And it was that question, that had me in his underused spare bedroomminutes later.
I'd read too many books where men had that secret bedroom that seconded as a play room for the kinky, or hell, an operations room for some secret society they belonged to. So when Dex opened the closed door to the room I'd yet to see, it wasn't at all what I was expecting.
There were bright, pure white light bulbs in the ceiling fan, lamps in two corners of the room flooding the space with illumination. A drafting desk very similar to the one back at Pins was pushed up against the wall with the windows. There were large bookshelves filled with books and pristine plastic wrapped comic books. Vintageaction figures were settled on shelves that dotted all of the walls where there wasn't posters or more framed artwork. Artwork that looked like Dex's heavy-handed style on kohl.
The frame closest to me looked like an original dark superhero. A black cape billowed behind a massive, muscular man with eyes that looked haunted.
"Did you do this one?" I asked him.
"Mmhmm," he answered right before I felt the warm length of his body just behind me. "That's one of my earliest drawings."
"It's so good," I told him honestly, taking in the sweep of heavy lines around the character. I wanted to turn around but he was too close, and it was easier to play opossum than to face Dex Locke. "You should start your own comic book."
"Thanks, babe." He paused. "I used to want to back when I was a kid, but... shit doesn't always work out thatway, you know?" There were no truer words that couldhave been said for me to understand completely.
"Oh, I know." I blew out a breath. "Stuff happens."
"Shit happens," he laughed darkly.
I tried to look at him out of the corner of my eye but I couldn't. "And here you are, a successful business man."
Dex snorted but it wasn't exactly in amusement. "If my juvie parole officer could see me now."
"You got in trouble when you were young, too?" I don't know why I asked. Like so many other things, this was Dex. It made more sense than not.
"’Course I did. Spent six months in boot camp when I was seventeen," he sounded a little too proud of it.
I smiled even though he couldn't see it. "For what?"
"What do youthink?"
"Jaywalking?" I laughed.
"No."
I turned my head to look at him over my shoulder. “Indecent exposure?”
All he did was stare at me for the longest moment in history in response. When I snickered, he blinked, one side of his mouth tipping up just barely.
“I don’t think I’ve ever let anybody gimme as much grief as you do.”
“Thank you?”
He grunted.
“Okay, no gay prostituting for you. What else then? Were you shanking freshman in school?” I really had no idea. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about him getting into fistfights with a teacher.
The other side of his mouth tipped up high right before he snorted, the sound was so close to my ear I could feel the heat of his lips and skin. "Graffiti."
"Oh." The teenage graffiti artist who turned intoatattoo artist? Perfect. As I did the math in my head, I realized that his dad'scrapmust have been almost immediately after he'd gotten in trouble. "And then?"
He shrugged. "Nothin’ much.I was still a shit when I got out."
Like that wasn't still the case. Ha.
"I got in trouble again almost right after I got out. That's why I got stuck with the whole five year sentence at county."
And at some point between that period of time, the tiger had changed his stripes but it'd been a little too late. From graffiti to assault. I couldn't have been attracted to a man that had gone to jail for unpaid traffic fines—and once I thought about it, that seemed really lame. Who would want to have feelings for a guy like that?
