“Listen the fuck up!” he bellows.
Instant silence. Every head turns.
“Skip,” I whisper, mortified.
He turns me toward him, pulling my face against his chest…shielding me. I grab his cut instinctively.
“Wait!Hecan touch your cut, but I can’t?” Syndy gasps.
I jerk my hand back, horrified. Skip grabs it, slaps it right back onto his cut, andstares her down.
“Can it, woman,” he growls.
Then he faces the bar.
“Listen, and listen carefully,” he snarls, voice carrying like a gunshot.
“The next person who disrespects my man…looks at him wrong, speaks to him wrong, breathes wrong in his direction…will learn a lesson they won’t fucking survive.”
No one moves.
“I’m not interested in anyone else,” he continues. “Not your bodies, not your beds, not your offers. I don’t want your attention. I don’t want your hands on me. I don’t want your histories with me.”
He tightens his arm around me.
“Eli is the only one I touch. The only one I want. The only one I let near my cut. So, hear me now. Skip is off the market. For good. And if any of you decide to test that?”
His voice goes razor sharp.
“I’ll deliver your fucking heart to my man as an offering.”
Skip calmly reaches over, grabs both our plates, and moves them to a nearby table with chairs.
He scoots his chair out, drops into it, then hauls me sideways onto his lap like I weigh nothing.
“Now,” he says, kissing the side of my jaw. “Where were we?”
I clear my throat, trying to ignore the fact that an entire bar just watched me get claimed like a medieval treasure.
“Um…four things,” I manage.
He hums against my neck.
“One,” I say, “I don’t want anyone’s organs delivered to me. Thank you, though.”
Skip snorts.
“Two…” I gesture awkwardly at myself. “I can sit in my own chair. I’m too big to be sitting on your lap. Especially in public. With my size, it doesn’t look… natural.”
His hand tightens on my hip, just enough to cut off my rambling.
“Three…I thought you weren’t into twinks?”
I look back at the cute little server and frown.
“And four,” I whisper, “thank you. Because… I’ll admit it… for a second, I was doubting us. They were both so perfectly pretty.”
Skip goes very,verystill.
