“But I’m unlucky,” I blurt out, thinking about his blood trickling over his abs and swirling down the shower drain. I still don’t even know what happened to him, just that it was yet another notch on his belt of bad fortune. “You’ll be unlucky for the rest of your life.”
He changes lanes, then steals a glance at the silver chain disappearing under the collar of my hoodie. “I’m trying to take my mama’s advice.”
“Which was?”
“Luck is believing you’re lucky,” he says. “That’s what she said to you, right?”
My heart clenches at the memory, and I can only nod.
“So from now on, I’m believing I’m lucky.” His hand slides over my thigh and floods warmth through my core. “I’m lucky that you let me take you out on a date, aren’t I?”
He chuckles when I swat his hand away. Touching leads to fucking, and fucking leads to me saying silly shit I shouldn’t, like,I love you, too.
As we turn off of Main Street and climb the hill up to the church, there’s a sudden, sharpcrack.
I scream. Rafe swerves the wheel with one hand, while the other flies across my stomach and cages me into the seat. I open my eyes as we roll to stop between the trees.
Rafe flicks on the interior light and grips my chin, eyes scanning me. “You okay?”
“Y-yeah.” I breathe out a shaky exhale, then nod at the windshield. There’s a pebble-sized crater on the right-hand side, and a spider web of cracks fissure out from it.
He glances at it. “Must have been a piece of loose gravel or something,” he mutters insincerely.
“You’re not believing hard enough.”
He runs his thumb over my bottom lip and gives me a humorless smirk.
“It’s a work in progress, Queenie.”
After swapping out Rafe’s G-Wagon for one of the sedans driving up our ass, we end up in Hollow. A lift takes us closer to sea-level, and when we step out of it, I have the urge to turn around and smack my head against its closing doors.
Dammit. This restaurant is fancy. The type that has too many forks on either side of the plate, and not enough food on top of it. The type you don’t wear sweatpants and a milkshake-stained hoodie to.
I wish I wasn’t so damn stubborn.
Rafe palms the small of my back and pushes me into the main cavern, where a server rushes over to greet us. “Mr. Visconti, Mrs. Visconti,” she says, nodding at us politely. She makes more pleasantries but they swim around my ears, wobbly and incoherent.Mrs. Visconti?
As Rafe’s hand finds my back again and guides me to a table, I glare up at his profile. “Why does she think we’re married?”
His dimple deepens. “Because I told her we were.”
“What?Why?”
He doesn’t reply until he’s sliding a chair underneath me. Then he lowers his lips to the soft bit behind my ear and whispers his answer against it. “Because I felt like playing our favorite game.” He plants a kiss on my neck. It’s so gentle, but it racks my insides like an earthquake. “Make believe.”
Stupefied, my eyes track him as he rounds the table and sits opposite me. There’s a flurry of servers with smiles and napkins and leather-bound menus, but how can I focus on trivial things like the daily specials, at a time like this?
Once we’re left alone, Rafe’s gaze heats on mine. I break away from it for safety purposes, and do a survey of the space.
The cave is hauntingly beautiful. A small, oval room with minimal human touch. There are only six tables, all empty except ours, and all are cut from rock. The bar is, too—nothing more than a craggy ledge jutting out from the far wall, with enough room to show off special edition Smuggler’s Club bottles in a back-lit case.
My gaze sweeps upward to the ceiling. It looks like it’s dripping. Each icicle-shaped rock is wrapped with fine fairy lights, dousing the cave in a romantic glow.
“Stalagmites,” Rafe says, watching me. “Produced by precipitation of minerals from water dripping through the cave ceiling.”
“Stalactites.”
“I’m sorry?”