Page 41 of Spiced!

Another pause.

“I mentioned you were a vet,” he said. “After you came the first time.”

“He remembered.”

“Adrian remembers most things,” Peter said. “He’s not just a pretty body, you know. That’s part of how he works. He actually has a brilliant mind, though I wonder sometimes if he knows it.”

I sat with that for a moment, trying not to fixate on caramel-colored skin and abs that stretched for miles. “Okay.”

“Brendan.”

“Yeah?”

“Go early,” Peter said. “Before his shift. He’s usually there early to stretch and warm up.”

He hung up before I could ask how he knew what I was planning, which was fine because Peter knowing things without being told was simply part of who Peter was. I had long since stopped being surprised by it.

So, of course, I drove to Ybor earlier than usual.

Chapter 10

Adrian

Brendan was already in his booth when I arrived. He hadn’t shown up during the set or after the crowd had filled in. He’d come before everything, an hour before my shift, while the bar was still in its pre-Saturday-night state of organized preparation. Many of the chairs were still upside down on tables, and Benji was doing his pre-rush inventory count with a most unusual silence for a man whose quiet state was generally akin to a volcanic eruption.

I strode through the back with my pastry boxes and Fanta and saw Brendan sitting there by the door with a glass of water and an untouched whiskey in front of him on the table. His jacket was neatly folded on the seat beside him, and he was scanning the room the way I was learning he always looked at things—fully and without rushing it.

His eyes locked onto mine a few heartbeats later.

Neither of us said anything for a second.

Then I turned to Benji, who was watching me with the carefully neutral expression of a man pretending to count bottles.

“You knew he was here?”

“I’m doing inventory,” Benji said.

“Benji.”

“The Campari count is very demanding.”

I looked at the Campari, then I looked at Benji.

I set my pastry boxes on the bar, called through to Rod, got the usual one arm through the pass snatching the guava box, and took my Fanta to the back to change. Only briefly did I consider walking over to say hello. It probably would’ve been the right thing to do, the thing normal people did, but seeing Brendan in my space, before I’d had time to settle into it, had me feeling very, I don’t know, un-Adrian.

I was rarely shy.

Hell, I danced in so little clothing that guys could tell my religion by my bulge. Still, something about confronting Brendan—okay, confronting was a bad word choice—something about seeing him made my stomach do dance moves my feet weren’t trained for.

So I took slightly longer than usual to slip out of my clothes and into, well, fewer clothes.

Not because I was nervous. I was not nervous.

At least, I wasn’t nervous about dancing.

I had been performing in front of rooms full of strangers for years. I’d performed on stages before thousands. I’d competed in dance events, had been judged, and won awards. Nothing about dancing on a bar counter made my stomach do anything.

And I refused to admit that I might’ve been nervous about a man in a booth who had come an hour early on a Saturday, which was either very casual or very deliberate, and I wasn’t sure which.