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“I don’t grunt.” I successfully drink my coffee without drowning myself this time.
“You grunt,” he insists.
“I do not,” I snap. “I don’t even speak.”
“How is that better?” he asks.
I wrinkle my nose. “It’s not fucking grunting like a caveman?—”
“I need coffee before all this noise.”
I snap my mouth shut.
Zarina’s morning voice is gruff and a little croaky from lack of use, her hair a cloud around her face. She’s wearing a hugeblack shirt that falls to her mid-thigh and nothing else. And while it’s technically covering more skin than her dress did last night, my body does not understand the logic of my brain. I stare at the hem, at her bare feet padding over the matte-black tile, at her sleep-swollen face she rubs as if trying to encourage it awake, and grip my mug like it’s the only thing holding me upright.
Darius opens the cabinet with the dishes and steps back, watching me watch Zarina. She doesn’t mutter a word of thanks to him before she rises on her tiptoes to reach over her head for a mug. And the moment she does, the shirt rides up just enough to show the crest of her ass where it meets her thigh. That’s the moment my brain loses all function for a full ten seconds.
Zarina settles back on her heels and pours her coffee while I squeeze my eyes shut and attempt to imprint that image in my head for all eternity. My imagination replaces Darius’s shirt with mine, and I almost stagger at the thought.
Something flicks my temple—Darius. He leans close and whispers, “Simp.”
“Shut up,” I grumble, rubbing my temple.
Darius huffs a laugh and carries his coffee out to the deck without another word. I glare at the back of his head as he surveys the inner courtyard of our compound, which is really the combined backyards of the Sallay block where we bought every single house and renovated them into an estate worthy of a Cardinal Family. Darius has aspirations to convert the courtyard into a training ground, but I refuse to let our home become militarized like that. Home should be refuge, not warfare.
The fridge door snaps closed, and Zarina picks up her coffee.
“Good morning.” I raise my mug.
She squints at me and does not return the greeting, taking a sip instead.
“Sleep all right?” I ask.
She licks her lips like she’s chasing the caffeine. “Fine.”
“Not a morning person, then,” I say.
“Not until coffee.” She leans a hip against the counter, her shirt blending into the black-on-black theme of the kitchen, and holds her mug with two hands.
“Drink up, then.” I keep my gaze on her face, my hands relaxed. “We have business to discuss.”
She grimaces. “At seven thirty-four in the morning?”
“Do you have any clothes?” I ask. And it’s half an excuse to give in to the overwhelming urge to drop my gaze to the hem of her shirt again, to her thighs the color of honey. I linger there, imagining there are actual smears of sweet, sticky honey on her skin and?—
“Whiplash, Jesus,” she mutters.
I drag my eyes up again, slow enough to know it’s less heated and more calculating by the time I meet her glare. “I’m trying to decide if our business should wait until you have clothes.”
She arches a brow. “Is it my clothes or lack thereof that bothers you?”
I want to say that it’s my inability to string two non-sexual thoughts together with her in that goddamn shirt that bothers me. But I don’t. Instead, I rest my chin on my hand with a lazy grin. Her glare darkens, red flushing her neck, and I file that away for later.
“Would you prefer to be in Darius’s shirt while we discuss next moves or in a tailored outfit?” I ask.
She drops a hand to the top of her thigh and bunches up the hem of the shirt in her fist. The crease of her hip lies in the shadow just beneath the heel of her palm. I can’t stop my eyes from flicking down, tracing the line of her body, trying to see what might lie beneath the black cotton.
“Which would more easily bring you to your knees?” Zarina’s voice is as husky as when she entered the kitchen.