Page 47 of Power Play

“It means I don’t know exactly how many books I own.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m not counting them for tax purposes.”

“That wasn’t where my concern went.”

Ryan glanced down at me beneath the backward brim of his cap. “Where’d it go?”

“I’m trying to decide whether your apartment has bookshelves or whether you’ve built load-bearing walls out of nineteenth-century fiction.”

His mouth pulled into a slow smile. “Come find out.”

The invitation shouldn’t have changed anything. I had been inside Ryan’s apartment before with everyone else, usually while Briggs complained about the furniture and Bliss touched things she had been specifically asked not to touch.

Going there alone felt different.

Everything with Ryan had begun feeling different lately, and pretending otherwise was becoming increasingly difficult. I had spent four years surviving an embarrassing crush by filing it beneath things that would eventually pass. Ryan was attractive. Everybody knew Ryan was attractive. Wanting him had never made me special when half the women at KFU experienced the same temporary loss of judgment whenever he walked into a room.

Friendship should’ve made it easier.

Then I got to know him.

I learned which smile meant he was genuinely amused and which meant he was about to say something designed to piss someone off. I knew he watched documentaries about historical wars when he couldn’t sleep and complained about bad translations in foreign films. He hated mustard, loved coffee strong enough to qualify as punishment, and remembered things people said months after they forgot saying them.

He knew things about me too.

Too many things, apparently.

Ryan stopped beside his truck and opened the passenger door.

I looked from him to the seat. “You’re assuming I said yes.”

“You didn’t say no.”

“That isn’t the same thing.”

“It is when you’re still standing here.”

“You’re deeply manipulative.”

“I’m observant.” He rested one hand on the open door and waited. “You want the books or not?”

“I want the books.”

“Then get in, mi hada.”

The nickname moved over my skin with the same quiet warmth it had inside the bookstore. I gave him a look meant to communicate that I wasn’t affected by it, but Ryan’s smirk said my face had betrayed me before I climbed into the truck.

He shut the door behind me and rounded the hood.

I watched him through the windshield because apparently I had stopped pretending I didn’t do that too.

Ryan moved with the kind of unconscious confidence that came from knowing exactly how much space he occupied and never apologizing for it. He opened the driver’s door, slid behind the wheel, and tossed his cap onto the dash before starting the truck.

My attention caught on his hair.

That was irritating.