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“Is it the contract?” Cara asked.
He glared at her. “Contract’s fine.” Okay, so banter Jack was all boxed up.
“I’ll get the next round in,” Cara whispered loudly, raising a dramatically arched brow at Lili that said she was doing them a huge favor and giving them some alone time. Lili cut a nervous glance around the bar. Alone time. Like that was possible.
“Did something happen?” Lili asked once Cara had left.
He answered with a kiss. A hot, demanding tongue sweep that made her thankful she was sitting. When he released her, they were both out of breath.
“I needed to see you. Just you.” The rigid set of his jaw paralleled the tightness of his hard torso, now encroaching on her body space. “How soon can we leave?”
Over his shoulder, she watched Cara’s tottering approach with an appletini, its contents flirting dangerously with the rim of the glass.
“Twenty minutes?”
“Ten. Then we go home and fuck each other stupid.”
That eased a smile from her, but it vanished immediately under his insistent gaze. A gaze filled with intent and need and all the things she wasn’t brave enough to say.
Cara had barely sat before she started peppering Jack with questions about the new show. The size of the studio, crew members she had in mind, foreign broadcast rights. Jack’s monosyllabic answers kept Lili on edge, and as the conversation slackened, she tried to will a similar looseness into his body. Her hand found his under the table and he grasped it tight in return. None of that dead fish grip, either. This was a fully paid up registration to the handholding convention.
It worked. He relaxed, and she relaxed enough to get lost in the normality of it. The nearness of Jack, the weight of his body practically curled around her in the booth. Again, she marveled at how big he was—physically, intellectually, emotionally—and how right she felt in his powerful presence. She’d heard of this, how being with that special someone could make you feel as though you were the only two people in the world. That’s how Jack made her feel when he was with her. Like she was the only girl in his world.
Cara was babbling about convection ovens when Jack cut her off. “Cara, you think Lili should apply to graduate school, don’t you?”
Lili almost choked on her beer. They were doing this now?
“Jack.”
He turned his I’m-not-messing-around-here gaze on her.
Cara divided an astute look between them. “I think it’s up to Lili.”
Jack scoffed. “If we were to leave it up to Lili, it would never happen.”
“This isn’t your call, Jack. I’ve already told you I can’t think about that.” She extracted her hand from his controlling grip.
Fast as a cat, he stood and held out his just-released hand to her. “We’ll talk about it at home. Come on.”
Hesitant at first, she only got up because she didn’t want to make a scene, but she made a stand for the sisterhood by ignoring his proffered hand. Take that, bossypants.
Then she heard it. The titter.
It could have been from anyone about anything but she knew better. The hip-looking couple at the next table, the ones who had mentioned Jack’s name earlier was all agog. The girl, a streaky blonde with an eyebrow ring, made no effort to hide her phone with the camera-lens facing them.
Jack placed a hand at the small of Lili’s back, an intimate gesture that she might have read as just another assertion of Jack’s control if she wasn’t so concerned with getting out of Dodge tout suite. She took a quick step forward, her worried gaze trained on the exit.
Walk past them. Avoid eye contact. Don’t acknowledge it.
“Fat cow.”
It was muted, a tossed away statement that struck hard in her breast and registered stranger still because it was said in a male voice. Online hate against women was often fueled by other women, and Lili had always assumed the people who cared about this kind of thing were female and middle-aged and likely to be found after a week of no contact, welded to their La-Z-boys while cats nibbled on their extremities.
Jack halted and spun around. So close. “What did you say?”
“Jack, let’s go.” She snagged his wrist but he held his ground, an immovable object.
Mules had nothing on him.
