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“Why would you tell her that?”
He shrugged. “Because she wouldn’t help me make the lasagna until I told her who I was making it for.” He glanced at her and winked.
“What am I going to do with you?” She wanted to snatch the words back at seeing the mischief lighting up his eyes. “Don’t answer that.”
“Pity. I had some really good answers to that question.” He pressed his leg against hers.
She just bet he did.
“Y’all decide on what you want?” Katie said, returning to the table. “The special tonight is spaghetti and meatballs.”
“I was kind of hoping for lasagna. Since I already know how good yours is.” Skye smirked when Tristan, in the process of drinking water, choked. She patted him on the back. “That go down wrong, Chief?”
“She knows,” he muttered, glancing at Katie.
Katie’s eyes widened. “I swear he made it. I only guided him a little.”
“Just a little?” Skye raised her brows.
“Okay, maybe more than a little, but only to tell him what to do. He actually did make it.”
“Well, it really was good, so thanks for helping him,” she said, letting Katie off the hook. Not Tristan, though. She wasn’t done with him. “I think I’ll have the ham and cheese wrap, a side of sweet potato fries, and unsweetened tea.”
“A hamburger, everything but onions, a side salad, and coffee will do it for me,” Tristan said.
After Katie left, Skye leaned back in the corner of the booth. “I don’t know whether to punish you for talking about me to Katie or reward you for the effort you put in to making me lasagna.”
“Both could be good if done right.” Heat flared in his eyes.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
“No.”
“That’s it? Just no?”
“Yep. See, it’s my eyes.” He pointed at said eyes. “They look at you, and it just happens. Nothing I can do about it.”
“You’re impossible.” And adorable and sexy and...everything she wanted in a man. All those bricks she’d piled up to make a wall no man could penetrate again, well, he was sneaking in and stealing those bricks, one by one. And doing it with smirks, smiles, and winks. With treating her as an equal and the way he listened to her. With lasagna dinners, kisses that melted her, and laughter. She thought she loved...liked the laughter best. Or maybe it was the kisses and the things he did to her body in the quiet hours of the night.
“The wheels are spinning, Sheriff. What’s going on in that mind of yours?”
Another thing. He saw her in a way no other man had. “I was thinking about the loft.” It was the first thing to come to mind because she sure wasn’t going to admit her brain was stuck on him.
“So, you’re really thinking about it?”
“Yeah. It’s perfect for me. You said you’d been in it once before?” There had been something in the way he’d said it that had snagged her attention. And now the wheels were turning in his mind. “What?”
“Not sure you want to know.”
“That only makes me more curious.” There was nothing he could say that would change her mind about the loft. The more she thought about it, the more she wanted it.
“It was Luther’s love nest.”
The fork she was playing with clattered to the table. “What?”
“Told you that you didn’t want to know. If it helps, that was about nine years ago. I was a rookie at the time, eight months on the job, when Miss Mabel grabbed me by the front of my shirt as I was walking into Sweet Tooth. She demanded I go upstairs and evict the—” he made air quotes “—hussy living there.”
“Miss Mabel owns my loft?”
