Page 19 of Undercover
“I would’ve called you,” I repeated. “This afternoon. I didn’t want to seem too pushy.”
Too late, I realized how that sounded. He’d texted me in the morning. His blush came rushing back and his gaze skittered away.
“Or desperate,” he said with a brittle little smile.
“Or desperate,” I agreed. “But desperate’s for the guy who screwed up the date the night before. Not for the guy generous enough to let him off the hook and invite him over for lunch.”
Gabe looked up at me through his eyelashes. Had he figured out what that did to my blood pressure? Probably not. He seemed weirdly naïve for someone who obviously slept around a little bit. Like he had no idea how attractive he really was, or how to use it, even though he seemed to think it was all anyone noticed about him.
“You’re a lot nicer than I expected.”
I let out a bark of a laugh, a little rusty-sounding. It’d been a while since I used it this often. “I don’t get that very much, honestly.”
His eyes crinkled as he laughed in turn, shaking his head. “Should I dump my beer over your shirt? Would that help you feel more comfortable?”
His lips, fuck, and those eyes. They really weren’t any color I could define. Blue mixed with green, with little threads of pearl gray. I started leaning down without even meaning to, the heat of his body like a magnet drawing me in.
The doorbell buzzed, and I jumped back like it’d somehow reached through two rooms and electrocuted me.
“Oh shit, lunch,” Gabe said, his voice a little high. He set his beer on the counter with a thunk and practically ran out of the kitchen.
No kissing, Alec.I took the opportunity of being alone for a minute to tug my shirt down, hoping it’d cover a multitude of sins, and then followed Gabe into the other room.
Gabe
Watching Alec eat sushi had to be one of the most pornographic experiences I’d had in years. I wasn’t any kind of foodie, much to the disappointment of my parents, who’d tried to teach me the social value of appreciating fine dining. I didn’t care about food one way or the other, really. It either tasted good or it didn’t—but honestly I could’ve lived on quesadillas and peanut butter sandwiches and an occasional apple pretty much indefinitely. Maybe I’d grown up as a rich, spoiled kid, but enough all-nighters in a lab burned the need for fancy food right out of you, if you ever had it to begin with.
So watching people eat didn’t figure into my turn-ons as a general rule.
But Alec approached his meal with a focused, precise intensity that had me squirming in my seat. The way he handled chopsticks with those long fingers had me fantasizing about all the ways they could handleme. He had such big hands.
I managed to eat my own caterpillar roll without dropping anything, but only barely.
“What do you have planned for the rest of the day?” He set his chopsticks down, much to my regret. I’d hoped for a few more minutes of seeing his fingers manipulating them before I had to make my brain function enough to talk. “What’s your usual weekend routine?”
My usual weekend routine…as opposed to my any-other-day routine? It was the weekend? Oh, God, I really needed to get a life. A real life, not this pointless round of meaninglessness.
Keep the existential crisis on the inside, Gabe. No one finds that attractive after you graduate from high school.
I shrugged. “No particular routine. Sometimes I go out, I guess?” Yeah, way to make myself sound exciting and interesting. And shit, shit, shit, he’d probably asked me that because he wanted me to suggest something for us to do. Wait, had he? Or was he fishing for me to tell him I had plans, so he could escape after we’d finished eating?
“Where do you go in Burlington?” Was it my imagination, or did he put the slightest, negative emphasis on the word Burlington? And then he looked right at me, dark eyes as intent as his body language had been with his lunch. A little shudder went down my spine. If he wanted me to be dessert, and we were staying in, that wassookay with me. Alec quirked a half-smile. “And would you want to go to any of those places with me?”
He seriously wanted to go out somewhere when he could stalk around the table and drag me into my bedroom? Should I be flattered that he wanted to spend non-sexual time with me or annoyed that he didn’t seem to be all that tempted by my nearby bed, with me in it all naked? Something from columns A and B, probably.
“We could…do you want to go down to the lake, maybe? Rent a couple of kayaks? Or we could get some coffee and take a walk along the waterfront?”
“Walk. I’m not much for boats.”
“Oh, do you get seasick? I do too. It’s the worst, especially since my whole family’s into boats in a way you wouldn’t fucking believe. Family business. Middleton Marine, have you heard of it? Or probably not, since you’re not much for boats.”
I clamped my lips shut before I could keep babbling like an idiot. And way to slip in the family business, there, when I liked to think I was above the typical Middleton penchant for mentioning how rich we were every five seconds. Like Alec hadn’t already figured it out from my condo, anyway.
Alec’s hand twitched, a quick fidget with his napkin. “I haven’t heard of it,” he said, leaning back in his chair. That was tension I saw in his posture, but why the hell would there be? Unless he’d caught the unintentionalmy family’s loadedsubtext. “You guys rent boats to tourists or something?”
I shook my head, emphatically. “No, Middleton manufactures custom yachts, mostly, and they have a few for charter that they use basically for advertising. Not your typical tourist stuff. And definitely notus guys, because I stay as far out of the family business as possible. Oh my God do I ever. I don’t have a head for business and I don’t want one, and thank God I have a brother and a sister to make my parents happy.”
He grinned at me, his teeth flashing and his eyes lighting up, and fuck, but the effect was even more devastating in the light of day. “I hear you. If it weren’t for my sister taking one for the team and popping out two perfect grandchildren, I probably wouldn’t be on speaking terms with my parents by now.”
