Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 142050 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 710(@200wpm)___ 568(@250wpm)___ 474(@300wpm)
“Listen,” he said in a low voice. “I’ve got to be honest.”
Her stare shot up toward his face, but she couldn’t make it any farther than his Adam’s apple. The tension rolling off him was palpable, and as a cold, hollow feeling struck her chest, she braced herself, noting he hadn’t taken his windbreaker off.
Closing her eyes, she nodded. “It’s okay—”
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”
Blink. Blink. Blink. “You… haven’t?”
“Why do you sound so surprised.” He laughed with an edge as he shrugged out of his jacket. “I can’t believe I’m the first man to say that to you.”
She refocused on her water glass because the fluttering feeling in her chest had probably translated into something rather walleyed-ish on her puss.
“That’s true,” she whispered. “But you’re the first man I’ve cared about hearing it from.”
Everything seemed to dim down around them, especially as he extended his arm and laid his hand on the table. Except just as she was about to reach across, the waiter, a tall, lanky young man with a ponytail, approached again.
“Hi, can I get you all some drinks?”
Dev took his palm back. “I’ll take a beer.”
“Sure, I’ll bring you the menu—”
“Just a beer. Doesn’t have to be special.”
That seemed to confuse the kid. “Do you want a seasonal lager? Or a draft—”
“Fermented hops. Cold. In a glass—but only because this looks like the kind of place where you can’t have it in a bottle.”
“Oh. Okay.” The waiter looked in her direction. “And you?”
Lyric smiled. “A ginger ale.”
“Right away.”
When they were alone again, she was the one who extended her palm this time. “Hi.”
Dev chuckled and took her hand in his. “Hi.”
“I thought about you, too.”
“Did you,” he drawled, his smile slow and sexual. “Good.”
The door opened and cold rushed in along with a quartet of bundled-up people. As their laughter spilled throughout the place, the sound barely registered.
It was amazing how you could be alone in a public place.
“Not much for drinking?” he remarked.
It was hard to translate his words, what with her mind going in all kinds of NSFW directions. But then the syllables arranged themselves properly.
“No, I don’t drink.”
He glanced out into the restaurant like he was looking for someone. “You want me to change my order? I can change—”
“Oh, no. It’s fine. I just don’t like the taste—as lame as that sounds.”
“Now that you mention it, you didn’t drink the beer I gave you last night. I would have gotten you water.”
The waiter came over with two golden long-stems, one of which had ice. “I’ll get your menus.”
“Thank you,” Lyric murmured. And then as they just stared into each other’s eyes, she flushed. “So…”
“Hard to make conversation without the soundtrack of bullets, huh.” As she recoiled, he put his free palm up. “Too soon?”
“Ah—no. No, I—”
“That was a bad joke. Sorry.”
Well, she thought, it would have been funnier if her brother was willing to talk to her. Or if all of her parents would have stopped looking at her like she was someone they didn’t recognize.
But come on, casually dating a human shouldn’t be that big a deal. And all of them had dealt with their own kinds of unconventionals in their relationships.
The arrival of the menus cut that avenue of thinking off, and that was not a bad thing. The conversation also got easier as they started to talk about food choices: what they liked, didn’t like, hated, would eat until they passed out.
After they put their order in, Dev sat back and regarded her in that way he did… like there was absolutely no one else on the entire planet. He’d been right. She did get told she was beautiful by males. But that was usually as their eyes were going down her body.
Dev’s were right on her own—
In the back of her mind, something registered, some kind of… not an alarm bell, no. It was something else that—
“So tell me more about your work?” he prompted.
Snapping out of it, she forced a laugh. “Well, I’m about to be out of work.”
“Career transition?”
“You might say.” She took a sip of the ginger ale. “I have one more commitment I have to honor, and then I’m through with the influencer business.”
“Oh?”
Lyric tucked some of her hair behind her ear. “Yeah, my manager’s roped me into that Resolve2Evolve convention—yes, the billboard that almost killed me. You’re remembering it correctly. Kind of ironic, all things considered.”
His eyes narrowed. “What are you going to do there?”
“Not stand under any big signs, first off. And it’s not my scene, trust me. All that self-help stuff, I think, is largely just spoon-fed platitudes.” Although considering the state of her own life, should she really be so judgy? “My manager—former manager—Marcia set it up before I could tell her I was dissolving my online persona and then couldn’t get me out of it.”