Page 35 of Rush
“What?”
“Admitting you were wrong.”
“Shit,” he said with a hiss, rubbing his hand over his face. “Still argumentative.”
Pouting, I grabbed my purse. “Never a dull moment.”
Ryan tookme to a tapas bar named Bomba.
Downstairs, they had a nice little restaurant and upstairs was the rooftop bar. It had spectacular views over the north side of the city, looking down onto traffic-packed Lonsdale Street.
Their liquor menu was pages long, featuring gin, vodka, bourbon, scotch, rum, whiskey, wine, cider, and beers from all over the world. We ordered up a selection to taste and found a table by the edge of the roof so we could watch the world below.
By the time I tried something from under every heading on the menu, my head was swimming. Ryan fed me fancy eggplant chips from the tapas menu, and by the time we were ready to move on, we were a mess.In a good way.
My face hurt from laughing at his silly jokes, and he practically carried me downstairs. I swore he was enjoying the last part, but the night was still young, and we had a few more stops before sunrise.
Next, we went to a nightclub in Prahran, just south of the CBD.
Inside, it was jam-packed with sweaty bodies. The music was thumping, the alcohol was flowing, and the air simmered.
“This is so cheesy,” I said, watching a scantily clad woman with bleached blonde hair walk by. She was wearing a black leather dress that barely covered her ass cheeks and left nothing to the imagination in the boob department. I hoped she’d taped herself in because she was millimeters away from having a nip slip…but that was probably the point.
“Just roll with it, J,” Ryan said, slipping his arm around my waist.
“I feel overdressed.” I glanced down at the designer dress I was wearing and made a face.
“You look perfect,” he retorted. “Those other women don’t hold a candle to you.”
I glanced around at the crowd and studied all the faces.
“You’re telling me, you don’t find any of these women attractive?” I asked.
“Nope. Not really.” He shrugged, his attention focused solely on me.
“Then what’s your type?”
He made a face and turned away.
“C’mon,” I complained, tugging at his shirt. “Tell me. What does the elusive Ryan Harper find attractive?”
His gaze met mine again, and I swore there was a hint of something dangerous in them.Dangerous attraction…
“Do you really want to know?”
I nodded, the rest of the club falling away until it was only him and me. In all the time I’d known him, I’d never seen him with a girl. He had to have a stream of them, especially now. He was handsome in a rugged bad boy kind of way. Elusive yet full of heart.
“Natural, effortless, confidence…” he murmured. “Big, small… Tall, short… Fair, dark… Doesn’t matter. She’s gotta be real.”
My heart almost stopped beating. I was swooning.Swooning…
“What about you?” he asked, blindsiding me.
“Me?”
My breath caught. I wanted to say Ryan Harper was my type, but it was too far, too soon. Besides, he’d kissed me as a joke the other day at the water park. His prize for beating me on the slide. It didn’t mean anything more than that.
“Yeah, you,” he said with a smirk.
