“If you make me cry on your birthday, I’m going to have to kick your ass.” I sniffled.
He flashed a smug grin. “Promise?”
“Oh, I promise.” I nipped the inside of his wrist. We enjoyed fighting as foreplay. If we were weird, at least we kept each other off the streets. “I still owe you for last night.”
“That you do.” He tucked my hair behind my ears to admire my earrings. “They look good on you.”
I snuggled against his chest, amazed as always at how natural it felt now to do so. “They’re beautiful. You have great taste.”
“A ring would look better.”
I didn’t move. Did. Not. Move.
He twirled my hair, still seeming perfectly at ease. “But I know you’re not down with that yet.”
“And you are?” Do not hyperventilate.
“I’m a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. And we have all the time in the world.”
As if he hadn’t just sort of asked me to marry him—had he? I wasn’t sure—he turned to pick up a piece of his penis cake and took a healthy bite. Vanilla pudding oozed out of the corner of his mouth and he licked it up, grinning.
I barely held back a girly sigh. God, he’d made me stupid for him. And he so knew it.
He motioned to my slice of cake. “Hurry up and eat that. Studying can wait. We need to go home right away.”
I did as he asked. It wasn’t hard. Erm, the cake wasn’t hard, of course, but it wasn’t hard to eat it fast. My sister was one hell of a good cook, even when it came to pudding-filled phalluses.
The instant I was done, he dumped the paper plates in the garbage, covered the rest of the cake, and split up his gift boxes to carry out to the car.
“So why are we in such a hurry, may I ask?”
“Hello, did you see that fucking hot teddy? And someone promised me birthday spankings, though I’m pretty sure we never clarified who got to spank who.”
He grinned over his shoulder as he locked the office. Then he took my hand and we headed up the hall, ignoring the usual catcalls from the guys and Vanity and her crew, some of whom had migrated from the newly MMA-free Mark’s Gym—much to Kizzy’s unrelenting, loud disgust—to The Cage. They loved making fun of us, but we didn’t care. Right then, I especially didn’t give a shit, since I could see my sister through the glass front door.
Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t alone.
Giovanni leaned against the stone wall beside her, his arm above her head. Sunglasses on, cocky smirk in place as she held out her cake-laden fork for him to taste.
“Dammit, he’s eating your penis.”
“Yep. That did it.” Tray glanced down at his track pants. “Teddy boner, officially gone.”
My grin lasted until my sister inched closer to Costas and tilted her head in full-on flirt mode. She was laughing and tossing her hair, and he was sucking on her fork like it had turned into a pronged lollipop.
“If we keep telling her to stay away, we’ll push her right into his arms. You know that.”
He was right. As usual. Trying to keep them apart was a losing proposition. Unless I chained her up, I couldn’t ensure she didn’t see him. Maybe I had no right to ensure it.
Loving someone meant letting her make her own choices. No matter how dumb. If she insisted on offering her sweets to dangerous men, I couldn’t stop her. But I could still bitch.
“I hate teenagers,” I muttered. “Full of hormones and stupidity.”
“So does that mean kids are out of the equation?” Understanding I had no desire to walk past my sister and Giovanni, Tray guided me toward the side exit. With his hand on my ass.
The guy gave good distraction, I had to admit.
Instead of freaking out at his question, I decided to take a page out of his book and flow. Lots of flow. “Put a r