Mathias knew good and well the guy wasn’t going to show anytime tonight. He shrugged. “So, I’ll stay until he arrives.”
“No, you won’t,” she said. “I’m still on the clock, and I’ve got plenty of work to do before I close up. You’ve got ten minutes.”
“Are you this unaccommodating with all of your clients?”
She leveled an impatient look on him. “You’re not my client.”
“And if I was?”
She laughed. A real laugh, unrestrained and genuine.
“Why is that funny?”
“You’re hardly the type to want a tattoo.”
He shrugged. “It will be my first.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” she said, her blue eyes lit with humor.
Mathias liked her eyes. He liked her laugh, and he had the fleeting awareness that he was enjoying her company more than he ought to. “What would you suggest?”
She cocked her head at him. “You don’t even know what you want?”
“It doesn’t matter. Surprise me.”
“Surprise you?” Her pretty face scrunched up, incredulous. “It’s permanent, you know.”
“So, come up with something I won’t regret for the next hundred years.”
The ghost of a smile played along the curve of her mouth. Damn, she had a fantastic mouth. Mathias’s groin tightened as he watched her chew her lip in contemplation. “Anything I want? Anywhere I decide to put it?”
Her choice of words only made his desire flare even hotter. “Anything. Anywhere. I’m in your hands completely.”
He held her sky blue eyes, knowing full well that there were secrets in their pale depths. Dark secrets that he was still determined to uncover.
“Can I trust you, Nova?”
She stared at him for a long moment. “I guess you’ll have to wait to find out. Take off your shirt.”
CHAPTER 4
Had she lost her bloody mind?
She must have, because that was the only explanation for how she’d found herself perched on her stool a couple of hours later, putting the finishing touches on a freehand tattoo she’d inked onto Mathias Rowan’s back.
His powerfully muscled, utterly distracting back.
Nova hadn’t wanted to notice how firm and strong he felt under her gloved fingertips. She hadn’t wanted to acknowledge the warmth of his naked skin, or the beauty of his Breed dermaglyphs--elaborate skin markings that made all of her work pale by comparison.
She could have gone with a smaller design, placed somewhere less intimate, less time-consuming. God knew, she would have, if she’d been thinking clearly at all.
But talking with him had put an image in her head that wouldn’t let go. When he took off his shirt and she saw the twin flourishes of glyphs on his shoulder blades, she knew she’d found the perfect placement.
And she had to admit, she took more than a little satisfaction in the thought of inking the tattoo on the persistent male’s spine, instead of somewhere with fewer nerve endings just under the skin.
Given how long the work had taken, she was also thankful that she hadn’t spent the whole time under his intense, unsettling gaze. Lying face-down, comfortably relaxed on the reclined work chair, made him almost seem like any other client.
Not that she’d ever had one of the Breed under her iron.