Okaay.This was going nowhere fast. But quitting is for wusses. I set my glass down on the bar next to his arm. He has a chunky platinum watch strapped around his left wrist and a tattoo of some sort of reptile. The tail coils around his sinewy forearm and thick bicep before disappearing under the short sleeve of his shirt. “Is that a snake?”
“No.” A look I can’t quite interpret falls across his face.
“What then?” I prompt.
“A drakaina.”
“What’s that?”
“A female dragon.”
The scaly ridges, outlined in black, are detailed and life-like. Intrigued, I reach out and touch his bare arm.Ho-ly shit!I damn near start breathing fire myself. I’d half expected the scales to be cool. Instead, his skin is hotter than a ghost pepper, and this close to him, he smells of citrus, spice, and sin. I want to bury my nose in his neck. I want to rip off his clothes and eat him up.
I lift my gaze to find something sharp and simmering in the dark depths of his eyes.
“How many tattoos do you have?” I am aware of some of them on his other arm.
No response. Hardly a breath. And that flash of something in his eyes is gone.
What was up with this man and his hot and cold vibes? Although he’s never returned any of my advances, I sense he isn’t immune. There’s a restraint that fuels those sonic waves. It pulsates in the tension arcing between us, and I just know it would blow the roof off if he let it loose.
“So…” I break the silence and trace the scales of the tail, challenging him to let down his guard. “How many others?”
“Why?”
“I’m curious.”
His expression remains level, but the muscles in his forearm beneath my fingertips rumble like quaking rocks. “Haven’t you heard that curiosity killed the cat?”
“Sure, I’ve heard it. But that doesn’t scare me.”
“I don’t imagine much does,” he says in what sounds like neither a compliment nor an insult. Then he surprises me with an answer. “I have fifteen or so, including my arms, torso, and thigh.”
“Oh.” I gulp, and my eyes drop past his hard chest and abs to his thighs and the bulge of denim. Maybe you could judge a man by the size of his feet, after all. Before I get caught drooling, I look back up.
He pins me with another of his nuclear stares that sears my flesh.
“I’d love to see your tattoos.” I reel him in now, taking a slow sip of beer and chasing the cold liquid on my lower lip with my tongue.
His eyes blatantly follow the motion.
“Interested?” I ask.
“In what?”
Time to go for it. No more games or beating around the bush. This sexual attraction is fierce and formidable. It has grabbed hold, and won’t be denied or abated until I thoroughly work him out of my system.
“Would you like to come back to my place? No strings attached.”
It flashes again, that hot and dangerous burn of his stare. Then just as quickly, it flickers out. “No, thank you.”
His abrupt response, delivered in the same tone as declining a taste of beer, snaps me back like whiplash.
“Sorry,” he adds, not seeming sorry at all. “Women like you aren’t my type.”
A blow no gentler than Theodore’s. And yet somehow, it manages to sting even more. My instinct is to curse him out and kick his ass into next week. Only, too stunned and mortified to speak, I just sit there as he places a twenty-dollar bill on the bar and walks away.
The achy rasp of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” drifts through the speakers, deepening the unwelcome pain in my chest. I look across the stretch of bar, past Cam’s raised eyebrows, to where Stiles is exiting through the door, leaving me in the wake of his rejection that hit entirely too close to home.
