Page 3 of Wicked Ends
“It’s your birthday?”
I nodded. “Twenty-five.”
He tilted his head to the side. “Now I know you’re just lying to get a drink. I’ll need to see your ID to believe you.”
“Very funny.”
“No, really,” he drawled, and his focus dropped down and fixed on my wrist. “Interesting tattoo.”
Just like that, he reached out and snagged my hand, twisting it to see better. I stilled. He’d touched me. I was so touch-starved, even the impersonal grip of this stranger felt good.
I glanced down at the place where his long, calloused, thick fingers met my skin.
Ah, yes, my one and only tattoo. I’d gotten it when the world felt like a very different place. Now, it was oddly jarring and out of place with the person I’d become. My grandma had let me get it when I was in high school. My grandpa had nearly had a heart attack when we’d come home.
The tattoo wound around my wrist. Musical notes, a scale climbing a bar, each in a vivid, bright color. Marcus moved my wrist this way and that, inspecting the ink.
“Hmm, C is yellow, I get that. E is green, interesting.” He raised an eyebrow at me.
“It’s just a tattoo,” I murmured, trying to stop my lonely heart from beating right out of my chest at the brush of bare skin from this beautiful man. God, I really was pathetic.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t think it is… it’s too purposeful. Synesthesia, right?”
I stared at him, shocked. I’d had synesthesia for as long as I could remember. Some of my earliest memories were of seeing color when hearing music. It wasn’t something regular people knew or cared about.
He was still studying my tattoo.
“How do you know about synesthesia? Most people think it’s some kind of myth, like the Loch Ness Monster or the female orgasm.” Why did I say that? I had no idea. I was flusteredby his touch and the fact that he was asking me such personal questions. Smooth, Arianna, very smooth.
“Let’s put a pin in that orgasm topic, we’ll circle back to it.”
My heart pounded at his lopsided grin.
He cleared his throat. “Music is a hobby of mine,” he supplied and set my hand back on the bar top. He stepped back and tugged up his black T-shirt.
Jesus Christ on a cracker.I stared.
His lower abdomen was liberally inked, but that didn’t distract one bit from the muscles formed in deep grooves. They packed his lower belly, and a light dusting of dark hair appeared, leading the eye lower still to where his belt sat, hiding the rest of the masterpiece that was this man from my hungry eyes.
“Eyes up here, beautiful,” he drawled.
Heat rushed to my face. He was grinning at me and tapping a spot beneath his heart.
“Diabolus in musica,” I murmured, immediately recognizing the notes C and F-sharp, connected by a jagged line. “A tritone,” I clarified, clearing my throat and hoping to shift attention away from my embarrassment.
“You know music,” he said approvingly.
I shrugged and took a slug of the mocktail, hoping it could keep my head cool. All this attention from a guy like him was making me overheated.
“Yeah. I studied it, back in the day,” I muttered. I didn’t feel like sharing with a stranger that I was just about to start teachingmusic at the local college. It would trigger too many follow-up questions.
“Back in the day, what, a whole year or two ago?” Marcus chuckled. “So, what’s a woman like you doing in The Clutch? I don’t know if you’ve realized it or not, but a biker bar doesn’t really seem like your scene.”
My eyes widened as I glanced around. “This is a biker bar?”
Marcus laughed. “The cuts didn’t tip you off, or the bikes outside?”
Duh.I was such an idiot.
