The restaurant. He’d been there half a dozen times since it had opened. That little Italian place was what everybody called it.
Surely it had a name.
Unfortunately, he had no idea what it was.
He told that to the Tigress. She looked at him as if he’d just announced he was from Mars.
“What do you mean, you don’t know the name? You must know it. You’ve been there before, haven’t you?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. But I never think of it as anything but the Italian place.”
She stared at him. Then she put the phone to her ear and said, very politely, “Sorry to have bothered you.” The polite tone vanished as she shoved the phone in his direction. “Call Tanner. Ask him.”
Right. Ask Tanner the name of the restaurant. Why do you need it? Tanner would say, and then he’d have to explain that Bianca was the one who needed it so she could tell an Uber driver where to take her.
Well, hell.
All of that would become clear when they arrived separately, he on his Harley, she in a car. Unless he waited for her outside the place because he’d certainly get there first. So, yeah, he could wait until she arrived, and then they’d go inside together—unless, by some chance, Tanner and his wife had decided to wait outside, too…
“This,” he said grimly, “is getting complicated.”
“In what way?”
“The idea was not to make Tanner and your sister uncomfortable, right? Well, arriving at the restaurant separately might not fill the bill.”
Bianca didn’t answer. Then she sighed, looked skyward, as if she might find an answer to their dilemma scrawled on the night’s black canvas.
Finally, she nodded.
He was right.
She could almost hear the questions, especially from her sister—a sister who, given the same set of circumstances, would undoubtedly view riding the Harley as a thrill.
Except, as Lie
utenant Arrogant had pointed out, she wouldn’t really be riding it. He would ride; she’d just hang on for dear life.
Hang on to him—she’d seen the way couples rode these things.
And maybe, just maybe, that was the real issue.
That she didn’t like the idea of putting herself into someone else’s care.
Into a man’s care. Into this man’s care.
Oh, hell.
Maybe the real issue was envisioning herself sitting tucked behind him, wrapping her arms around his hard body, pressing herself against his back…
The hot images in her mind fled, replaced by uncomfortable images of herself trying to deny the truth of those images to her sister. Alessandra had always possessed an uncanny knack of seeing through her.
Bianca took a deep breath.
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“I’ll get on that thing.”