Page 14 of Patrick

“Go ahead. Let’s eat this food before you faint,” she says, arching a brow.

“I don’t faint.” I pull out her chair and wait for her to sit.

She lowers into her chair and tilts her head up to look at me with an expression so vulnerable it nearly buckles my knees.

“Honestly, I’m too nervous to eat,” she whispers.

Opening my mouth, I find I have no words, so I nod and sit across from her, less excited about food as my belly clenches. Maybe I’m experiencing sympathetic nervousness. Or maybe I understand exactly how she feels.

“You have to eat. We came here so you could have your Paul Bunyan breakfast. You’re the one who’ll faint if you don’t eat.” I eye her up and down.

She’s slim. Not an ounce of fat under the coat that she slides off her shoulders. Certainly no excess in her thighs, hips, and rear. In fact, she looks toned and perfect. Whatever baby fat she had when she was younger is gone. Not that she would ever have been classified as overweight. But now she looks like she’s training for the Olympics.

She laughs and takes a deep inhale over her plate of food. “Well, if you insist.”

I laugh, and the tension I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to ignore seeps out of me.

She slathers her stack of French toast with butter and syrup, cuts a triangular piece from it, and lifts the forkful to her mouth, not seeming to mind me watching.

“Oh, that’s so good,” she says with her mouth full and her eyes fluttering closed in ecstasy as she chews. I’m stuck paying attention to every detail: the drop of syrup on the corner of her mouth, the column of her long white neck with her head thrown slightly back, and her murmurs bordering on orgasmic moaning as she swallows her food.

I clear my throat. She opens her eyes and sees me staring, but it doesn’t throw her or make her blush self-consciously; she only smiles like she’s pleased. With what, I’m not sure. I’m more scared than pleased with any of this, or the sane part of me is.

My dick is thrilled and looking forward to the prospect of getting up close and personal with her.

My stomach, along with my entire digestive tract, growls angrily at me for not even touching the food on my plate. She arches a brow, and I can see her telling me what are you waiting for?

Instead of picking up my burger, I steal one of her pieces of bacon and crunch it between my teeth before she can do more than widen her eyes in surprise.

“Good bacon.” I grin.

Belatedly, she gives my hand a light slap. “You don’t have a right to take my bacon without asking. We don’t have that kind of relationship.”

“If I asked, you would have said yes. I skipped the formalities.”

“We haven’t decided to skip the formalities.”

“Then what are you doing here? What do you want from me, Fifi?”

“I want to see if we could have that kind of relationship.”

“Exactly what kind of relationship are you talking about?”

“A serious one.”

Her words shock me like a bucket of ice, and then the sting stays with me because I can’t push the idea away, and even though I’m shaking my head no, I’m considering her, imagining myself having the right to take the bacon off her plate any time I want, having the right to watch her eat breakfast every day.

Fuck.

“No?” she asks softly, and I hear the unmistakable wobble in her voice. Double fuck.

My hand shoots out to hers automatically because she’s backing away and closing up, and the part of me that doesn’t wait for rational thinking or any kind of decision-making process has already decided that I don’t want to let her go.

Confusion rises to her face as my hand clamps around hers and holds on tight like I’m her kidnapper more than a potential lover. I try to relax, but instead, I lean in close.

“You surprised me. I was expecting… something else. We’ve never had any kind of relationship, let alone a serious one. You want to go from zero to a hundred in the blink of an eye?”

“I thought you were fast.” She suppresses a smile, trying to lighten up. “They called you speed-Trick, don’t they?”