“Very observant. What gave it away? The frown lines?” He was ridiculously cute when he grinned. With short, dark hair and emerald eyes, he should have been on the cover of a men’s fitness magazine, but he also had a brain in that pretty head of his. Yes, that really did do something for her.
“We call those laugh lines where I’m from.” She’d talked about using Botox once and Chris and Serena had a fit. They were her laugh lines, they’d told her. They were lines she’d earned, soft lines that spoke of a good life. Her mother didn’t have a line on her face. She ruthlessly purged them with chemicals and fat from someone else’s ass since there wasn’t any on hers.
“I like that. Yes, Lisa is ten years younger. Lila is four years younger and Laurel is six. I’m the only boy and significantly older,” he explained.
“I have a younger sister.” Hey, it was something they had in common.
“How much younger?”
“Amy is five years younger. My parents tried for a boy, but they quit after two girls. Well, I think they tried but I could be wrong. Sometimes I’m certain Amy and I were conceived in some weird science experiment.” She’d dreamed of it often. Dreamed that somewhere out there was a loving alien who left her on Earth and she’d been picked up by the wrong traveler. “There are only two of us though. I can’t imagine a family of six.”
He stopped. “Six?”
“You and your parents and three sisters.”
He went back to chopping. He’d moved on to radishes. “No dad in that scenario. I’m pretty sure we all had different fathers.”
So the sister hadn’t been joking. She could understand bad parents. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be. We all survived.”
She really wanted him to talk more. She suddenly had the realization that she’d viewed him as nothing more than a himbo to fantasize about sexually. He was a man. He had problems and baggage, and they might be more like her own than she could imagine. If his sister had been telling the truth, he’d likely had to raise his younger siblings while his mother had chased her demons. Her parents had been far more interested in power and position than they had been in their daughters. “Your sister was saying something about your mom.”
There was no way to miss how his muscles tensed. “I don’t like to talk about the past. I would much rather discuss the now. You didn’t like Lisa until you figured out she was my sister. Did you think she was my lover?”
Heat flashed through her system, and she was sure there was no way she hadn’t flushed like crazy. “How was I supposed to know? They don’t look like you.”
His hair was dark where they had a lightness, more gold and red to their tones and two were quite petite while the third had a willowy grace to her form that didn’t scream that she was related to the linebacker in front of Bridget. Will was built on big lines. He had to be six three.
“They? Which one did you think I was sleeping with?” He placed a bowl in front of her. A chuckle huffed from his mouth. “All three? Seriously? You must think I’m far more energetic than I really am. I’m quite lazy. I have a vacation coming up and I’m planning on laying around like a slug.”
He had time off? That was convenient.
He refilled her wine glass. Damn. She hadn’t noticed she’d emptied it. “No, I’m not dating anyone.”
“But you’re looking for a sub.”
He shrugged again. “Not particularly. I tried that route and it didn’t work out for me.”
The storyteller in her sensed something juicy. “Then why are you at Sanctum?”
“Why are you at Sanctum?” Will shot back.
Because she wanted to find a man like the ones she wrote about. Because she wanted someone who would love her and see past all the crap she put out there to protect herself. “I’m doing some research.”
Yeah. Crap like that. She was so smart.
“There you go. We’re both just playing around.”
She was heading into her mid-thirties and standing alone with the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen. How long was she going to keep this crap up? The wine had already started to work on her. She knew it was dumb, but she was tired of the self-protective shit, sick of always being the tough girl. “I’m not playing. I’m lying.”
“Lying?”
“I don’t know. I’m certainly not telling the truth.” Why was it so hard to admit it? “I kind of want to see what it would be like to have a Dom.”
“Are you serious? Because Mitch told me you’ve been very academic about it.”
“Yeah, that seems safer than opening myself up. Also, the Doms I’ve worked with haven’t called to me. It’s not that they’re bad. I like Jesse a lot, but he’s strictly a friend, and Mitch seems a little cold to me. I would be all over Alex McKay, but the marriage thing is kind of sacred.”
“So you don’t do married guys?”
She didn’t like the hardness in his voice, but she couldn’t quite figure out how to respond beyond the obvious. “No. I guess that would be a hard limit. I don’t date anyone attached to other people. I don’t date a lot at all.”
He wiped his hands off on a towel and moved around the bar. “I don’t either. Between work and moving, I haven’t had a chance and really, I’m not looking for anything serious.”
Well, at least he was honest. The one guy she was seriously interested in wasn’t serious at all. Story of her life. She nodded. “Understood.”
She put the wine glass down.
“Hey, I’m trying to be honest here, so why do I feel like I just became the bad guy?”
She shook her head. “Not at all.” It wasn’t like he’d offered himself to her. “I think it’s good to be upfront and open. You know I really should get to work. I didn’t get my word count in today.”
She was going to make a fool of herself if she stayed much longer. She liked him. She liked how he talked about his sisters. She liked that he could make a salad and kept making sure she had what she needed. It was a recipe for disaster.
“I thought you were staying for dinner.” He moved in, taking up all the space. This close, she could see that he had a five-o’clock shadow across his perfect jaw. She was a sucker for a square jaw. Damn it. Even his ears were hot. She kind of wanted to lick them to see if he was ticklish there.