His mother gasped. “Well, Inever.”
“Bye, Riley! It was great to see you again. We’ll have to do a double date sometime soon,” Andy said enthusiastically.
“What did she say?” Miguel demanded.
“She insinuated that we don’t care about our son,” Marie bellowed.
“Oh, I don’t think she insinuated anything,” Nick said, slinging his arm around his girl’s shoulders. “Night, folks.”
“Night, Uncle Nicky,” Esmeralda said without looking up from her book.
Nick grinned the whole way to the front door.
17
9:31 p.m., Saturday, August 15
“Ithink that went well,” Nick said from the passenger seat.
“Did we just come from the same family dinner?” Riley asked as she navigated his parents’ street. “I’m a money-grubbing psychic, and you’re a sleazy investigator with a wine buzz.”
“It’s easy to not care about what people think when you’ve been building a tolerance to it your entire life,” he explained.
“Huh. You might actually have a point there.” She drummed her fingers against the steering wheel and then let loose the question that had been on the tip of her tongue all night. “So you’ve really never been jealous before?”
He reached over and brushed her hair back from her face, capturing it at the nape of her neck. “Never. I don’t like it.”
She bit her lip and shot him a glance when she pulled up to a stop sign. “I kinda did. And I know that makes me sound like a seventh grader looking for drama. But it was nice to know how much you care.”
“Youknowhow much I care, Thorn.” His voice was low and gravelly. “You’re a psychic, remember?”
“Don’t remind me. And just so you know, I don’t go spelunking in your head. Every once in a while, I might accidentally pick up on something. But I try to respect your privacy.”
“You do know how much I care, don’t you?” he repeated, his other hand sliding the skirt of her dress higher and higher.
“I have a rough idea.” Her voice sounded like she was being strangled. Only Nick Santiago could take her from pissed off to turned on in the span of ten seconds.
“Pull over there,” he said, nodding toward the dead end of the street before turning his attention back to the thigh he was exposing.
“We arenothaving sex in your parents’ neighborhood.”
His fingers tightened on her hair. “Pull over.”
“I used to make good decisions before I met you,” she complained as she took the right turn and parked in front of someone’s walled mini-estate.
His grin was lethal. “But you have a lot more fun now.”
She wanted to argue, but he was releasing her seatbelt and turning off the engine.
“You can’t be serious,” she whispered in the dark.
He guided her hand to his lap, where she found him hard. “Deadly. Do you know how many times we’ve been interrupted in the last week alone?”
“No.”
“Seventeen,” he said. “I counted.”
“How much testosterone do you have? We just got in a fight with your parents, and you had at least a bottle and a half of wine.” Not that she was complaining. A turned-on Nick was one of her favorite kinds of Nicks.
