Page 26 of Just Say (Hell) No
“You must be cold, too,” she said. “And you don’t have another pair of shorts.”
“Nah. I’m a pretty tough bugger, and they’ll dry. Go on. Ella’s hungry, and I’m guessing you need a coffee.”
“Uh, Marko,” Ella said. “Where’s your wallet?”
His face changed. Completely. He started patting his pockets. “Bloody hell. I may have got a bit carried away there. Wait. Here. Brilliant.”
Or not. The slim black-leather folding wallet looked like it had cost something. Now, it was absolutely, positively soaked with salt water.
Marko stood and looked at it for a long moment. “Destined, that’s what I am,” he finally said. “And not in a good way. I’m texting my mum back to tell her she’s losing her touch. At least I left my phone in the car.”
“What?” Nyree asked, trying not to laugh. She should be sympathetic, but he looked so nonplussed.
“My Tarot card of the day. Which somehow always seems to show that I’ve got this. Never mind.”
“Ah. What were you meant to be today?” she asked. He was pulling a couple slips of paper out of the wallet. Or more like—a couple ragged, limp ribbons of paper. It was awfully hard not to smile. Girls’ phone numbers? If they were, he was out of luck. She shouldn’t feel so pleased about that.
“King of Swords,” he said. “Competent. Logical. In control.” He shoved the mess of paper into his back pocket, then froze. He was patting his backside again, then checking his front pockets, which forced Nyree tolookat his front pockets. His thin shorts were still soaked. Still clinging, too. And his long ring finger hadn’t lied.
Testicle size. That was the correlation, and the evidence was right there. It wasn’t only that, either. He had plenty of everything.
She looked up fast. She didnotneed that information.
“Well, bugger me,” he said in resignation. He hadn’t noticed her momentary lapse, fortunately. “My car key would seem to be in Davy Jones’s locker.”
“Should we have a look?” Nyree asked. “Maybe we could find it.”
“Unlikely,” he said. “Tide’s going out, and searching futilely for my key isn’t the image I was hoping to leave you with. No worries. I’ve got another key at home.”
“House key?” Nyree asked.
“He has a key pad,” Ella said. “Good thing. I can’t believe you did that, Marko. It’s awesome. He’s always so perfect,” she told Nyree. “He never does awkward things. I can’t believe you jumped in the sea with yourwallet. Wait till I tell Caro.”
“My sister,” Marko told Nyree. “Not my girlfriend. For the record, I’ve got heaps of sisters, so if you hear another name, she won’t be my girlfriend, either. And it could be,” he told Ella, “that my mind was elsewhere.”
“Oh,” Ella said. “You mean because Nyree took off her clothes? That’s even worse, when you just gave me that whole lecture about thinking ahead and not getting carried away. Like you’d never done it. I told you,” she said again to Nyree, “he’s perfect. This is great.”
“Consider me humbled,” he said. “And if we’re all done battering my ego, maybe Nyree could get that shower and let me see if my plastic still works to buy her breakfast, so my world could go right side up again.”
There was a bubble of laughter in Nyree’s chest, trying to get out. She said, “Why is it that before, I was nervous about it, and now, I suddenly want to go to breakfast with you fairly desperately?”
He started to smile. Slowly. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’ll take it.”
“Did you think Marko was, like, bad or something?” Ella asked. “Just because he looks like that? He’sboring. I’m telling you. He’sresponsible.All he does is train and eat.”
The laughter bubbled over. “I believe she’s your cousin,” Nyree told Marko. “I’ll go take a shower, and I’ll take that coffee, too.”
“Maybe you could tell me why,” Marko said to Nyree when they were seated outside the Mission Bay Café with the dog’s leash around her chair leg and the kitten on his lap, “my spectacular failure at being the King of Swords worked for you.”
She’d taken her shower, and her mass of black hair was more tumbled than ever, blown about by exertion, wind, and water. The pale-blue cotton dress had tiny sleeves, showed some very nicely rounded upper arms and a swell of pale breast if you happened to look down the front, and reached only halfway to her knee when she sat down. Which she was doing now, her bare thigh centimeters from his.
Not a hardbody, no.
He was carefully not looking at any of it except the hair and the face. It wasn’t easy. When she’d laughed, before… that had been a midnight laugh. A little bit sweet and a little bit dirty. He wanted to hear it again.
“Taking notes, are you?” she asked, a saucy smile hovering at the edges of her mouth. Her emotions moved across her square face like the Auckland weather. “For your romantic career?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe taking notes on you. Tell me what I did right, and I’ll do it again.”
