Devil and the Deep (The Ceruleans Book 4) - Julie Ann Walker Page 0,82
her eyebrows to her hands, to the swift, efficient movements they made. He was instantly mesmerized. The soft moonlight streaming down from above seemed to highlight just how graceful and small they were. Narrow palms. Thin fingers. Short, unpainted nails that showed half-moon shapes up by her cuticles.
Pretty.
Alex had pretty hands.
Which made sense, he supposed, since the rest of her wasn’t too hard to look at either. Oh, not that Alex ever flaunted her cute, all-American-girl appearance. Quite the contrary. She didn’t seem to care that her curly hair was usually sticking out every which way. She didn’t wear revealing clothing that showed off her delicately curved figure. And she hid the most amazing green eyes he’d ever seen behind a dark pair of tortoiseshell glasses.
Nevertheless, there was no mistaking how attractive she was. It was always there. Staring him in the face. Taunting him.
And maybe that was why he was always so short with her. Because he could have ignored any woman who strutted her stuff. But it was impossible to ignore a woman who didn’t seem to know or care she even had stuff.
Or maybe I’m short with her because she drives me crazy. There was always that possibility.
“Orange?” She held out a peeled half to him.
“Sure.” He accepted her offering. One thing about her that didn’t drive him bonkers was the fact that she fed him. Always. “Thanks.”
For a couple of seconds they sat in blissful silence. The only time Mason knew Alex to keep quiet was when she had food stuffed in her mouth, which, thankfully, was quite often. But he should have known the reprieve wouldn’t last for long.
“So which kind do you think Bran and Maddy are?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“People where lust turns into love? Or people where love turns into lust? Because they’ve been cultivating this friendship for months, which leads me to think they’re the latter. Then again, seeing them together is like walking into a welding factory.” When he cocked his head, she wiggled her eyebrows. “I’m talking sparks, baby. So that leads me to think it’s the former. I guess it’s that whole chicken-and-egg thing. One of the quintessential mysteries of life. Although maybe you have more insight. After all, you were there when they first met.”
He blinked. “What was the question again?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Why is it no one can ever follow my line of inquiry?”
“Maybe because after you ask something, you keep talking for five minutes, and by the time you’re finished, people have forgotten the initial query.”
“Well, then people should learn to focus.”
“Consider me a camera,” he told her, a grin tugging at the corners of his lips. Despite all the ways she exasperated him, it was fun keeping up with her lightning-fast mind.
She blinked at him. “I can’t tell if you’re serious or just being a smart-ass.”
“Can’t I be a serious smart-ass?”
“We’ve gone off the rails.”
“You act like that’s something new for you.”
“The question,” she stressed, “is whether you think Bran and Maddy are the kind of people where lust turns to love or vice versa.”
“Neither,” he said, popping an orange slice into his mouth. “Theirs is a lust-only situation.”
“How can you be so sure?” she asked curiously, taking a bite of orange. A drop of juice landed on her lip, and she absently licked it away. He gritted his teeth when the sight of her pink tongue caused an ache to form low in his belly.
“Because I know Bran,” he said, looking away from her. “And he won’t let love into the equation.”
“Why not?”
He turned back to stare at her the way he would stare at a blank wall. “He just won’t.”
He and Bran were peas in a pod in that respect. They both agreed that there were two kinds of love. The kind that flourished and left both parties stronger for its presence; the rare kind of love. And the kind that destroyed and made both parties weaker and warier for having experienced it; the more common kind of love. Turned out, neither one of them cared to play the odds on the former because both of them had already experienced the carnage left behind from the latter.
“Does it have something to do with his father or the way he was raised?” Alex asked.
And now Mason’s stomach ached for a whole new reason. “What the fuck do you know about that?”
“Nothing,” Alex said, blinking warily. “I just heard LT say something to Romeo once about Bran being the way he is