didn’t seem bothered in the slightest by all the uniforms in the place. Just like he’d said.
“So you have to tell me your name,” she announced. “Before anything else happens.”
Yeah, ’cuz God forbid she chow down a cheeseburger in front of someone she hadn’t been properly introduced to. Evading a police helicopter, fine. But dinner? She had to draw the line.
Rolling her eyes at herself, she said, “What I mean is—”
“Syn,” he interjected.
“Sin.” Jo tilted her head to the side. “As in not a virtue?”
“No, with a y.”
“What’s it short for?”
“Syn.”
His dark, glowing eyes calmly stared back at her across the table, like he was prepared to field a credit check if she wanted to Experian his ass. And the juxtaposition between all that open-book and the sheer size of him wedged into the booth was a contradiction she was grateful for. The fact that he didn’t seem to have anything he was hiding from her made him so much less dangerous.
Plus, again, there was a whole squad of cops around them. If she needed 911, all she had do was pull a “Help!” and a sea of blue would ride up on the guy.
Then again, if he’d wanted to hurt her, he’d had plenty of chances already.
“Can I ask you something?” she said, leaning forward. “And I don’t want to offend you.”
“You won’t offend me.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to ask.”
“It doesn’t matter what it is. You will not offend me.”
As he continued to look over at her, the commotion of the busy bar disappeared on Jo. Between one blink and the next, there were no waiters buzzing around with trays of drinks and pitchers of beer. No plates of onion rings or chicken wings being delivered. No men with badges laughing loudly or women with badges telling stories. Privacy bloomed around them, an illusion created by how she felt as he stared at her like that.
Jo cleared her throat. What had she been—oh, right.
“Are you a pro wrestler or something?” she blurted.
“Wrestler?”
“You know, the WWE. Hulk Hogan, although I guess he was doing that in the eighties. I know of him through reality TV. And that lawsuit over the sex tape years ago, thank you, TMZ.” As Sin with a y just continued to meet her eyes, she shook her head, aware she was babbling. “Have you heard of any of those things?”
“I know what a sex tape is, though I’ve never seen one.”
“That makes you party of nobody else,” she said dryly.
“Why would I want to watch someone I don’t know having sex? Or someone I do know, for that matter.”
Now her eyebrows went up. “You have single-handedly disavowed the porn industry, then.”
Make that left-handedly disavowed, she amended to herself. And she would have made that joke out loud, but she didn’t know him well enough. Maybe he was really religious?
“It’s just not of interest,” he said.
“You’ve never watched YouPorn.”
“What is that?”
“You’re not from here, are you.” As if geography might account for him being the one person in the bar who wasn’t familiar with that URL?
“No, I’m not.”
“So where are you from?”
“Not here.”
When she waited for him to fill that one in and he did not, she sat back. “Europe? I mean, you don’t sound American.”
“Yes. Europe.”
Tick-tock… no amplification on that, either.
All right, he might have been open to answering anything, but he clearly wasn’t going to help her much on the Easter Egg hunt.
“So you’re not a wrestler—are you a weight lifter? Wait—a CrossFit guy?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“So how are you this big?” She shook her head. “What I mean is—”
“Genetics,” he said remotely.
“See, I have offended you.”
“No, I just don’t like where I came from.”
In the pause that followed, a waitress walked up with a pad and pen. As there were no uniform requirements for the bar, the twenty-something was rocking a hipster vibe with mud-colored clothes, a tattooed sleeve down one arm, and some piercings in her face.
“What can I getcha to drink?”
That she only looked at Syn seemed right. Jo would have done the same in her shoes—hell, she was doing the same. Of all the people in the place, he stood out—and yes, the men and women in uniform and plainclothes had noticed him, too. And at least nobody was springing forward with a Taser and some cuffs.
“Water,” he said.
The waitress pulled an “And you?” without glancing in Jo’s direction. Her eyes were too busy roaming around the span of Syn’s leather jacket and the breadth of his chest