Page 22 of Deadly Little Sparrow

“Yours don’t?” I tease.

“First time for everything, I guess,” Sparrow says with another smirk that I can see out of the corner of my eye, tempting me to take my eyes off the road for just a second to steal another look at him.

The bodega I was on my way to before I spotted him on the street comes into view up ahead, reminding me of what I’m actually supposed to be doing this morning.

“Shit,” I mutter and then sigh under my breath.

“Didn’t think this all the way through, did you?” he guesses.

“I’ve got a couple of collections I’ve gotta do. I would blow them off, but I’ve done that one too many times lately already,” I confess.

“Collections? Like, breaking kneecaps and waving your gun in people’s faces to get them to pay up?” The tremor of curiosity in his voice is unmistakable. “Sounds like a pretty unforgettable first date if you ask me.”

“You want to come with?” I pull into a spot in front of the bodega and park.

“Hey, it’s your kidnapping,” he says with a shrug, reaching for the handle on his door. He pushes it open but pauses before getting out to look over his shoulder at me with a wicked grin. “Don’t get it twisted though. If anyone is going to be tied up and gagged by the end of this date, it’s going to be you.”

Heat flushes over my skin and settles between my legs, tightening around my cock. I manage to bite back the whimper that forms on the tip of my tongue, but just barely. If I ask very nicely, will Sparrow tie me to his bed and keep me?

“You’d better hurry before I make a run for it,” he taunts when I don’t immediately follow him out of the car.

I manage to get my limbs to work again, and pull myself together enough to step out onto the shoulder of the busy street. I shrug my jacket into place, buttoning it and smoothing my hands over the soft, unwrinkled material. So far, Sparrow has only seen me after work hours. He’s seen me in dark bars and filthy alleys. He’s seen me undone in private. What will he think of the unflinching omen of death the rest of the city sees me as?

I stride around the car, bypassing the parking meter without stopping. When I reach the door to the shop, I pull it open and wave Sparrow in ahead of me. My eyes fall to his pert ass and my cock gives another eager throb. Hopefully the threat to tie me up later was more of a promise than a tease.

“The shop owner behind on his payments?” Sparrow guesses. “Are you gonna pull out your brass knuckles and rough him up a bit?”

“I would never rough Vinny up. He makes the best egg sandwiches in the city.”

“Damn straight, I do,” Vinny agrees from behind the towering wall of products he keeps stacked on the counter to encourage impulse buying.

“Morning, Vin.” I greet him with a brief flicker of a smile. “Three to go and coffee too.”

“Coming right up,” he says, and seconds later, the sizzling sound of the grill fills the cluttered shop.

“Breakfast sandwiches?” Sparrow questions. “I thought we were breaking kneecaps.”

“Never break kneecaps on an empty stomach,” I advise.

While we wait for our food, he wanders around the shop, touching random items and whistling along with the music playing over the speakers mounted to the ceiling. I track him with my eyes, adding up the things I already know about him from watching him for weeks. It’s not much. I know he takes his coffee black and he never passes a dog on the street without stopping to pet it. I know that he has exactly two pairs of jeans, both of them worn and holey. And I know that if I thought I still had a soul, he would have claimed it as his own when he slammed me up against that door in the alley and put his hand around my throat.

I swallow at the ghost of a feeling wrapping itself around my neck and quickening my pulse.

It’s a paltry list full of holes that only make me more curious about him.

“Where did you grow up?” I ask, and he stops his meandering to turn towards me with his head cocked to one side.

“That the most interesting thing you want to know about me?”

“I want to know everything about you,” I answer without hesitation. “I figured that was a good place to start.”

“Connecticut,” he says, grabbing a package of spearmint gum and tossing it onto the counter next to the cash register. “Just the one brother, and parents so WASP-y they could be on the home page of the Connecticut tourism website. No pets because my mom didn’t like mess.”

I listen as he rattles off facts about himself like he’s reciting someone else’s biography that he had to memorize for a class project.

“But you like dogs,” I say, thinking about the way he always lights up when he stoops to pet one.

“Better than most people,” he agrees with a one shoulder shrug. “What about you?”

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