“Hey, I’m dripping suds everywhere.”
“Don’t care,” he murmurs, leaning in toward me.
My heart hammers in my chest and my eyes close as he moves in and presses his lips to mine. Sweeping his tongue over mine, I come alive and forget my hands are wet as I latch onto his hoodie to get closer to him.
His hand finds its way up to the back of my neck and his warmth runs through me. I’m hungry for more but he pulls back and rests his forehead against mine.
There’s so much more to him than the guy I met in Tariq’s kitchen. He wants to know everything about me, and the more time I spend around him, the more I want to learn about him. There’s no denying he’s a gang member, but it’s not all he is. He’s a survivalist and I can understand that.
“It’s getting late, I should get home.”
“I’ll walk you out.”
I say my goodbyes to his brothers and grandmother and offer a small smile to his mother. She doesn’t say goodbye.
Darius grabs my keys from the hall unit, and I ask, “Are the wheels on my car still going to be there?”
“It’s outside my house, no one will have touched it.”
He opens the door for me and like he said, my car is still in one piece. The sun is setting and a chill runs through me. Stepping down off the porch, I look up and down the street. It’s unusually quiet and I shiver from the chilly breeze.
Darius walks me to my car and hands over my keys. His skin brushes against mine and I flit my eyes to his.
“Thank you for dinner. Your family are nice, and you have a lovely home.”
He stares at me, not saying a word.
“Are you the only one providing for them?”
He nods.
“How?”
If he expects to get to know me without him being honest with me in return, he’s got another thing coming.
Smirking, he says, “Anyway I can.”
“What does that mean?”
He moves closer. “It means, I do what I have to in order to pay the bills, put food on the table, and clothes on their backs.”
He opens the door for me, but I don’t move to leave. I’m not ready for this to end.
“I don’t bring anyone home, you feel me?”
It’s almost a privilege I got to be the one he let into the mini world he keeps to himself.
I smile. “I feel you.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, his eyes blaze with what I hope is lust.
“I’m not going to lie, I want inside you.”
“Romantic,” I snort.
“Romance doesn’t run in my blood…” He moves even closer, his sweater brushing against my jacket. “But I don’t think that’ll matter to you.”
It should scare me how he sees me so well. He’s right, romance doesn’t bother me. I’ve seen for myself how caring and protective he is of his family. You can tell a lot about a person by how they are with their blood. It shows who they truly are when they’re not hiding it from everyone else.
“My dad is away on business tonight, if you don’t have plans, you should come over.”
