Bad Boy Ink (Get Ink'd #5) - Ali Lyda Page 0,23

gave a stiff nod. “I'm fine.” His tone was as pinched as his face and I was certain he wasn't being truthful.

But if he didn't want to talk about what was going on, then it wasn't my job to push for more, especially when this was the longest we’d gone without snapping at each other since we’d met. We looked over the menu, although for me it was just for show. I always ordered the same thing: steak and fries, baby.

Our waiter approached, the son of the owner who I’d had many conversations with over my years of coming here for lunch. I loved his accent, the consonants soft and rolling.

What caught me off guard wasn't the waiter but Aiden, who began speaking in fluent French. He placed his order easily, comfortably, and I was both awed and more than a little jealous. Particularly when said waiter beamed with happiness, clearly enjoying a customer who spoke in his native tongue.

When the waiter turned his attention to me, I was prepared to say what I wanted but he simply asked, “The same as usual?”

I nodded. He gave me a brief smile, polite and professional, before he left us. I looked at Aiden. Aiden looked at me. We both seemed to have questions for the other but were weighing the potential risks of actually throwing a line out. He took the plunge first.

“You come here enough that the waiter knows your order? Or is he a former conquest as well?”

I stared back smugly. “I seem to recall telling you I haven’t had time for dating. But yeah, I come in here pretty frequently for lunch because of the quiet. They let me do homework and take up a table, and in exchange I tip well and set up a bot to periodically leave five-star reviews on their social media. You know, play the algorithm a bit.”

“And you have a favorite order that they know because you cheat the system.” Aiden said it as a statement but it was clearly a question.

“It isn’t cheating if they deserve every single one of those stars. And I like it here, it’s got a Cheers sort of vibe. You know, a place where everybody knows your name? And I didn't know that you spoke French.” Another question in statement form.

“Interesting,” Aiden said, a smirk somehow in his voice. “And here I thought you were good at digging up dirt on other people. If you had done your research properly, you would know that I went to a highly prestigious private school where I was made to study not only French but Spanish as well. And thanks to my roommate at the boarding school, I also can speak a bit of Dutch.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at him in a new light. Not just a pretty face, that was for sure. “Look at you, the Renaissance man. Fluent in worldly languages as well as coding ones. But are you fluent in the most important language of all?”

It took immense effort not to giggle as Aiden looked like he was truly considering an answer. “What, you mean Latin?”

I couldn’t help it; I straight up guffawed. “No, the language of love, baby.”

Aiden rolled his eyes but a faint blush crept onto his cheeks. “You are the worst. Look, can we just talk about the case? I'm not interested in playing ‘get to know you’.”

He used finger quotes and everything. I gritted my teeth as I smiled in return. Shit, this kid was prickly. But whatever, even if I wasn’t used to people disliking me, it wasn’t a crime, and it was time for me to stop letting Aiden get under my skin. I thought again about what Bryan had said. I needed to be a better partner so we could get through this class intact—and with that A.

“Okay,” I said as I pulled out my laptop and opened it and trying not to glare at him over its screen. I’d do what he wanted, but the sting lingered. It wasn’t just that I rarely had people so actively dislike me. It was that when Aiden dropped his guard, even if just by a bit, he was…handsome, clever, endearing. The kind of guy a man could fall for if he wasn’t being careful.

Focus on the case, Bryce.

Our case was a murder. All our clues were digitally loaded, including several encrypted files to stand in for hard drives we needed to crack. Further, the case hinged around trying