I think my mouth watered a little before I caught myself and snapped my eyes over to Shane. "He wasn't listening."
“Don’t think anybody’s ever pinched me in my life,” Dex claimed with a frown.
"You weren't listening!" I insisted.
“I’m gonna have a goddamn bruise. From you,” he pointed out the obvious.
"Bro," Shane hummed. "You know your ass can't be getting into trouble again."
I wanted to ask him if he was still under probation. I mean, he'd lost his mind over some guy accidentally spilling a drink on him. Whatwouldn'tmake him lose his mind?
Almost as if he was reading my mind, Dex made an irritated noise in his throat. "He spilled shit on me."
I snickered and mumbled under my breath, "Wearing a black shirt." Like that was noticeable.
I must have spoken too loudly because Dex's head snapped around to look me in the face.
With a one-shoulder shrug, I twisted my body to look out the window. "Just saying. Spray a little Resolve on it and it's fine. You didn't need to get your panties in a wad."
Shane snorted.
Dex grunted but I ignored him and settled my forehead against the window of the cab, listening to Shane strike up a conversation about having watched The Avengers recently. I’d overheard from Slim that Dex's first tattoo had been a Captain America shield somewhere on him. Where exactly it was located, I had no clue.
To be honest, I thought that was sort of cute.
Big, bad Dex with his inked up arms, black bike, the f-bomb dropping dick in a motorcycle club… liked superheroes? Unreal.
So all right, it was pretty friggin’ cute.
I pulled out a twenty dollar bill from my purse to pay for the trip when Dex pushed my hand away and nudged me out of the cab. I felt like a drunken prostitute on the way through the hotel lobby and up the elevator with the two friends. Shane said bye on his floor while we went up silently to the twelfth floor.
We were about halfway down the hall when I remembered something Dex had said at the bar about being too old. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-three,” he answered.
I stopped walking and stared at him. Thirty-three? I guess it made sense. He had his own business. A business that had been open for six years, so it wasn’t like he couldhave been too much younger despite the fact that his looks landed him somewhere in his mid twenties instead of early thirties.
“Huh,” I huffed, taking in the lean frame in a fitted shirt. “You don’t look like you’re thirty.”
Dex shot me a sidelonglook that could have passed as a smile. “I feel like it most of the time."
Neither one of us said anything else as we made it into the room. I grabbed my pajamas and ducked into the bathroom to shower the smell of sweat from the bar off and get ready for bed. By the time I made it back out, Dex was sitting on the edge of the mattress in basketball shorts and a t-shirt with a bottle of lotion between his legs, one hand massaging his opposite arm.
“Are you putting lotion on?” I asked.
Those true blue eyes flickered up to mine. “Yeah. It preserves the colors. See?” He slid the sleeve of his t-shirt up to his shoulder, pointing at the solid shiny black ink of his right arm. “Gottabe careful with all this black. I don’t want it lookin’ gray in a few years.”
“Oh,” was my brilliant response. I blinked. “How many do you have?”
Dex smiled, that slow creeping smile that I recognized as a sign that he was amused. “Only five.” He watched me standing there for a minute longer. “Wanna see 'em?”
No.
Whowas Ikidding? I nodded anyway.
He slid forward on the edge of the bed, his hands dropping to his knees before he started yanking up the material on one side of his shorts. Heavy muscle filled in his thigh covered in black ink. A tattoo that looked like the outline of a sugar skull—the ones I'd studied in my Mexican Folk Art class in high school—stamped his leg. The letters 'WMC' and 1974 were tattooed in individual banners directly below the figure withloose, almost loopylettering.
“This is my club piece,” he explained.
