Page 80 of Wicked Intentions (Wicked Games 3)
My voice all gravel and sandpaper, I say, “All right. I’ll show you the diamond and I’ll tell you the whole plan. Then you’re gonna tell me everything I want to know. Your life story, where you grew up, everything you love and hate and are proud of and regret. Your favorite music, your favorite food, the name of the first boy you ever kissed. And I’m gonna tell you mine.”
Mariana laughs breathlessly, her eyes alight. “You kissed a boy?”
“Smartass,” I growl, falling, falling, falling, head over heels and around again.
Twenty-One
Mariana
I once heard insanity described as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That was Albert Einstein, a much more intelligent person than myself. I’m thinking of him now as Ryan drives me to wherever he’s keeping the diamond. I’m in the passenger seat, mulling all my life choices that have led me to this moment as the cityscape of Manhattan flashes by outside the windows, a silent movie of color and light.
It’s silent inside the car, too. For once, we’re not fighting or fucking. We’re just sitting side by side, holding hands.
Such a simple thing, yet so painfully tender. My whole life, I’ve felt lioness-strong, toughened by the cruelty of fate and circumstance, but meeting Ryan has taught me that my heart isn’t the fortress I thought it was.
Instead, it’s is a newborn baby bird, blind and vulnerable to predators and the elements, trembling with hunger and terror in its nest.
I want to kick my own ass for being so weak. This whole thing has disaster written all over it.
“Pretty grim over there,” Ryan observes, squeezing my hand.
I keep my gaze turned to the window when I answer, because I know how good he is at reading what’s in my eyes. “Just ruminating on the vagaries of life and how arbitrary it all is.”
His chuckle is warm. “I understood about half the words in that sentence, but my advice is not to worry. It’ll all work out in the end.”
Now I do look at him, because my curiosity is overwhelming. The sunlight treats him differently than it does other people, caressing him in a hazy, lover’s glow, gleaming the tips of his hair and burnishing his skin to gold. Before I met him, I never even considered a man could be pretty, but he’s beyond merely pretty. He’s mind-meltingly beautiful.
Yes, that’s it. He’s melted my mind. No wonder I’m having trouble thinking.
“You’re an optimist,” I say flatly.
“You say that like you’re accusing me of murder.”
“Have you always been like this?”
He glances at me sideways, the flash of dimples in his cheek annoyingly adorable. “Like what? Awesome? Amazing? Unbearably cool?”
“Guess you weren’t kidding when you said you were conceited,” I mutter.
“The only difference between me and you, Angel,” he says, squeezing my hand again, “is that you’re a plotter and I’m a panster. You sweat every detail, and I live by the seat of my pants. We both get where we want to go in the end, I just don’t waste time fussin’ over what-ifs.”
I suffer a brief but violent pang of jealousy that he doesn’t have the worry gene, but then am insulted that he’d refer to all my careful planning—for instance, on a job like stealing the Hope—as “fussin’.”
“I don’t fuss. I deliberate. I consider all the options. It’s called being professional.”
“It’s called bein’ anal.”
“It’s called being an adult!”
He sighs like every man has ever sighed when dealing with a woman who doesn’t agree with him. That “here we go” sigh. That “maybe it’s PMS” sigh.
I’d like to hear the sigh he’d use if I stabbed him in the neck.
“You’re awful dramatic for someone who’s so anal.”
“I bet your brain feels as good as new, seeing as how you never use it,” I grit out.
His shoulders shake silently. While I’m over here steaming, the bastard is trying not to laugh! When I try to extricate my hand from his, he just holds on tighter.
