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“Our tête-à-tête is over,” I informed him.
“Our teh-tah what?” he asked.
“Tête-à-tête. It’s French for a private conversation between two people,” I educated.
“I need to teach you Spanish,” Javi muttered.
“Charla privada,” I declared.
Javi stared at me, something working behind his golden eyes I did not want to see, because even with the little I let in, it was divine, so I blocked it out.
“Okay, I don’t know what’s going on here, and I’ll go on record right now stating that I really, really wanna know,” Shanti butted into our staring contest. “But Willow got an early morning call from Kev.”
That got both Javi’s and my attention.
“Trev was murdered last night,” Shanti announced.
“Holy—” I began.
“Shit,” Javi bit off.
“I’m calling an Angels confab,” Shanti said. “Can you come to work early so we can discuss this latest development?” she asked me.
“What are you women into?” Javi demanded to know, sounding a hundred shades of unhappy, which was ninety-nine-point-nine shades too much when it came to Javi.
“Not murdered dudes,” Shanti told him. “That’s a huge-ass curveball.”
“You bitches need to pull back,” Javi decreed.
Shanti’s eyes flashed, and I suspected mine did too, because as all the world knew, we could call each other bitches because we were each other’s bitches.
Some guy couldn’t call us bitches.
(Though, I tried not to cuss on the whole. I just couldn’t pull it off like other people could. Cursing made me sound like I was trying to be a hard-A at the same time failing spectacularly.)
Javi seemed impervious to our eye flashes, demonstrating this by asking, “How’d this asshole get murdered?”
“Throat slit,” Shanti answered.
I gasped. “Oh my God!”
Even if I’d sat down briefly with the man last night and I was stunned and sickened that he was now dead, even more so since he got dead by those means, that was the only reaction I was able to have because I had to have a new reaction seeing as I was suddenly backing up double time.
I did this until I hit wall, and Javi, who’d been stalking me into that position, got deep in my space, including his face in mine.
I didn’t have good memories of his face being that close to mine, no matter how beautiful he was.
We weren’t going to make any either, I knew, when he ordered, “You are so far out of whatever this shit is, it’s not even a memory for you.”
Man, he was making me mad.
“Do I have to remind you that you can’t tell me what to do?” I asked angrily.
He ignored me, and instead told me more stuff to do, “And I’m not makin’ a fuckin’ appointment to work our shit out. We’re hooking up tonight. Get Jess to take you to work. I’ll pick you up, and we’re having dinner.”
I really wanted to tell him what he just said was kinda like making an appointment.
I did not, because I was stuck on the fact that I was absolutely not sitting with this man at a dinner, which would feel like a date, in order to make him feel better for spouting off at me and sharing in a not-nice way the kind of woman he thought I was, no matter how much he regretted doing it.