She's beautiful. His first thought. A different kind of beautiful than normal, too.

She's wearing jeans that don't stick close to her calf muscles for practicality, and instead they rush out over the more familiar heeled boots that still don't bring her near his height. The plum coloured shirt is so different that it almost floors him that the snug sleeveless shirt isn't black. She always wears black or white, and to see her looking so colourful shocks him even more than the fact that yes, she's wearing jewellery, and yes, its that necklace he gave her as part of an undercover stint in Venice, and how about that, it matches perfectly.

He wonders whether she chose the shirt to match the necklace, or the necklace to match the shirt. Either way, he hopes she thinks back to that night where they danced and for a few hours were more than convincingly the newlywed Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Soren.

"You look different," he remarks as he sees her applying lipstick. It would be a sight that convinced him this wasn't even Natasha if she hadn't been using part of the reflective wall of their interrogation unit as a mirror. The way she uses the shining surface as a mirror and then glares at her own reflection as if she doesn't recognise it makes him smirk to himself.

"I'm bringing in Banner tonight," she replied stoicly. Just another job. Doesn't matter if she's looking like flames when she does it.

"Shame," he said, his lips picking up at one corner as he leans against the opposite wall to blatantly stare at her. He waits until she turns and sees him before deliberately looking her up and down like a hungry wolf.

"Put your tongue back in, Barton, or I'll snap it off," she threatens him, but there's a smile of her own on her lips, though you'd have missed it if you didn't know her as well as he did.

He shrugs, continuing to leer. "Can't help it," he commented. "I see you all dressed up like that and it makes me want to just..."

He leaves the comment hanging and she turns, slipping on her leather jacket that slides just perfectly under the obediently trained curls in her hair. "Leer at me in a way that will get you castrated?" she tests him.

He laughs, and shakes his head. "Nah, you keep threatening and you never will..." he tells her, then admires her more fondly. "It makes me want to...I don't know...take you to dinner or something," he mumbles.

She raises an eyebrow at him. "This is what it takes for you to treat me like a lady, huh?" she noted lightly.

"Maybe you should dress like one more often," he jokes, covering his wince with a laugh when she punches his arm hard enough to leave a bruise above his elbow. He'll cover it so she doesn't get the satisfaction of seeing her signature on him.

She turns and starts to stalk down the hall away from him, but he catches up to her and pulls at her arm, turning her back towards him. "If I treated you like a lady all the time, you'd divorce me," he told her playfully, giving her a quick kiss before releasing her.

The way she rolls her eyes and him and walks away without a word is more of the beauty he'd used to, but watching her walk away from him with those jeans hugging everything just right is exactly the sight he needs.