy confidence returning as she lifted her chin. “First time, sweetheart?”
Something in the catch in her voice struck him and suddenly several things fell into place at once: the wobble as she had strolled across the street to lean down to his car window, as if the heels were unfamiliar to her; the startled expression that flit across her face when he had asked her how much; her complete inability to negotiate the price; the perfume – light instead of overpowering, and not the cheap stuff so favored by the other girls at the truck stops – and Elliot would know, at this point he had taken out each one of them for a ‘date’ and was still no closer to infiltrating the brutal serial rapist who tracked them mercilessly up and down the I-95.
He asked softly, taking a step back, rethinking everything about his approach. “Is it your first time, Lydia?”