Page 94 of Tempting Little Thief

Her lips lift with an airy laugh, and she leans back, lying across my lap.

It’s such a normal, comfortable move to make that it digs at something inside me. I can’t stop staring at her.

“Bastian the badass,” she teases. “Mybadass.” She glances up, but only for a second before going back to following the path her fingers trace over the tattoo on my side, her thumb gliding over the eye of the monster down to its mouth. “There’s a scar here.”

“Scars all over if you look close.”

“I felt them,” she whispers, quietly wondering. “From the devil?”

That’s right, I tossed that one out there, didn’t I?

Swiping my thumb beneath her eyes to clean off the streaks of black makeup there, I find myself nodding. “My old man. He was a real piece of shit.”

Frowning, I bring my gaze to hers. I don’t talk about this shit. Not because I have issues or try to bury my past, but because no one wants to hear my shit. Why would they?

It ain’t pretty, and most have their own problems to worry about. They don’t need mine.

I expect her to look at me with prying eyes, searching for a way to fix the broken boy, but I’m not broken and there is no fixing to be done. I am who I am. Period.

So she shocks me when I get none of that, and the girl smiles up at me instead. “But did he kill people so he couldtake over the world?”

Chuckling, I lift her by her ribs, and she twists, wrapping her legs behind as I lower her into my lap. “Nah …” I think better of it, and I can’t help the smirk that follows. “Tried to, but nah.”

She eyes me, her gaze slicing to the perfect circle, the bullet wound on my shoulder, to the zigzagging slashes beneath the ink on my chest. She touches the tattoos on my neck, the barbed wire made to look like it’s cutting deep, tearing at the worthless skin that means nothing. Mine’s marked up in the worst way, scarred and mangled from shitty at-home stitch jobs in places. I don’t give my marred body a single thought in the day. It means shit to me.

But the ink that covers it? It all means something.

Rocklin’s quiet, but creases have formed along her brows, so I draw her gaze to mine with a tip of her chin.

I wait, and it takes her a minute, but then she says, “When you said you had no parents, what did you mean exactly?”

“Ask me the real question.”

Her submissiveness was gone the minute we were done playing, so she goes full sass on me now. “Did you lie to me?”

My eyes narrow. “What if I did?”

“I don’t like liars.”

“You like me.” I rub my palms along her thigh. “And you’ve got no clue if I am one or not.”

“Do not fuck with me, Bastian.”

“Then tell me what you think you know.”

She concedes. “Your father is dead.”

“Uh-huh …”

“Your mother isn’t.”

I flip her so fast she yelps, and I’ve got her hands pinned above her head a second later. She thinks she’s fast, slick, and she is.

I’m faster. Better. “You went digging.”

“I had to.” She lifts her chin defiantly. “You snuck into a place no one has ever snuck into before, and that was before The Game Room. I let it slide, don’t ask me why—”

“Because you want me.”

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