DISCLAIMER: Leverage and its characters are the property of TNT. No infringement intended.
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
SPOILERS: 2x09.
Adorable
By ralst
The pout was adorable.
"I was never a lawyer," Tara explained, the humour leaking from her voice, despite her best intentions. "I was pretending."
Parker stirred her drink, the ice clinking musically against the glass and adding to her confusion. "You don't really wear glasses?" She hadn't seen the glasses herself, but both Elliot and Hardison had commented on the 'librarian look' and Parker had been disconcerted by their omission.
"No." If Parker weren't so cute, Tara would have abandoned the conversation long before, but there was something endearing about the other blonde that she just couldn't resist. "I'm a grifter, like Sophie." She knew that Parker had spent the better part of an hour glued to her cell phone, listening to Sophie in London, but the conversation didn't seem to have answered all of Parker's questions. "We worked together on the Sydney-Allinson job."
Parker's brow furrowed. "The Picasso?" She'd heard about that job, and always suspected Sophie was at the bottom of it somewhere, but she'd never got around to asking the other woman about it. "Is it true that you hypnotised the guard-dogs?"
"No. We persuaded the dog-handler to keep them locked up." It had been the handler, afraid for his job, who had come up with the hypnotism story. "Did you really jump off the Eiffel Tower to escape the police?"
"Yes." The smile, which had been absent up until then, was positively adorable, and it took all of Tara's willpower not to comment on that fact. "Are you going to go all strange over Nate, too?" asked Parker.
Tara laughed. "Definitely not."
"You're sure?"
"Absolutely." Tara smiled, her fingers running slowly down Parker's arm. "He's good looking enough, but he's hardly adorable."
The look of confusion slowly eased from Parker's face, to be replaced by a speculative look, which was aimed firmly in Tara's direction. "You like adorable?"
"I love adorable," Tara corrected.
The pout returned to Parker's face before, with a twitch of excitement, she realised that she rather liked being adorable, at least in a grifter's eyes. "You smell good."
Tara laughed. "Absolutely, adorable."
The End