“No, thanks, I can do it.” He wanted her focused on her own dinner. He liked watching her enjoy the food.
“What? How can you turn that down?” Quan asked. To Esme, he said, “You can do mine.”
Suppressing a smile, she put a morsel of lobster meat on Quan’s plate, and Khai had the horrible urge to snatch the food off his brother’s plate and gobble it down. It made no sense, and he grabbed his water glass and took a large gulp. A floral flavor had him frowning. What was that?
When he pulled the glass away from his lips, he found red lipstick on the rim. He’d accidentally used Esme’s glass. Germ transference. He wasn’t excessively germophobic, but with all the new bacteria no doubt swarming in his mouth, he might as well have kissed her.
Except he’d never kissed her. Not even once.
He didn’t know the softness of her lips or the taste of her mouth. By drinking from her cup, he’d gotten all the cost without any of the benefit. That hardly seemed fair. The scope of his vision narrowed to her lips. Full, red, and wet, they called to him.
When she sucked on her fingertips, Khai felt the draw deep inside of himself. The breath punched out of his lungs as his body hardened in a dizzying rush.
He drank the rest of her water and pushed away from the table. “I’m going to get a drink.” Maybe alcohol would kill her bacteria and clear his mind.
Esme waved saucy fingers at him as he escaped to the bar to order something strong.
It wasn’t much of an escape, though. Quan followed him there and rested a big arm on the bar’s counter, looking relaxed and dangerous at the same time.
“How you doing?” Quan asked.
Khai had no idea how to articulate his current state, so he gave his usual answer, “Okay.”
“You missed kendo practice last weekend.”
That was kind of a big deal. Khai never missed practice—not even when he was sick—but Esme had asked him to take her to Berkeley. And if she asked, he knew he would give her anything. If he could.
“Sorry, I was busy,” he said.
Quan laughed as he rubbed at his buzzed head. “Tell me about it. I’m so busy with this CEO shit I hardly have time for anything. That’s why I haven’t checked up on you before now. She’s not who I expected Mom to pick for you, but she’s great. I’m surprised you don’t like her.”
Khai started to correct his brother and say he did like her, but he frowned at his drink instead. If he said he liked her, Quan would probably start matchmaking. He didn’t want that. It was hard enough to stay away from her as it was.
“What don’t you like about her?” Quan asked. “She’s fun and hot as fuck.”
He couldn’t answer that question. There wasn’t anything about Esme he’d change. Not a single thing. “I’m just not interested.”
As he said the words, however, they felt uncomfortably like a lie. Their relationship wasn’t even physical, and he was already half addicted to her. He needed to keep them apart. For both their sakes.
He dug the paperback out of his inner coat pocket and flipped through the pages with his thumb once before he caught himself.
“You’re kidding me,” Quan said, pinning a disgusted look on the book. “You’re going to read with her sitting there?”
“Yeah.” That had been the plan. Weddings were bad enough on their own, but watching Esme and Quan interacting like best friends was even worse. He didn’t bother analyzing why.
“Can’t you try to be nice to her? It’s obvious wed
dings are hard for her. She grew up without a father, and it has to suck seeing the bride with her dad.”
Khai frowned. He hadn’t made that connection earlier. Because of his stone heart. But now that he understood the reason for Esme’s sadness, he swore he’d go through the list of Phils one by one if he had to, and then he’d send her dad to her wrapped in a red bow like a Lexus on Mother’s Day. As for being nice to her, he recalled his brother’s weakness for orphaned anything—dogs, cats, tiny gangsters from school, you name it. “She’ll be fine with you there.”
“Are you . . . handing your girl to me? You’d be okay with me and her being together?”
It took Khai a moment to comprehend what his brother was saying, but then his muscles flexed involuntarily. No, he wasn’t okay with that. He didn’t want Esme for himself, but he didn’t want her with anyone else, either. He always pictured them apart but single.
“Because I’m interested,” Quan continued. “Those eyes alone would do it, but the rest of her . . .” Quan made hourglass movements with his hands. “Jesus.”
Listening to his brother talk about Esme that way was worse than hearing someone chew with their mouth open, and the unfamiliar desire rose to punch Quan in the nose. When Khai noticed he’d fisted his hands, he uncurled his fingers, appalled. He pushed away his violent thoughts and forced himself to be rational. When he thought about Esme’s needs instead of his own, one thing became very clear.