The Latin Lover

“You would have thrown a fit if they had.”

“I was naive then…a foolish boy who thought byba mou could do no wrong. Clearly I was deceived as to the sweetness of your character.”

“Are you saying you don’t think your byba is sweet?” she asked, with a pout she’d perfected just for him.

A look came over him that sent erotic pulses pinging through her. “More sweet than is good for me.”

“Are you sure, Spiros?” Was that husky voice hers? “I think I am very good for you.”

He closed his eyes for several seconds of silence and then opened them. “I think you need to change if I am going to take you out.”

“You don’t want to be seen with me wearing my sweats?” she asked, making no move to leave her secure perch.

“I refuse to take you where others might see that band of flesh between your top’s hem and the waist of those too provocative bottoms.”

“My sweats are not provocative.”

He lowered her so she was standing in front of him and then fingered the waistband of her zebra-striped velvet bottoms. “These? They cling to your perfectly shaped derrière and could stand to go further up your torso.”

He thought her butt was shaped perfectly? Another smile broke over her face. “I’m no Urkle wannabe. I have no intention of wearing my pants up around my armpits.”

“Who is Urkle?”

She forgot that he hardly ever watched television—and never the American programs. “A nerdy character in an old sitcom.”

“And she wears her sweats above her belly button?”

“It’s a him and, yes, way above…but don’t think for a minute I’m going to. This is the style.”

“If you bend over, I will see the swell of your bottom.”

“You think?” He was being circumspect, but he meant the crack of her bottom, and she could not let that statement go unchallenged. She spun and bent over. “Well? See anything?” She knew darn well he didn’t. She wasn’t a tramp, and didn’t dress like one.

But Spiros did not answer.

She looked back over her shoulder and her breath locked in her chest. He was staring at her in a way she had only ever dreamed of. With a dark hunger that called to something deep in her womb.

She straightened. “Spiros?”

He stared at her. “You should not have done that.”

“Why?” she asked, her brain refusing the evidence of her own eyes as impossible.

He couldn’t want her. She’d loved him for too long, getting nothing but friendship back in return, for things to have changed like this. It was wishful thinking on her part. It had to be.

Only he was still looking at her as if she was a feast and he the starving man.

“Because,” he said, in a tone she had never heard from him before.

“Because why?” She was nothing if not tenacious.

Anyone who knew her at all knew that. And he knew her better than most.

He didn’t smile at her childish prompting as he had always done in the past. His jaw was too rigid for even a facsimile of one. But he stepped forward.

She had the craziest urge to step back. Crazy because close to him was where she wanted to be. It always had been—even before she’d known she was in love with him. Only right this second he was almost a stranger. A dangerous stranger.

But he would never hurt her. She knew that. No matter how intense he was acting right now. And if by some miracle his attitude meant what it seemed to mean, she wanted it. She knew she did.