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He regards me like I asked him to dance out in the rain, naked. “Do I look like I eat that shit?”
Instinctively, I glance down at the tight stomach under his semi-see-through shirt and push all intrusive thoughts out of my brain with an extra-big bite of my burger. Not in a million years.
“What do you eat then? The blood of forty virgins for breakfast or something?”
He grins. “Or something.”
“I always had my suspicions you were a vampire.”
Sweeping an expressionless eye over my legs again, he adds something that makes my heart still. “I have a question for you.”
I stop chewing. Glance down at the door handle, but with a click, it locks shut, as if Raphael can see into my thoughts. He turns his attention to the windshield, leans back and runs a palm down his throat. “Why don’t you sleep at night?”
My burger drops to my lap with a sorry thud. “Maybe I’m a vampire too.”
“Penelope.”
His voice wraps around my name like a hug, making my lids flutter shut. It’s loaded with the perfect storm of impatience and softness, and I guess that’s why the truth slips from my lips.
“Bad things happen at night,” I whisper.
His jaw tenses, but he still doesn’t look at me. “Like?”
Like grown men dragging me out into an alley and lifting up my dress. I settle for another example, though. One that doesn’t hurt as much “My parents were killed at night.” I glance at the clock on the dash. “Three-forty a.m, to be exact. It’s a time to be awake and alert, not asleep.”
He nods slowly. I can’t read the expression cut into his face, even when I squint, but he’s definitely not surprised. I guess he probably did his research before giving me a job, and besides, men like him treat death like part of the furniture: always there and easy to gloss over. “Can’t you be awake and alert in your apartment?”
“No.”
His gaze sparks with irritation. “You’re not immune to getting bundled into a trunk, Penelope.”
We’re back to saying my name like that, then.
Happy to have moved on from the topic of my parents, I slurp on my milkshake and shrug. “I’m lucky, remember? Proved it in the phone booth.”
“You’re not lucky,” he snaps.
Instead of biting back, I fish around in the pockets of his jacket and find a loose coin. I hold it between us, a slow grin sliding across my face. “Heads or tails?”
He sighs, leans against the armrest, and hides his interest behind his knuckles. “All right. What’s the wager?”
“You win, and you get your watch back,” I wave my wrist in his face, his watch sliding up and down it. “I win; you eat the burger.”
“Heads.”
With a flick of my thumb, the quarter spins through the air and clatters on the central console. I peer over and laugh. Toss the greasy bag in his lap. “Bon appetit.”
He scowls. Unwraps the burger with the tips of his fingers. But then the jokes on me, because when he fists the burger with both hands and stares into my fucking soul as he takes a ridiculously big bite, hot, needling lust sinks to the pit of my stomach and sizzles against my clit.
Christ. It’s just a burger. But there’s something about how small it looks in his hands; something about the way his inked forearms flex and the primal way his teeth sink into the bun. It makes me think of other things he eats like that.
Head swimming, I inch open the window, subtly turn my head, and suck in a lungful of damn air. I’m about to steal another one, when a hot hand slides under the jacket and over my thigh, tightening my lungs.
What the—
My gaze drops to my book sliding across the center console. Raphael flips it open, tears out a page, and wipes it over his mouth.
I gape at the jagged edge.
