Seeing this hunk in the raw would certainly be no hardship.
Maybe if all flashers were gorgeous, there’d never be any public indecency charges enforced?
Highly likely, and totally unfair.
Because they were in public, and her security was eating Michelin starred food on her father’s dime, she felt safe enough to say, “I’ll stay calm.”
His smile was so warm she felt her cheeks grow even redder.Jeez, she was turning into a beet while he grew ever more handsome.
He stared her square in the eye, then closed his, let out a deep breath, but as he opened them again, looking right at her once more, everything had changed somehow.
His eyes were still blue, but they were different.Gold striations had appeared in the orbs, making them even more gorgeous than mere moments before.In fact, she was blown away by their beauty.It was like looking into expensive marble with the distinct colors streaking through the stone.
But, as she carried on looking deep into his gaze, the gold didn’t stop there.
She gasped when the gold seemed to take shape, coalescing into a wavy line that drifted over to her.As she watched, each striation set another line sparking from his eyes and drifting out into the ether.She looked from him, watching where the energy ended up.
Diana appeared, and a gold line clashed with her.The Maître d’.Some men at the bar.Other wavy lines went toward the kitchen.
She frowned, remembering what he’d said about how much of his family worked in this place…
El looked at her security, who, while eating, were also watching the room as a whole, monitoring for risks to her person.There were no wavy lines connecting them to Ryan, and a lot of the early bird diners were also unattached.
But she?
No.
As she looked back at Ryan, a little freaked and a lot confused at the sparks that were flying from his eyes and linking him to people in the room, she saw the line between them was thick now.Almost as though it had time to grow while she’d been looking at his other connections in the room.
She gulped.
Looking at Diana, who she knew to be his niece, she saw that the gold bond was strong, the thickness of a necklace chain.When she looked back at him, the line uniting El to him was as thick as a piece of rope.
Her jaw trembled as she tried to figure out what that meant.
If the thickness of it represented…
She raised a hand to cover her eyes, unable to look any more at the gold sparks throughout the room.
“You don’t understand yet,” Ryan said softly, but his voice was so much deeper than before.Whatever he’d done to show her that, somehow, it had changed his tenor.He was almost bass now.His tone close to booming even if it was quiet enough so that no one could hear.
“What was that?”she whispered, peering through her fingers to ask him.“Brutal honesty, remember?”
“It was how I know who you are to me.”
She frowned.“I’m nothing to you.We’re just strangers.On a date.”
“Looking to be more,” he continued.“Otherwise, why would we have agreed to meet?”He shook his head.“Don’t be scared, El, there’s no need, and I mean you no harm.”
“You ask me to not to be scared,” she scoffed, “but you show me something that’s so beyond insane, I can’t even begin to describe it.”
He nodded, the act sage, like he understood her growing hysteria.Because she said she’d stay calm and wouldn’t freak out, loudly, she intended to do as bid.
With a shudder, she reached for her spritzer and took a huge gulp as he murmured, “As I’m sure you gathered, each link is to someone close to me.”
“I did gather that, but that’s what doesn’t make sense.There’s one between us.But we’re strangers.We don’t know each other.”
“I keep using the word ‘yet’, and I use it again now.We don’t know each other yet, but we were always supposed to meet.”
