Fuck. I swallowed hard. I was going to have to think about that because the way I wanted to kiss her might lead to some loss of control. “Hey, you’re looking well.”
Her smile was bright. “You too. You look good in black. You feeling better?”
I frowned, then forced my expression to relax as I remembered my food poisoning cover story. “Much. Maybe we’ll actually get to finish this date.”
She laughed at that. “Please, don’t jinx it.”
When the conversation was surface topics, things were easy. Relaxed. Familiar. Like I could do this with her. But once we sat down and I asked about her work, I felt like I was getting a presentation. Like the woman whom I wanted to get to know, the one with the knockout scent who harnessed the sun in her smile, took a backseat and was replaced by a completely different woman. One who, while perfectly nice—engaging even—was not real somehow. Maybe I was projecting. Because hell, I wasn’t real. I was a bloody Tin Man.
And then, of course, she said, “How is work going? You are designing your own game, right?”
I knew exactly which Marcus suit to access. We got briefs weekly with work notes to memorize so we could better play real people. “It’s great. I ran into some difficulties, but in the end, I got it working. It’s boring, I know.”
“No,” she said enthusiastically. “It’s not boring at all. I want to hear about what you do.”
The irony of it was that, if push came to shove, I could probably put some sort of game together. I’d been trained in the field. I had a photographic memory. It wasn’t super complex, but I didn’t actually do the job, so it made lying about it difficult.
“You were telling me that your brother had a baby. A son, right?”
I sighed. “A baby boy.” Liam had a girl. Using real details was encouraged, but just bits and pieces of them. We were trained to keep things similar but blurred.
Once dessert was served, my heart started to beat faster. It was time that we figured out if we were going to keep doing this. I liked her, but would it be awkward if we just stopped?
Would it be awkward for you? Find something you like about this woman. Make it stick.
After I paid the check and we left the restaurant, I took her hand.
It was the quickest movement, but her gaze flickered down to our joined hands. The smile she gave me was bright, warm, inviting. But her eyes were wary. Searching.
Did she find what she was looking for? Most people would have believed the façade, but not Lyra. If I knew what was good for me, I would pick someone else. Someone easier. There was nothing easy about Lyra. She was looking for the real me, but she wasn’t going to find it. That would be dangerous for the both of us.
But still, she let me hold her hand and comfortably fit her small, delicate one in mine. The electric hum that snaked up my arm was almost impossible to ignore. The more time I spent with her, the more I wanted her.
When we reached the community garden in the park near our building, I stopped her. “So I’ve been thinking. It’s the third date.” I watched her visibly swallow, hard.
“I’m sorry. I’m really nervous.”
That moment of realness made me grin. “There’s probably no need to be nervous.”
Her brows lifted, and then she blinked rapidly in surprise. “Oh, right, yeah. Sure, totally. We can just be friends.”
Friends? I shook my head. For some reason, I had an aversion to that idea. “No, I meant before we—you know, get nervous about anything else, maybe we should kiss first?”
She choked out a laugh. “Oh my God, I’m like the worst date ever. I’m all stiff and awkward, then I proposition you.”
I laughed. “No. We’ve been busy and then on our first date, you got called for a work emergency.”
She winced. “I’m really sorry about that. And well, you were sick the next time.”
Right… sick. “We could try it now.” My voice sounded like someone had put it through a cement mixer.
You’ve been staring at her lips all through dinner, wondering if one kiss will tell you how this is supposed to go.
The community garden was helping me out with ambiance. It had tea lights strung around the trees inside. I’d helped with planting some of the flowers earlier in the year, and they had all started to bloom now. It was the perfect romantic spot for a kiss.
“Oh, right, yeah. L-let’s do this.”
There was something endearing about her. She was tiny compared to me. Five foot six or seven. I couldn’t tell properly because she was almost always wearing heels. Either way, I towered over her. I stood six foot three, so I had a tendency to do that to everyone. She was lean, slender but curvy. Great arse. The kind you could really dig your hands into.
And slap.
I cleared my throat to erase that mental imagery. Nope. I would not think about slapping her arse. I would not think about her arse at all. This was just a kiss.
I would kiss her and see if she was okay with that. And then later—much later—I’d think about slapping her arse. Maybe doing other things to her arse, but that was beside the point.
She stepped in, her scent making me dizzy, coaxing me to lean in, get a whiff, and become ensnared in her trap forever. I took her arm, sliding my fingers along her soft, supple skin until my thumb reached her wrist and paused at the pulse point. I could feel the uptake as I gently rubbed that spot. Something stirred deep inside me as an answer to that rapid flutter. And then her other arm wrapped around my neck and she whispered, “Okay, Marcus Black, let’s see what you’ve got.”
I grinned then, and holy shit,
