Page 18 of With This Kiss
My fist clenched around my fork, and I quickly shoved a piece of chicken in my mouth, barely tasting it.
I couldn’t fucking wait for the dinner to be over.
4
JAMIE
Ilooked down at the row of numbers I had transferred from my arm to a piece of paper.
There was still a faint smudge from the ink where Reign had marked me, despite the vigorous scrubbing I had done.
All I had to show for it was sore, raw skin rubbed red.
Two days had passed since my interaction with him. He was so much more than I had imagined.
And I had imagined what he would be like since that night when our eyes first met.
But when he was sitting close to me, so close I could feel his body heat radiating toward me in waves, and the energy he seemed to have sucked up just from being there…
I almost felt suffocated.
And he wanted me to buy him dinner.
Why the fuck would he want me to buy him dinner?
Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
I wasn’t so stuck on traditional gender roles that I thought a man should always pay, but the way he had worded it, the way he gave me his number without asking for mine, leaving the decision up to me, made it feel as if I was… wooing him.
My cheeks flushed at the thought.
I didn’t want towoohim.
I didn’t even want him close to me. The man was dangerous—that much was obvious, but he was also bad for me.
And my life was complicated enough right now without inviting someone like Reign Mahankov into it.
And if Dad found out Reign had given me his number…
He would blow a gasket. No one would want to be around when that happened, even me.
I shuddered from the thought.
Everything in me said to throw the phone number away.
Walk away.
Everything would be better for me.
Then, my phone lit up with a text notification from Preston. I didn’t bother looking at the message. My eyes were focused on the picture I had set as my wallpaper.
It was Etta and me at a summer carnival when we were both twenty-two.
Despite having family members so heavily entrenched in the Caparelli Famiglia, we had been pretty naïve when we were young.
We thought we were invincible.
We thought nothing bad could ever happen to us, simply because bad things were something that only happened to other people.
