Page 43 of A Matter of Time

“Yeah, but don’t you⁠—”

“Sammy, dance with me!” a woman yelled as she took a seat on his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck and straddling his hips. It was a neat trick considering she had a dress on.

“Oh-kay.” I stood up, not wanting her knees on me or the mojito she was holding to get dumped in my lap. “I think I’m gonna go.”

He just looked at me. Just that much distance made it too hard to hear.

I walked around him to get to the ear she wasn’t blowing in and leaned down close to him. “I’m gonna go. I hafta work in the morning.”

He reached up and fisted his hand in the neck of my T-shirt. “I’ll take you.”

“But…” I gestured at the woman in his lap. “Hello.”

I actually got a grin before he yanked me down beside him.

“Sit.”

“You know, I really⁠—”

“Shut up.”

I felt my brows furrow as he lifted the woman off his lap and set her on the couch to his left. He moved her like she weighed nothing at all. I was smaller than her; he could carry me wherever he wanted.

“Let’s go.”

It was agony to spend another minute with him, but there was no way for me to leave without a scene. So I allowed myself to be steered out of yet another club, onto the street. Before I could even shiver, I was wrapped up in a cocoon of warmth.

“Keep that on till we get to the car.”

His peacoat swallowed me, falling to my knees, hanging long over my hands, but as he had been leaning back against it for more than an hour in the club, it had absorbed all his body heat. It smelled like him too, of some kind of citrus and sandalwood and warm male. I was a fan and sighed deeply.

“See,” he grumbled at me. “You need to carry a damn coat.”

Or get an even better accessory—a man who had a coat.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes, Detective, I heard you.”

Half an hour later, I was standing in the street in front of my apartment, shivering because I had given back his coat, and leaning against the driver’s side door.

“Thank you so much,” I told him, my hands squeezing both the outside metal of the door and the leather interior. “You were great with my friends, and I really appreciated dinner.”

He nodded.

I smiled at him. “Maybe tomorrow you can have the night off from seeing me. That’d be good, huh?”

He let out a deep sigh, his eyes locked on mine. “You’re exhausting.”

“Yeah, I know. My boss says that too.”

“Speaking of which—it’s, like, three in the morning—how are you even gonna get up for work?”

“I just will, because if I don’t, Dane Harcourt will murder me.”

“That would save me a lot of work.”

I leaned back from the car. “I’m sure, but still…thank you.”