Page 40 of Lawless in Leather

When she sat back down, Mal was sipping his drink, watching her over the rim of the heavy glass.

“Good scotch,” he said.

“Life’s too short to drink bad booze.” She picked up her glass, took a mouthful, and tried to relax.

“Amen to that.” He took another sip, looked around the room. “I like your place.”

“It’s small.” His place, if she was remembering what she’d read about him correctly, was not.

Mal gestured at the room. “This looks like you.”

She looked around. It wasn’t too messy; despite the hectic last few weeks, she’d managed to spend a few hours here and there keeping the disaster zone to a minimum. But it was a riot of color. And overstuffed with well, stuff. Her tiny desk was disappearing beneath papers. And her plants needed watering. “It’s home. For now.”

“For now? You’re thinking of moving?”

“Eventually, sure.”

“Does that mean closing the club?”

“What? Oh. No. It means that one day hopefully the club will be doing well enough that I can afford somewhere bigger.”

“Ah. Somewhere for the giant cat to stretch his legs.”

Wash chose that moment to come over and investigate what was happening now that he’d finished his dinner. He looked at Raina sitting in the chair, sent her a why aren’t you on the sofa like normal, crazy human look, then sprang onto the sofa. He sniffed at Mal then retreated to the other end of the sofa, sitting watchfully.

“I get the feeling your cat disapproves,” Mal said.

“He’s a smart cat,” she said.

Mal put down his glass. “Okay. Are you going to tell me exactly what about me makes you so nervous?”

How about everything? “That might take another drink or two.” She swirled the ice around in her drink, heard the ice clink, then took a swallow. The scotch burned all the way down and set up a warm glow in her stomach. Not enough to distract her, though.

“All right, then who taught you to drink scotch?”

“Taught me?”

“Bad choice of words. Introduced you?”

She shrugged and shifted on the chair. Her legs protested with twinges. What she really needed right now was to stretch. Normally she’d be in the shower or the bath, easing the aches that five hours of too-high heels and performance sentenced her body to. But with Mal here that wasn’t going to happen. “I’ve always danced. Which means paying attention to what I put into my body. When I was younger I was a little obsessed about it and beer was always too many calories. So I drank spirits. And my granddad drank scotch so that’s what I drank. By the time I wised up on the diet front and realized I was never going to be a skinny ballerina, I’d acquired the taste for it. Never did go back and learn to love beer.”

“Did you want to be a ballerina?”

“For a while. But like I said, wrong body type.”

Mal smiled at her over his own glass. There was something wicked about that smile. “It looks pretty good to me.”

She shot him a look.

“What? You left that opening a mile wide.”

“I thought baseball players were meant to know when not to swing at something.”

“Only if you always want to play it safe.”

Meaning why not take a risk? On him? She ignored his line. She wasn’t ready to step up to the plate. Not just yet. What had she been talking about. Ballet. Right. She looked down. She was hardly built like a bombshell but her proportions—or so her teachers had informed her—were wrong for ballet. “Anyway, ballet and I weren’t meant to be. So I switched to other kinds of dance. That was the main thing, that I got to dance.” And she’d just kept dancing. No matter what. That had been the one constant thing in her life. Dance. Pushing her body to its limits. Until it started pushing back. Her right calf twinged again and she stretched out her leg with a wince, leaning forward to catch the toe of her boot and pull her foot back to stretch before the twinge could develop into a full-blown cramp.

Mal put his glass down. “Cramp?”

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