Page 119 of The Kingpin's Call Girl

I grin up at Luka when we’re finally alone. “I feel like we got the best table!”

He sits. “My brother was bringing hell down on this place, and let’s just say this guy’s glad I took over.” He hands me a menu. “Everything here is amazing.”

“So you like sushi?”

His lips quirk. “It’s my favorite.”

“What’s so funny?”

“Us. Having normal things in common.”

We figure out our order and hand back our menus.

“I bet we have a lot of normal things in common,” I say.

“Like what?”

“We both speak Latin,” I point out.

“Yeah, we haven’t discussed that yet, have we? Orton’s and my secret fucking language. Nobody’s supposed to know that.”

I shrug. “Language of medieval manuscripts. Whadya gonna do?”

He grumbles in the joking way he sometimes does. Eventually, our drinks arrive—a scotch for him and a cosmopolitan for me.

I say, “My classics teacher’s head wouldexplodeif he knew people were using Latin to discuss nefarious criminal enterprises.”

He picks up his glass and swirls the amber liquid around and around. “The more nefarious, the better.”

We talk about his travels and random city things and my textbook idea with my fave girl historian.

It’s fun, though sometimes I catch him looking grimly at my wrist, which he so carefully bandaged up before we left.

I’m keenly aware in these moments of what he is, a dangerous—and yes, nefarious—criminal who’d hunt and kill for me. He wants to hunt and kill Bender for what he did to me. He’d rip him apart with his bare hands if he could.

It means everything.

But he’ll hold off in order to find and protect Mary. That means everything, too.

Our gazes meet. His dark angel eyes sparkle.

Shivers slide over my skin. I just want to live in this moment.

Our first course comes, and we dig in. The salmon rolls are incredible. He encourages me to taste the surf clam, a.k.a. the hokkigai. “It’s mind-blowing when it’s fresh.”

I sell him on the natto roll, which he seems to have categorized in his mind as hippie sushi. He’s shocked that he likes it, which is highly enjoyable due to how expressive I’m learning he can be.

We order another round of just our favorites, and then his phone dings. The way his eyes narrow slightly when he reads the message—not quite his full intimidation squint, but close—is something I’ve come to recognize. I love how I can read these tiny shifts in his expressions now, like a secret language only I understand.

“Here we go,” he says. “Pictures for you to look at.”

“To see if any of them are Bender?”

“You good to check them out?”

“Let me at them!”

None of them are Bender, as it turns out. I try not to feel hopeless.

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