Work In Progress (Red Lipstick Coalition #3) - Staci Hart Page 0,58

waiting.

“It…it’s just that…” I paused. “Did you know even your elbow is hot?”

He blinked once, his face frozen for a split second before he burst into laughter.

Heat stung my cheeks. I thought it might be the good kind of laughter and not the mocking kind, but I’d never been good at deciphering the difference between the two.

Tommy started walking, bringing me with him, given that my hand was locked in the vise of that stupid, hot elbow, which also happened to be inhumanly strong.

“You know,” he started as we headed for the door, ignoring Gus as he bounded around like a jackrabbit, “I’ve caught myself watching your hands, thinking about how sexy they are.”

My face swiveled, and I stared at him like he’d grown an extra head or four. “My hands?” I said stupidly.

He glanced at me, amused. “Your hands.” He opened the door, and we descended the stone steps. “They’re so small, so delicate. Sometimes, I wonder what they’d look like…full.”

At that, my blush flared so intensely, I saw spots. “I…they…I mean…” I stammered, finally landing on a noncommittal, “Huh.”

A black Mercedes waited at the curb with the driver at the open door. Tommy transferred me into the car by way of my hedonistic hand. The door closed with a thump, leaving me alone for long enough to press the back of my hand to my forehead and consider how fucking hot it was in there. Maybe it was my dress, a virtual furnace. Or maybe it was just that the driver had, in an effort to warm the car up, turned it into an inferno.

But when Tommy slipped in next to me with smoldering eyes and that damnable smile, I realized it was just him.

“So, can we go back to when you said you thought I was sexy?” he asked.

Just like that, the tension snapped with our laughter.

“You’re the one who said you wanted me to…to…fill my tiny hands with…well, you didn’t say what, but I have my guesses.”

He snickered. “Well, you want to make out with my elbow.”

My nose wrinkled, but I was still laughing. “You wouldn’t even be able to feel it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know that thing kids do? Dare somebody to lick someone else’s elbow when they’re not looking?”

His face screwed up in confusion. “Is that what kids do in the suburbs? If that happened at my high school, it’d end with somebody losing teeth. Probably the one with the wayward tongue.”

I rolled my eyes. “My point is, you can’t feel it. Your elbow is one of the least sensitive parts of your body, like your heel or your knee.”

“Okay, first—knees can be very sensitive.”

“It’s thick, wrinkly skin over a joint. It’s not sensitive,” I said, so sure of my rightness that I sounded petulant.

“I’ll prove it,” he countered, his voice as deep and velvety as my dress.

Before I could ask what he was going to do, he was doing it. His hands—so big that they were far more like paws than hands—reached for the hem of my dress, the tips of his fingers rasping the skin of my shin. A tingle shot all the way up my thigh at the contact.

He slipped the hem up my shin to expose my knee. Goosebumps raced down my calf. I watched with fascination as his fingertips came to a point, brushed the center of my kneecap, and opened up, spreading out with feather-lightness that set my skin on fire.

“Oh,” I breathed, anticipating more, waiting for his hand to trail higher, to tease my tingling skin into a flame.

But he only chuckled and set my skirt to rights. “See? Told you.”

I tried to gather my wits, which had been strewn all over the floor of the car like a busted pearl necklace. But for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why he was uncuffing one sleeve and hitching it up past that goddamn manly knob he called an elbow.

“Your turn.”

My eyes dropped to the naked joint, then back to his eyes, which glinted with something dark and brilliant. “My turn to what?”

“Prove it.” He turned his gaze to the city beyond the window and thrust his elbow in my direction.

For a second, I just stared at it, inspecting the topography of ropy muscle, the flat line of his ulna, the divots where muscle gave way to bone and tendon that comprised the man—machine? Gallic prince? barbarian warrior?—who sat next to me.

I couldn’t see his mouth, but I could see the curve of his cheek and the