I sighed. “It may be.”
Her face lit up. “Excellent. I would say you finally got laid, but if that were true you wouldn’t have been getting your sweat on with me this morning, nor would you have showered and cut your morning routine in half in order to avoid going home.”
I sipped my coffee. “How did you get all of that so early in the morning?”
She waved her hand. “I’m psychic. I’m good at picking up the details.” She put down her spoon and eyed me with intensity. “You haven’t had sex yet, but you’ve come close. Really fucking close. Since he’s been in your life, in your home for a decent amount of time, you’ve been wanting him, which I’m sure feels like forever. He’s a hot-blooded man, so he’s wanted you since the moment he saw you, and he’s obviously battling with some demons since he’s a big bad alpha male who is used to just taking what he wants.” She took a break to sip her tea.
“And that’s a compliment, honey, that he’s fighting all of his instincts for you,” she continued. “Because he respects you. Thinks you’re too good for him—which you are. You’re too good for all of us. He’s a bad guy trying to do a good thing. But since he’s a bad guy to the bone, in all the worst and best ways, he’s not doing the noble thing of leaving you alone which makes your coupling inevitable and only makes him grow more attached to you every second you spend together.”
I gulped my coffee, desperately wishing it was a mimosa.
“You’re attached to him because you’re a unique woman with a huge heart, and he’s hot as balls,” she stated softly. “But that’s not why you’re attached to him. You see the bad, and you want to dig beneath it, to find the good. And the bad excites you. Because unlike your other boyfriends, you know that his kind of bad will never be used against you, only against the motherfuckers stupid enough to even think about laying a hand on you.”
And on that, she leaned back, flipped her hair over her shoulder and crossed her legs. “I’ll bet my vintage Chanel that he’ll be walking his fine ass through that door,” she pointed a long nail to the entrance, “within the next ten minutes. I’m surprised you even managed to get any breakfast, honestly.”
I blinked at her, amazed, impressed and mystified.
It was at that moment, the door to the café opened and the air pulsed with intensity thanks to the large, pissed off, sinfully hot biker currently prowling through the café.
“Are you a witch?” I whispered across the table to Marilyn.
She just grinned wickedly.
There wasn’t any time to digest everything she’d just said or to debate her magical powers because Hades was here, pulling me out of my chair.
Pulling me out of my fucking chair.
He didn’t exactly drag me out of it because my body kind of moved of its own accord, but he did most of the work. While holding my upper arm, he reached into his cut, somehow got cash out of his wallet one handed, then threw way too many bills on the table.
“Get your shit,” he demanded, nodding to the bag I’d set on the vacant chair beside me.
“You can’t just—”
“Here you go, sweetie,” Marilyn interrupted, leaning over the table to snatch my bag before holding it out to me, smiling smugly.
I glared at her. “You really are a witch.”
She only winked and wagged the bag at me, which was actually really impressive considering she was doing it one-handed and that bag was heavy as all hell.
As much as I wanted to sit my ass back down, attach myself to the chair and refuse to leave—only a little bit of that was due to the three bites of French toast that were left on my plate—I knew when I was outnumbered and fighting was futile.
Instead, I snatched the bag and stumbled ever so slightly as the weight of it transferred from Marilyn to me. Hades, quick as lightning, grabbed the bag from me without so much as flinching, then he proceeded to drag me out of the restaurant.
Okay, drag might’ve been a little dramatic since I mostly walked out of my own power, but still. It was only after we’d left the main street and were down an alley where he’d parked his bike that I thought to stop walking and snatched my arm from his grip.
Or at least tried to.
Hades only stopped walking because he literally would have had to drag me otherwise, and that was obviously crossing a line for him. But his hands tightened around my upper arm, almost to the point of pain. He was making it clear that he wasn’t going to let go of me.