Page 61 of Tide of Treason
And froze.
Lucius was bent over the open hood of a Maserati, tattooed forearms streaked with oil, tie wrapped haphazardly around his head. The back of his hair stuck up in wild little curls, ruffled the way it always was when he raked a restless hand up his nape too many times. Grease cross-hatched the sharp angles of his jaw, the smudge so intimate I felt an irrational urge to wipe it away with my thumb. A cigarette drooped from the corner of his mouth, ember pulsing in cadence with the stubborn muscle ticking in his cheek.
He glanced up. Our eyes met.
Great. Monsoon outside, heatwave inside.
“You lost?”
“Trying to remember where I parked,” I lied, knowing full well I hadn’t driven here. My car was back at Il Cigno, safe and dry in the garage where it belonged, because unlike most of the degenerates upstairs, I had enough sense not to gamblewith a single BAC above .08.
“You drove?”
I conceded with a sigh. “Fine. I didn’t.”
“Then you didn’t park.”
Pedantic bastard.
I pursed my lips, tasting coppery irritation. “Can’t a girl admire a classic?”
Overhead fluorescents buzzed, stuttered, lending a morgue’s chill to the cavernous room. There was tension riding his shoulders, thunder in his gaze. He set the wrench down, wiped grease across his forearm, and slammed the hood shut. The metallic boom rolled through my ribs, fluttering the pulse that already misbehaved around him.
Lucius twisted the key. The engine roared to life with a rough growl, vibrating through the metal frame. He tapped the gas. Listened. It was a fine-tuned machine, just like the man himself: mean, built for speed, and way past factory settings. It matched the roll of thunder outside, except thunder didn’t make a grown man’s fingers twitch on the gear shift.
Hmm. Interesting, indeed.
I dragged my damp hair over one shoulder, the strands cooling where they kissed collarbone, and leaned into the curve of the hood. Warm steel hummed with eight hundred horses, vibrating through sternum, stomach, somewhere lower. He chewed on his cigarette, narrowed gaze flicking to the slow rise and fall of my chest against the Italian metal. Exhaling, Lucius slid the loosened tie from his hair. Smoke curled between us, a gray ribbon twining invisible shacklesaround my wrists. With a casualness that felt anything but, he looped the silk around my waist. Tugged. Pulled me off the car, careful not to let his hands touch my wet skin.
If that wasn’t the most Lucius Andrade move in the history of this fucked-up whatever-the-fuck we had going on, I didn’t know what was.
He lingered at the knot he’d cinched, pulse beating against my wrist. Awareness snapped taut, sharp enough to draw blood. Just as quickly, he let go. The tie fell against my hips when turned away and wiped a smear of rain—plus the faintest ghost of my nipple imprint—off the Maserati’s hood with the side of his palm.
“What the hell,” I breathed.
Lucius sparked another cigarette off the glowing end of the last one, snapping the cherry into a shallow puddle at his feet. “Are you going back up?”
“To do what?”
“Win back your money.”
“Who says I lost?”
One eyebrow kicked up. “You’re dripping tequila and bad decisions, which tells me you lost.” He nodded at the passenger seat. “Get in. I’ll take you home.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not sober.”
“And?”
He dragged a palm down the cliff-edge of his jaw, smearing fresh engine grease across a cheekbone my stupid mouth still remembered tasting. “And I don’t want you towrap yourself around a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t drive here.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, as if he’d forgotten that tiny detail. Then, in classic Lucius fashion, he doubled down. “I’ll drive you wherever the fuck you’re going.”
I stared at him.
