“Thanks, Mace.”
She simply nodded in her no-nonsense style and went on to the next customer.
It took some doing to get out of the café. I swore everyone in town must have been there for lunch though it was barely noon.
He gestured to a table at the edge of the outdoor patio.
I rushed over to grab it. Not because I wanted to get space between us. Surely not.
I’d barely slid my butt into a chair before a woman with wild, curly dark hair tried to grab it. “Damn.” She gave me a shrug and moved to a smaller table at the back of the patio.
“Quick.” Gage’s voice rumbled near me as he set my to-go cup down.
I cleared my throat and curled my fingers around it. Better than doing something stupid like looping my finger into the worn denim about six inches from my face. Good grief.
And a flash of memory made me swallow a groan. Of me on my knees going at a very similar zipper.
Nope. Do not need that in my brain right now.
I focused on the funky to-go cup. There were about fifteen different designs on the cups and I’d gotten almost all of them. Most of them had a small Halloween or horror item hidden in the seasonal drawings. I grinned as I spotted the skull hidden in the center of a rose.
God, I loved Macy.
“What’s the smile for? I know it’s not for me.”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
He sat across from me, invading my space once again. Mostly because it was a little table and he had legs for freaking days. But his muscled arms and the long fingers wrapped around his cup seemed to fill every bit of the available room as well.
Everything about him was far too large. Including his ego. And other things that didn’t bear repetition except in my dirtiest fantasies.
“Do you have to?”
“What?”
I glanced at his hands past the midway mark of the table.
“You liked when I invaded your space before. In fact, I nearly changed your nickname to barnacle.”
“Shut up. What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me what made you smile.”
“Why do you care?”
He leaned back in his chair, but his big stupid foot was still caging me into my chair. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I’m less than nothing to you. We had one night, Gage.”
“Well, there’s two fallacies in there. Number one, you’re my sister-in-law now, so you’re definitely not in the less than nothing category to me. And hello, what we did that night? Nothing forgettable there, huntress.”
I flushed. “Would you stop saying stuff like that?”
“Is it that I’m mentioning it or that you can’t forget it either that riles you so?”
I picked at the double shot sticker on the side of my cup. “I haven’t thought of you since.”
“I might believe you if you looked at me.”