Page 19 of Tattoos and Heartbreak
Which just made the blush even worse.
God damn him and those stupid, brooding eyes of his. I was sitting here trying to write music and he, what, thought he’d come in and stare at me like he wanted to eat me up? Where the fuck did he get off?
“What do you want?” I asked, injecting as much ice into my voice as I could manage. “There aren’t any photographers in here to take pictures of us, you know. You’re in here with me all by yourself.”
He leaned forward on his elbows, let his eyes rake up and down my body once more, and whispered, “That’s what you think, sunshine girl. But you never know where the reporters might turn up.”
He reached out, grabbed my fork, and took a bite of my blueberry pie.
“That’s mine,” I said hoarsely.
He shrugged. “I figured. Mind if I have a bite?”
“Little late to ask for permission, isn’t it?” My eyes flicked down to his mouth, which was currently savoring my blueberry pie, and the heat in my face spread rapidly to the rest of my body.
A man eating blueberry pie should not make you feel like you were about to burst into flames. Eating blueberry pie like it was the sexiest thing you’d ever tasted should be illegal.
Rivers’ mouth curled up like he knew exactly what I was thinking and he leaned back, releasing me from the hold he’d had on me. “I can order my own if you like. Is there anyone even left in the kitchen?”
I gazed out over the hotel’s small café—empty at this hour—and nodded to the kitchen. “The chef’s still back there. He’s the one who brought me the pie.”
Rivers followed my gaze, then got up and strolled in that direction, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched like he didn’t expect to have any luck with his request. Moments later he was back with his own slice of pie, though. He cut the tip off and slid it onto my plate, then gave me a quick flash of a smile.
“To pay you back.”
“Oh,” I said, surprised. “Right. I mean... I wasn’t worried about it.”
“But I wouldn’t want you getting the wrong idea. I’m not the kind of guy who eats someone else’s pie and doesn’t pay them back.”
Well that statement left me with a number of questions. I wondered if I was allowed to ask any of them. We hadn’t talked, not really, since that first night, when we’d told each other a bunch of secrets in what now felt like an incredibly childish game. Since then, we’d been forced together in a fake dating scheme orchestrated by his agent and told that we both had to behave ourselves if we were going to get what we wanted.
A spot on the tour for him.
A contract for me.
It wasn’t exactly a situation rife with romance.
But that didn’t mean we couldn’t be friends.
I picked up my fork and took another bite of his pie. When he raised an eyebrow, I shrugged. “You take a bite of my pie, I take a bite of yours. What are you doing down here, Rivers?”
He tipped his head at me. “I couldn’t sleep. I always have trouble when we’re on the road. I get so riled up for the shows themselves and then have trouble settling back down.”
Okay, I hadn’t been expecting so much honesty. But now that I was looking at him, I realized that the mask he usually wore—that cocky, uncaring expression he turned on the world—had fallen.
Leaving the lonely boy I’d seen that first night.
I reached out to take another bite of pie but he blocked me with his fork.
“My turn,” he said. He reached for my pie, took a small bite, and put it in his mouth, chewing thoughtfully as he watched me. When he spoke, it was a question. “Why are you down here, sitting in a mostly dark restaurant that I suspect the chef kept open just for you, with nothing but a guitar to keep you company?”
“Are we playing this game again?” I asked. “A question for a question?”
A soft shrug from Rivers. “Unless you’re going to run away.”
Unless I was going to run away.
Not likely.
