Page 59 of Badd Ass
I bobbed my head to one side. “Kind of.”
“I’m convinced he’s an ancient Eastern mystic disguised in the body of a sullen teenager,” Zane said. “It’s the only possible explanation for how he knows half the shit he does.”
“I watch, and I listen, and I ask questions. I pay attention. I read.” Lucian finished his stew and knocked his beer back. “It’s not mysticism, it’s called being a keen observer of human nature.”
“Yeah, whatever, Confucius.” Zane leaned back in the booth and slung his arm around me. “Get back in the kitchen, you slacker.”
Lucian shook his head again, a small but genuine grin on his lips, and then flipped Zane the bird. “Shouldn’tyoube behind the bar?”
“Brock got bored being by himself upstairs, so he came down to relieve me.”
Lucian just nodded and went back into the kitchen, whistling the theme toKung Fu.
Zane watched him, and then grinned at me. “That kid is something else.”
“How old is he?” I asked.
“Nineteen, almost twenty.”
“He’s not really a kid, though, is he?”
Zane shook his head. “No, you’re right, he’s not. But then, he never has been. Even when he was a little kid he was quiet to the point of silence. He didn’t speak until he was more than two, but then he was speaking full sentences. Mom thought he might have developmental problems, but the doctor said he was physically capable of speech, fully capable mentally, and developing normally, he just…didn’t want to speak for whatever reason.”
“Huh. Well, he’s a wise young man.”
Zane laughed, nodding. “No shit. You forget he’s there, and you’ll be having this conversation or whatever, and then he’ll just bust out with a sentence or two that’s so…insightful, I guess, that it makes everyone just go, ‘Huh, he’s right. I’ll be damned.’”
I leaned against Zane’s shoulder. “Want to, um, go upstairs? Or downtown? Something?”
He eyed me. “When’s your flight out, again?”
I blinked back some kind of weird, hot, salty wetness that was gathering in the corners of my eyes. Not sure what it was about, but I didn’t like it very much. “Ten tomorrow morning.”
“This week went by way too fast, didn’t it?” His arm, slung around my shoulders, tightened. “I’m kind of just feeling one more night together in my bed. Whatcha say, babe?”
I nodded. “I’d like that.”
He threaded his fingers into mine, swung his legs out of the booth, stood up, and then bent to lift me bodily out of the booth. Effortlessly, he carried me to the stairs leading up to the apartment, pausing to let me open the door for him. Before ascending the stairs, he kissed me.
Right there in full view of the entire, packed bar, eliciting a chorus of wolf whistles and cat calls from his brothers and several of the bar patrons. I laughed though the kiss, unable to keep a grin from spreading across my lips, despite my melancholy.
To his room, then.
And his bed.
Clothes came off, and he settled above me, kissing me breathless, kissing me senseless, kissing me into teary-eyed oblivion. He backed away, his thumb brushing under my eyes.
“Hey, none of that,” he murmured.
Ask me to stay, ask me to stay, ask me to stay—the plea rang through my mind, but didn’t pass my lips. I wouldn’t beg, couldn’t.
“This has just…it’s been the most amazing week of my life,” I whispered.
He slid into me, bare, his erection hot and hard inside me. “It has been for me, too.”
I wrapped my legs around his waist, my arms around his neck, and I kissed him as we began moving together in perfect synchronicity. Our hips met, our tongues tangled, our breaths mated, and I couldn’t help another tear from sliding down my cheek. Zane didn’t wipe that one away, even though he saw it. His eyes locked on mine as we moved together. He didn’t shush me as I began moaning, a sound lost somewhere between a groan of rapture and a sob of sorrow.
His eyes reflected his own deep well of intense emotion, none of which he expressed verbally. He showed me, though, in the desperate fervor of his thrusting, in the tremble of his lips as he held off his climax, in the clench of his jaw and lowering of his brow, in the rippling of his arms on either side of my face like solid iron-hard bars of flesh and muscle.