Page 46 of Passion and Payback

“That doesn’t narrow it down much. There’s quite a few places in the city that require suits.”

“Well,” he said, pushing to his feet. “I suppose I should probably start doing some research, shouldn’t I?”

“I imagine you should,” I said, eyes flitting to the curve of his ass before hastily returning to his face. If we were to play this like a proper date, I would have to start behaving appropriately. Well, for a little while anyway, between the kiss and now the offer of a ‘proper’ date, I could feel an entirely different door opening in my mind. The kind that would rewrite how I looked at him, tearing down the walls and fail-safes I’d placed in my head over many years.

“And don’t think I didn’t see you just check out my ass,” he said as he left the room, allowing me a moment to see the grin on his face before he disappeared around the corner.

“Wear a little less clothing, and I’ll check a few other things out,” I muttered as I picked up my laptop, opened it, and stared at the screen momentarily before closing the program.

I had a few other things on my mind that were more important.

KAI

“Just how long are you going to take in there?” Hunter called through the bathroom door.

“I haven’t been in here that long,” I said with a roll of my eyes as I tried to ensure I got every last bit of soap off my body. “You’re going to take far longer than me.”

“Will not!”

“Will to.”

Italwaystook him longer to get ready to go out for the night. Even when we were teenagers and weren’t going anywhere important, he took forever, mostly because there was rarely anywhere important to go. There had been a couple of years there, when we’d been about thirteen, where he’d taken to trying to cover up his marks with makeup, and he got quite good at it. Even the worst bruises ended up looking faint and healing.

Until his father figured out what he was doing. It was the one time I’d seen Hunter almost lose his self-control. He’d shown up at my house, full of emotion, as he stood there, holding an arm that needed a cast, covered in new bruises and with blood running down his face. Even when I took him to the hospital, he made me promise I wouldn’t take my rage out on the bastardwho’d caused Hunter so much harm. Back then, I thought he’d done it not because he was afraid of what his alcoholic, out-of-shape father could have done to me but what I would have done to him and what would have happened to me afterward.

It was only now I wondered if it was his way of controlling himself; by keeping me calm, he could also keep himself calm.

“I’m getting out now!” I called so he could start getting ready. I had found a nice place that thankfully had a last-minute cancellation and managed to get a reservation. The place was…well, I couldn’t pronounce the name, considering how horribly French it was. I did, however, have the location stored on my phone, so finding it wasn’t going to be a problem, though we were going to have problems if the menu was in French and I had to pronounce anything aloud.

“About time!” he called through the door, sounding irritable. He’d never been good at waiting patiently. He’d been calm all week, only asking if I’d managed to find something and looking a little surprised when I said I had. Then he laughed when I said I’d pulled some strings because we both knew I had zero and let the subject drop. Yet as the time ticked away today, he pestered me about getting ready and asking if I had something to wear.

I opened the door, keeping a hand on the towel around my waist, and eyed him. “It was fifteen minutes at most. I was making sure to get every nook and cranny, alright?”

The argument on his face died as his eyes widened while he stared at me, his arm tightening around the towel he was holding. “I?—”

“What?” I asked in bewilderment. “Cat got your tongue?”

“Uh, no, but all your nooks and crannies sure do,” he said with a snort, eyes slowly panning over me, forcing me to realize I was standing there in just a towel, and not a particularly thick one. “You’re very…wet.”

“Good lord,” I said with a laugh, pushing past him. “Tone down the horny.”

“Oh, I’ve been trying,” he teased, and I knew that once again, he was checking out my ass. Of course, that was after he made sure to stare at my groin covered by the thin towel as I moved past him.

The past week had been…interesting. Asking Hunter out on a date had shifted something in our heads, especially how we were around one another. We’d be perfectly fine one moment, and then the next, I’d catch his eyes lingering on me a little too long. I hadn’t figured out if he was simply letting it happen more than he had in the past or if I was more attuned to it.

Whatever the case was, we had gone from effectively zero sexual tension in the apartment to an overload. I’d even had to start being careful when I saw him and vice versa. The other day, I’d been eating a sandwich at the counter when he emerged from his bedroom to get coffee and start his day. The problem was, he’d done it wearing the smallest sleeping shorts known to man sitting dangerously low on his hips. I’d ended up squeezing my sandwich hard enough to make the tomato explode everywhere when he’d bent down to retrieve a spoon he’d dropped. I had to clean it up, my face as red as the tomato, while I avoided looking at him.

Not that he was anywhere near innocent. I’d once woken up in the middle of the night, as I often did, considering I was still adjusting to a regular sleep schedule. I hadn’t realized I couldn’t hear him sleeping, distressed but soft noises. He’d been attacking a bowl of ice cream when I entered the kitchen and looked guilty until his face went blank and his eyes dropped. It had taken me until he’d left the kitchen with a choking noise to realize I’d been wearing sleep shorts of my own…and was still half hard from having just woken up, giving him an eye full.

Needless to say, things were a bit tense, and I constantly felt we were trying to behave ourselves. I’d neverreallylooked at Hunter as a sexual being before, mostly because that was a dangerous line of thinking. The problem was I was beginning to see it more and more, making it incredibly difficult to ignore.

Thankfully, in the ‘safety’ of the bedroom I was using, I could let those thoughts slip away as I finished drying. Opening the closet, I pulled out the garment bag I’d snuck into the apartment. I’d found a tailor willing to do the tailoring for me quickly, and the suit looked better on me than any other suit I’d owned.

I slapped on some deodorant and the cologne I’d found. It was absurdly expensive for the small bottle, but I was told up and down it would smell great on me. I could take my time while Hunter was in the bathroom. It was a simple suit with no frills, but flair was more Hunter’s style, and I wondered what he would look like when we went out.

It was a good thing Hunter was the slow and steady type about getting ready because it took me forever and repeated watches of a YouTube video to get my bow tie right. By the time I finally got it done, I looked in the mirror and admired myself. I still looked rough and a bit mean, but the suit somehow refined it, making italmostelegant.

“What do you think?” I asked the oversized orange ball on the bed. Clem looked up from his nap to squint at me, slowly blinking his eyes before closing them to begin purring while he went back to his nap. “I’ll take that as your stamp of approval.”

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