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At the same time, I try to coax the brutal possessive lust inside of me into a slumber, a temporary rest, because I know it can’t lie dormant long.
Chapter Thirteen
Zoey
A general feeling of strangeness comes over me as I walk into the diner this morning. It must have something to do with how different I feel, how changed to last time I stepped foot in here. When I left yesterday evening I never could’ve foreseen how drastically I would change, how everything would shift so that now I feel like a new woman as I head toward the counter.
Zack walks silently over to the corner, looking out of place in his sleek gray suit, steel hair, and hulking form. I watch him for a few moments, my insides sizzling when I remember last night, how he turned near-feral when he told me I better not keep him waiting for too long.
My belly swirls with nerves every time I return to his words, replaying them in my head like a freaking mantra… except this causes more anxiety to surge around me, not relief.
It’s empty apart from us. I’m the first in and it’s my responsibility to get everything set up for the day.
“Do you want a coffee?” I call over to Zack.
He’s sitting in the corner booth, opening his laptop.
He makes the electronic device look like a toy in his giant’s hands. “That would be perfect.”
“How do you take it?”
“Black. Strong. No sugar.”
I giggle. “So you like torturing yourself, huh?”
He smirks over at me, lighting up my insides. “Why do you think I’ve decided to watch you all day, my little artist? Watching, but not touching. That’s goddamn torture right there.”
I laugh again – a rare occurrence in this place – and start making the first pot of coffee for the day. Once I’ve given Zack his coffee, I’ll start setting up the coffee machine for the fancier ones, laying out some pastries, making sure everything’s clean and tidy for opening in thirty minutes.
I pour Zack’s coffee with a warm feeling moving through me. It’s silly for such a simple thing to provoke this joy inside of me, but there’s something so couple-like about making my man a coffee, about carrying it over to him and laying it down.
I feel like his girlfriend, giving him a stiff black mug of coffee before he cracks on with his work.
“So what have you got to do today?” I ask.
He smirks up at me, his blue eyes seeming brighter and less savage than they did last night. It probably has something to do with the fact we’re no longer touching.
Any time we’re pressed close, it’s like a monster awakens inside of him that he can’t control. It’s like something shatters in him and he can barely hold himself back.
I love it, of course, I love it, but this is nice as well. It’s good to feel like a couple, even if I should be reflecting on how impossible such a feeling should be.
But impossible seems like a useless word right now, capable of no good, causing only harm and heartache.
I push it down deep and focus on the immediacy of our romance instead.
“I’m going to contact my guy in intelligence and have him look into Jerry. I should’ve done that last night, truth be told, but I was a little… distracted.” His eyes glimmer hungrily and an answering surge moves through me. “And then I’ve got some plans to work on for a gym I’m opening. It’s right around the corner, actually.”
“Around here?”
I glance at the grimy windows of the diner, taking in the sight of the rundown streets beyond. Even in the sun, they seem to devour the light, stealing all the goodness out of the air. Nothing around here is clean and well-maintained like in Zack’s neighborhood.
“All of my gyms are in neighborhoods like this,” Zack says. “I like to open them in low-privilege areas as often as I can. I still charge, so don’t look at me like I’m a saint. I still turn a profit… a healthy one, honestly, because I also have an upscale line of exercise gyms in the fancier parts of town. But this – teaching these kids how to defend themselves – is my real passion.”
He doesn’t need to tell me it’s his passion when I can read it so plainly on his face, his love for his work beams through every inch of him.
“That’s amazing.” I reach down and touch his hand, squeezing on to feel the heat blaring through him. “You know how you said I was going to make a good mom?”
“You are going to make a good mom.”
“I think you’re going to make an even better dad. Look at you. You care so much—”
“What’s going on here?” Comes from behind me.
Something drops in my chest at the sound of my boss’s voice. I turn to find Clive swaggering over to us, his lip peeled back in a sneer. He’s a short wide-shouldered man, with a bald head and a band of dusty-blonde hair around the edges. He must be only about thirty, but he moves and behaves like a man twice his age.
