I love you.
I almost said it right there and then, because he remembered I needed two pairs of glasses.
“Not in the habit of killin’ beautiful things, babe,” he murmured, eyes dark. He cupped my face after he’d put my glasses on. “You know I don’t operate on the usual,” he said, responding to my initial statement. He stepped back, letting my face go but snatching my hand and walking us toward the building.
Gravel crunched underneath my shoes as butterflies swarmed in my stomach. I was never settled with Gage. Never complacent. Because he was always doing something to shake me up. He did that just by freaking looking at me.
And now he was dragging me toward an abandoned building in the middle of nowhere for a ‘date.’ What was inside could range from a picnic lunch to a pile of dead bodies. That was Gage.
“Nervous?” he asked, eyes twinkling as he stopped us in front of rotting wooden doors.
I jutted my chin up. “No,” I lied.
He full-on grinned, yanking me forward for a rough kiss.
My butterflies went wild for an entirely different reason once he let me go.
He seemed to sense the need flooding between my legs, his eyes darkening. “Later,” he promised.
Then he opened the door.
It took a few seconds for me to adjust to the grainy light inside, the smell of dirt and metal mingling with the fresh air from outside.
There was a thump and rattling of chains as Gage shut the door behind us, grabbed my hand and walked me to the middle of the room.
I had expected it to be messy. To have random motorcycle parts lying around the place. Torture devices.
Dead bodies strung up from the rafters.
But it was clean.
Meticulously so. The concrete floor was slightly dusty, but not as much as it should’ve been, which meant it was regularly swept.
There was a desk running along the length of the building to our left. Most of the surface was clear, and I couldn’t see exactly what lay atop—tools of some kind—but they were all neatly bunched together. There was also a sofa, small coffee table, an old TV, and a white mini fridge.
But that wasn’t the focus of what was in the room.
No, it was the table that Gage stopped us in front of. More accurately, what was on top of that table. Gage yanked a string attached to the ceiling when an electrical buzz sounded for a moment, a bright almost blinding light illuminating every detail.
I gaped.
It wasn’t hard to put the proverbial pieces together and realize what was in front of me.
“Okay, for our first date, you want to build a bomb?” I asked, looking to the mess of wires in front of me and then back up at Gage. “And that’s not actually a question, since it’s pretty freaking clear we’re making a bomb right now. It’s just a clarification of reality.”
He grinned, cupping my face. “We make our own reality.” He nodded to the table. “Sometimes I destroy mine.” He laid a gentle kiss on my lips. “You said you could tell a lot about people about how they manage airports,” he repeated my ridiculous words, made all the more ridiculous by the fact that we were standing in front of a half-built bomb.
I merely nodded.
“Well, I’m not people. You know that by now. But you want to know more, so I’m giving you more.” His eyes shadowed with something. Something dark. “As more as I can right now. So you can tell a lot about me by how I build a bomb. You up for it?” It was a challenge and also something else. He was showing me his life, not hiding the more dangerous parts of it. Because everything was the ugly truth with Gage.
That’s what made it so beautiful.
“Yeah,” I whispered.
His eyes flickered and he laid another kiss on my mouth that was not at all gentle. “That’s my girl. And just so you know, I’m teachin’ you. Because my woman is gonna know how to blow shit up, just in case she feels the urge.”
Eleven
Three Days Later
I opened the door with a smile because, well, I was smiling a lot these days. Even though life with Gage wasn’t exactly conventional—we’d built a bomb together for our freaking first date, for crying out loud. A ‘conventional’ person wouldn’t consider our thus far rocky and pain-filled relationship—if that’s what it was—a reason to smile.
But I was quickly learning that I was far from conventional too. And Gage and conventional didn’t even live in the same zip code. Or the same country.
He certainly wasn’t smiling when I opened the door not long after I’d gotten home from work. Not even his version of a smile—an attractive mouth twitch. No, it was the exact and utter opposite of that, in fact. He was glowering, his fury pushing past me and polluting the very atmosphere of my apartment.