A woman’s body is a temple.
It should be treated as such.
—Brynn Dalton’s Rules for an
Exemplary Life, #55
You can’t be serious about this.”
“I’m always serious,” Brynn said, shooting Will a death glare. Honestly, for a guy who’d sworn to be her personal tour guide through the land of rebellion, he was turning out to be a total stiff.
Starting with the night he’d verbally agreed to her frenemy-with-benefits suggestion before dumping her on his front porch and telling her he was tired. She’d assumed he’d come around the next day to collect. He hadn’t. Nor the day after that.
Then he’d dropped by with pizza, and then left without
so much as a kiss.
Hell, she half expected him to show up with flowers, and that scared the crap out of her, because it would mean he was up to something.
So Brynn had done what she needed in order to regain control of the situation.
She’d taken him to a tattoo parlor.
“What do you think about this one?” she asked, pointing toward a tiny purple butterfly. “Maybe on my butt or something?” Where nobody will ever see it.
Will glanced over her shoulder at the binder. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”
Brynn turned the page and planted her finger on a skull with pink roses for eyes. “Okay, then, how about this one?”
“Not unless you’re a cross-dressing trucker.”
“If you’re not going to help, you might as well go home.”
“Really? Because if that’s an option…”
Brynn clamped her fingers around his wrist, enjoying the way the dark blue of her new manicure looked against his forearm. “You said you’d have a fling with me.”
Will let out a long-suffering sigh. “Which I thought meant no-strings-attached sex, not hanging out in a dirty tattoo parlor on a random Friday morning.”
“It’s not dirty! I did a lot of research for one that was clean and respectable.” And you turned down the sex.
“There!” he said, jabbing a finger at her. “That right there is proof that you shouldn’t get a tattoo. You researched first? Tattoos are supposed to be spontaneous. Or at the very least, about the ink itself, not how often the place dusts.”
“I don’t care how often they dust so long as the needles are clean,” she said with a lot more confidence than she felt. Actually, she did care about how often they dusted, but there weren’t exactly a whole lot of high-class tattoo parlors out there.
“We are not having this conversation,” Will muttered. But he reluctantly lowered himself into the seat next to her. She’d been sitting in the small waiting area for nearly twenty minutes under the guise of deciding on her “ink.” But she was pretty sure both Will and the kid behind the desk knew what she was up to.
Stalling.
As if on cue, an irritable-looking woman came out of the back room where the pain happened, and Brynn did her best not to gape. Save for her face, the woman was literally covered in tattoos, most of them resembling animals you’d find on a safari.
Brynn mentally crossed predatory animals off her list of choices. Too many teeth.
“Where’s, um, the guy that was here earlier?” Brynn asked, gesturing helplessly in the vicinity of the grungy welcome desk. He’d been clean-cut and sweet-looking. Nothing like this woman.
Safari Woman snorted. “Christian? He’s on his lunch break. He doesn’t do much other than phones and cleanup anyway.”
Cleanup? Clean up what?