And when I pulled Roxie into the room, threw her down on the bed, and saw her gaze up at me with a naughty sparkle in her eyes?
I stopped caring about what Violet thought.
20
Roxie
When I was a little girl, we always went to my Nana’s house for Thanksgiving. Nana made sure to pull me into the kitchen to put me to work as her “special little helper,” retrieving spices and rearranging dishes as they came out of the oven. She talked constantly while cooking, hardly pausing to breathe as she juggled pots and pans like some sort of culinary circus performer. She would tell me about the latest drama in the soap opera she watched, and share gossip about the neighbors in her community (”Julia next door is aslut. And at age 81!”)
But she mostly rambled on about cooking. Little tips and tricks she had learned in the kitchen across decades. “The most important lesson I can teach you,” she said one Thanksgiving day, “is about the greatest spice of all. The one which enhances every single dish in this kitchen. Time.”
“Thyme?” I asked, reaching for the bottle in the cabinet and holding it up.
Nana gave a full-chested laugh. “Not thyme, darling.Time. When did I tell your mother I was serving dinner?”
“Four o’clock.”
“And what time is it now?” she asked.
I stood on my tip-toes so I could see the oven clock above a pot of boiling potatoes. “Almost five.”
“Exactly!Timeis the greatest spice of all. If you make your guests wait a little while, smelling all the delicious smells from the kitchen, they’ll get hungrier. And when they do sit down to eat, the meal will taste twice as good because they had to wait.”
That lesson was true in cooking, and it was also true in romance.
Riot and I had been waiting for so long, sharing secret kisses and desperate touches wherever we could, that we wereravenousfor each other by the time I walked into his hotel room. He threw me onto the bed, covered me with his warm body, and finally gave me what we’d both been waiting for.
It was raw and intense. Moving by instinct rather than thought, tearing at each other’s clothes and kissing wherever our lips touched. And as soon as he sank into me, I closed my eyes and surrendered to the mindless drive of our bodies.
Riot seemed distant as we cuddled afterward. Like he was lost in thought, staring up at the ceiling while his fingertips strummed along my back like I was a guitar made of flesh and bone.
“Whatchya thinking about?”
With my cheek against his chest, I felt him grunt more than I heard it. “Whether we should swap our opening song.”
“You don’t like the setlist?”
He shrugged. “I do. Just wondering if it can be improved.”
I lightly kissed his chest then looked up at him. “I think you’re overthinking things.”
“Hah. Probably.” His hand slid lower. “Right now I’m overthinking that ass.”
He gave my cheek a little squeeze, and I shook it for him.
“It’s yours to do whatever you want with,” I told him.
Suddenly he slid out from under me. I sat up and watched him walk across the room to retrieve his guitar, admiring the way his tattoos decorated his sinfully sexy body.
“Feel free to keep walking around naked.”
“Sorry. Gonna cover myself up in a second.”
“Boo!”
Riot pointed a finger at me in warning. “I don’t like being booed. Not even as a joke.”
“I find it hard to believe you’ve ever been booed before.”
