Exposed Exposed (Dom Nation #1) - E. Davies Page 0,34

any straightforward answers on whether he wanted that.

Whether he wanted me.

I shouldn’t need him so badly, right? He was one man—one random man I’d only met last night. Never mind that last night had felt a hundred years long.

“Here you go.” Rex passed me one hot glass latte mug, and after one deliciously foamy sip, I sighed with contentment and shook my head. Was there anything he wasn’t good at? I could let this man spoil me for a long time.

“Thanks.”

“Now, come here.” Rex didn’t wait to see if I’d follow his order. He laced his fingers with mine and pulled me toward the living room.

I gulped hard. Was this an intervention? I didn’t want to have to explain that Isaac and I weren’t together anymore—or admit to what I’d let him do for so long in my desperation for attention.

But instead of perching at an angle and lecturing me on the sofa, Rex took me to the love seat and sat close to me. Then he wrapped an arm around my shoulders, casual yet intimate.

He doesn’t want to tell me off. Duh, Slate, I thought, closing my eyes for a moment to let the sensation of weight across the back of my neck settle in.

I hardly knew what to do except clutch the latte mug to my chest and count my breaths so I didn’t make embarrassing excited noises.

“I like to watch the sun rise these days,” Rex said softly, between sips of his own coffee.

“These days?” I asked. Was he usually a late riser? If he frequented Dom Nation, that wouldn’t surprise me.

Rex hummed softly in response. “I used to work all the time. Dawn ’til midnight.”

I took a risk and teased him. “And you don’t now?”

I could see the corners of Rex’s lips fighting to stay downturned. “This is different. It’s fun.”

“So running Daddy Cakes isn’t your only job, or…?” I trailed off.

I was hungry for knowledge about him. I felt like I’d glimpsed everything around him—his shop, his coffee maker, his very bed—but the man at the middle of it all was still a mystery.

So I didn’t know what might be going through Rex’s mind as he bristled slightly. “It is,” he told me in a voice that left no room for argument.

Had I offended him? Crap. I was walking in a minefield here.

But worse still, I felt the volley of his deflection coming a mile off, and there was nothing I could think of to distract him except to jump up and accidentally spill coffee everywhere.

“How about you?”

There it was. I tried not to groan. “You won’t believe me if I tell you,” I muttered.

Rex smirked. “Oh, are you the new Bond?”

I snorted at him and elbowed him gently in the side. “Shut up,” I told him, prickling with worry that he’d take my words wrong. But he just grinned at me, and I sagged with relief. “No. I’m a dental hygienist.”

Here came the joke: oh no, don’t judge me for owning a cupcake shop! I brush all the time!

But instead, Rex just smiled. “Don’t worry. Sugary sweet isn’t my style.”

Thrown off-balance by my expectations, I just blinked at him. “What is?”

Rex tilted his head back, drained the rest of his latte, and pushed himself to his feet.

It was hard to process the emptiness of my shoulders without that slender arm curled around them. Like without him there, I was just going to float off into space forever.

“Let me give you a ride back home.”

Seems pretty sweet to me, I thought, but I’d already pushed him unknowingly once. I wasn’t going to test my luck. Not if I wanted to save it up and get lucky later.

Clearly he was trying to throw walls up between us. Normally I would have melted away into a puddle of angst about it. Thoughts like of course he doesn’t like me or I don’t deserve it might have carried me off in a great flood of emotions I didn’t want and didn’t know how to deal with.

But instead, I was intrigued and perhaps miffed. I wanted to know why he was resisting me at every turn, and then—just when I gave up hopes of interesting him—he made some move to bring us closer.

“I’ll take a ride,” I told him, not even bothering to hide the innuendo dripping from my words.

Rex threw me a sideways glance, his lip curling up in a knowing smile and his eyes hooded. Like he was half a second away from calling me over and