Page 28 of Riot’s Revenge

“So, you’ve said.” He reached farther into the cupboard before suddenly going still.

A moment later, he slid back out and looked up at me. “You don’t own any tools?”

I shrugged. “In my defense, I patch people, not plumbing.”

“You don’t even own a screwdriver.”

“I own tape.”

His stare somehow managed to communicate disappointment, judgement, and mild horror all at once.

A laugh escaped me, which I covered quickly with my hand when he raised his eyebrows.

Riot pulled out his phone and sent a text.

I didn’t think much of it until twenty minutes later, when a prospect appeared at my door carrying a battered toolbox and looking deeply confused about how he’d ended up there.

I stared at the toolbox, then at Riot. “Did you seriously summon someone to deliver tools?”

“Yeah.”

“Like some kind of motorcycle-themed delivery service?”

A reluctant smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Pretty much.”

The prospect looked between us uncertainly, clearly trying to determine whether laughing was allowed.

I laughed enough for both of us.

Once the toolbox had been delivered and the prospect escaped back to wherever Riot had sent him from, the apartment settled into a comfortable silence.

At first, I stayed in the kitchen because there wasn’t much else to do, but after a while, I realized that wasn’t the reason anymore. There was something strangely captivating about watching Riot stretched out beneath my sink arguing with a leaking pipe.

The ridiculousness of the situation wasn’t lost on me. Every other time he’d been in my apartment, we’d barely made it through the front door before getting distracted. Riot’s visits had always carried a certain expectation with them. There had always been an urgency between us, a physical pull neither of us had spent much time resisting.

Yet Riot seemed perfectly content to spend his evening fixing plumbing and insulting my complete lack of household equipment.

What caught me off guard wasn’t seeing him in my apartment. I’d seen him there plenty of times.

What was strange was that He wasn’t touching me every chance he got. He wasn’t looking at me like he was counting down the minutes until he got me into bed, he was lying beneath my sink because the dripping annoyed him, muttering under his breath whenever the pipe refused to cooperate. As he shifted beneath the sink, the movement tugged his shirt higher, exposing a strip of tanned skin above the waistband of his jeans.

My attention snagged immediately, which was deeply unhelpful because once I’d noticed it, my brain became considerably less interested in plumbing. The glimpse of skin only drew attention to everything else. The broad span of his shoulders, the tattoos disappearing beneath his shirt and the powerful lines of his torso whenever he stretched to reach something farther beneath the sink.

I looked away immediately, then looked back, which turned out to be a mistake.

His forearms flexed as he worked, muscles shifting beneath tattooed skin while he tightened something I had absolutely no interest in learning about.

“You know staring isn’t helping.”

I jumped, and heat flooded my cheeks. “I wasn’t staring.”

“Sure.” The smug bastard didn’t even look up.

“I was observing.”

A low laugh escaped him, and the sound caused more heat to pool low in my stomach.

For several moments, the apartment fell quiet again except for the occasional clink of metal against metal and the distant noise of traffic drifting through the open window.