It was both off-putting yet extremely welcome.
I did want to talk about the psych ward, let out a little of the steam before it made me implode, but I didn’t want to harp on it.
Brock seemed to understand and respect that.
“If the food is half as good at the coffee was, I guess I might be able to look past the fact that I’m enabling crime. So how did you come to know about all the crime around here?”
“I actually grew up, in a way, around it all. Antony’s sons—Luca and Matteo—went to our school. So did Reign, who runs the biker club. And Charlie and Helen’s kids,” he said, nodding toward the couple. “Sure, everyone was tight-lipped about family business, but shit always gets around.
“You never felt, I don’t know, unsafe, being privy to all that information?”
“Nah. Like I said, they have their code. Innocents don’t get caught up in their shit.”
“I hardly think you could call yourself innocent,” I shot back.
“Me?” he asked, pressing a hand to his chest. “I’m a starry-eyed virgin over here,” he insisted.
“Really? Is that why the bartender is giving you both a death glare, and a longing look?” I asked.
Maybe someone else might have been jealous about that. But, first, this wasn’t a date, regardless of how it looked, and even how I was beginning to feel about him. Also, second, we all had a past. Neither of us were starry-eyed virgins. I had men in my past, he women in his. That was life. It was silly to be jealous about that.
“You noticed that, huh?” he asked, looking both bashful and cocky at the same time, something that shouldn’t have been possible, but he managed to pull it off.
“I think it says something that it’s both, not one or the other,” I said.
“It was casual fun… two years ago,” he said, shrugging it off.
Two years ago and she still had that longing look? How good was this man in bed?
What?
No.
I could not let my mind go there.
Oh, who was I kidding? My mind had been there almost since laying eyes on him.
And since I’d been batting the question around for a few days, I was pretty sure I could say with some level of certainty that he was probably amazing in bed.
I had the feeling that he was not a one-trick pony. You know… the guys who had one move only. The ones who couldn’t handle a position change, let alone anything else.
And Brock’s casual confidence told me that he wasn’t the kind of guy who was intimidated by bringing some fun toys into the bedroom either.
I mean, I could just imagine him saying something about how toys were friends, not foes.
“Miranda,” Brock said, making me jolt, having been so lost in my own mind.
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to need you to stop looking at me like that,” he said, voice just a shade huskier than usual.
My sex clenched hard in response, damn him.
“Like what?” I asked, going for casual, breezy, as I reached for my wine glass, my mouth suddenly feeling dry.
“Like if I offered to climb under this table and go down on you, you’d let me,” he said.
And, yeah.