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Rafe arranged a sleepover for me?The idea is sweet, sickly even, and it churns in my stomach like I’ve eaten too much chocolate in one sitting. I try to wash it away with rationale: he probably doesn’t trust me to be on his zillion-dollar mega-yacht alone, which is fair, considering the last rich guy that was mean to me got his casino burned to the ground. Besides, it’s not like he knows how badly I wanted to have sleepovers when I was a kid.
I look over the top of Rory’s messy bun and meet Angelo’s suspicious stare. He gently sweeps his wife to the side so there’s no barrier between me and his last-ditch attempt at interrogation.
“You know where my brother is, Penelope?”
“Have you triedFind My iPhone,Angelo?”
Tayce stills. Wren draws in a sharp breath, and Rory mutters something about flamingos under her breath.
The air heats for a moment, then cools when dry humor softens Angelo’s expression.
“I get it now.”
I frown. “Get what?”
But he doesn’t reply. Instead, he plants a kiss on his wife’s jaw, tells her to call him before she goes to sleep, and disappears out to the swim platform.
I turn back to the lounge for an answer. “Get what?”
Rory smirks. Wren turns red and looks away. When I glance at Tayce, she places a hand on my thigh and gives it a squeeze.
“He means, he gets why Rafe is obsessed with you now. You talk almost as much shit as he does.”
The interrogation was inevitable. I answered questions about our situation with flippancy—we’re just fucking, chill—and questions about how long I’ll be here for with vagueness—until I get bored of him.
Truth is, I don’t know the real answer to either.
At least the third-degree was short-lived. When Tayce asked how big Rafe’s dick is, Rory got so grossed out she knocked a glass of red wine on the cream carpet. We turned our attention to moving the sofa three feet to the left to hide it, and luckily the conversation never went back to the topic of her brother-in-law’s manhood.
The evening bled into night with the unrelenting rain and the soundtrack ofMamma Mia!providing the backdrop to a sleepover I could have only ever dreamed of as a kid.
Now, I’m curled up on the sofa in my pajamas, drunk on sugar and wine, and I’m trying to play it cool. Trying not to grin like a maniac as I watch Wren teach Rory the official dance to ABBA’sSuper Trouper,and trying not to ask when we can do this again.
The sofa dips beside me. “Decide on what you want, yet?”
I glance down at the black box Tayce set on the coffee table. She snaps it open and runs her finger over a silver tattoo gun.
I swallow. “Depends. Does it hurt?”
“A lot less than getting impaled by Rafe’s massive dick, I’m sure.” Cheeks heating, I go to swat her away, but she ducks out of arm's-reach, laughing. “Nah. It’s more a scratch than a stab. And after a few minutes, the area goes numb and you can’t really feel it anyway.”
My eyes travel down the length of her arms as she snaps on a pair of black gloves. “You don’t have any tattoos yourself?”
“Nope, that’s why they call me the tattooless tattoo artist.” She glances up at Rory and Wren doing the Brooklyn shuffle, then lowers her voice. “Tattoos make you identifiable.”
The sound of her beer chinking against mine in The Rusty Anchor echoes in my head.
“I hear you’re the best.”
She laughs. “That’s what they say.”
“Did you always know you wanted to be a tattoo artist?”
She cocks her head, and for a moment, I watch her unscrew her gun and sterilize each part. “No,” she eventually says. “I was studying Art History at college. I wanted to be a museum curator.”
“So why tattoos?”
A dark smirk touches her lips. She flips her long, black hair over her shoulder and pins me with a knowing look. “I like inflicting pain on men, even just for a little while.”
