Heavy: A Bad Boy Next Door Romance

by Amelia Wilde

  “Why not?”

  Her eyes are back on mine, and her shoulders are tensed a little, like she knows this is the kind of question you normally wouldn’t ask someone you don’t know. Her expression is totally sincere, questioning, curious, and her lips are parted slightly as she breathes, listening and waiting while her question hangs in the air.

  I give her a half smile that fades into something more closely resembling the truth. “I don’t have much to come back here for.”

  “Really?” She leans back against the wall of the booth. “Why are you visiting now?”

  “Are you sure you want those kinds of personal details?”

  She bites at her bottom lip and blushes a little bit, and it’s so fucking cute I almost die. Then she laugh a little, the sound falling on my ears and lighting me up inside like sunshine. “Can I just say—I never do this kind of thing. This is so weird.”

  “What’s weird about it? The bar?”

  Her eyes flick across to my arms, covered by my jacket, and it’s then that I can’t stand to have it on anymore, so I shrug it off, tossing it into the booth next to me. Now the tattoos running down to my wrist are on full display. “You’re not exactly…the kind of guy I normally go out on dates with.”

  I never want to wipe the smile off my face. “This is a date?”

  “Oh, God,” she says, and lifts one hand to her face, brushing a lock of hair away from her forehead. “Is it?”

  I let her wriggle for a few beats, then let her off the hook. “Nah,” I say. “We’re just two random acquaintances out taking a walk. And grabbing some food.”

  I want it to be a date. The moment the words are out of her mouth, I know that’s what I want this to be. But I also know that Zelda—no matter what her story is—is too good for me. It’s written all over her. It’s written all over me.

  She seems to summon something deep inside herself then, and focuses on looking me straight in the eye. “You know…” She picks up the menu again and moves it over three inches to the left. “I wouldn’t—” Then she shakes her head, looks away, cheeks flaming. “This is all so—I can’t say it.”

  “Say it.” I don’t know what this is between us, or what it could become, but for some reason, I feel like we can talk to each other. If we just get past this initial awkward tension, we could—

  “I wouldn’t mind if it was a date.”

  “Wow,” I say, leaning forward. “Are you sure about that? You don’t even know my last name. We’re total strangers.”

  Uncertainty flashes across her face, and I hear her phone buzz again in the pocket of her yoga pants. I didn’t even know yoga pants had pockets, but these must. The vibration of the phone makes her set her mouth into a thin line.

  “If you tell me your name, we won’t be total strangers. And then maybe we could go out on a real date.”

  Chapter 15

  Zelda

  “You want to know my name?”

  The waitress comes back just then with the drinks, so he can’t answer. I’ve never seen a woman with that many tattoos before. She has to have more than Sawyer. I hear myself ordering a burger, but I’m desperate to get back to our conversation.

  I’ve never been in this bar before in my entire life, and it’s four blocks from my house, just at the edge of where the district turns from residential to business. It’s not the kind of place my parents would have ever taken me, and afterschool stuff obviously didn’t take place in hole-in-the-wall bars like Bernie’s.

  I’d say that was what was setting my nerves on edge—even if it’s a half pleasurable edge—but it’s not. I went to dive bars in college, although not very often, and some of them were a lot shittier than this.

  No, what’s making my stomach do slow flips is Sawyer.

  Even the bar might as well be high noon compared to the darkness of the club, and now that I’m sitting across from him, I can’t deny that he tears me right in two.

  He’s the sexiest man I’ve ever seen. Every muscle is cut, taut, and even though he’s wearing a t-shirt, I know absolutely that he’s got at least a six-pack, maybe an eight-pack. But he’s not overdone like some of the guys at the local gym. He doesn’t have a bulging neck. Even if he did, it would be hard to see past his chiseled, Greek god face to complain about it. If my pussy was sensitive before we got here, now it’s practically begging for attention.

  I shift in the booth, wondering if he can tell that I’m in the middle of the biggest mental struggle of my life.

  Because…

  It’s not tattoos that I have a problem with, per se. It’s just that the tattoos, combined with his muscles, and something about the look in his eyes, tells me that he’s not the kind of guy who works regular hours in an office in the city. I don’t know what he does exactly, or what’s happened in his life to make him exude danger the way he does, but it’s rolling off him in waves.

  It pulls me in at the same time that it sets off warning bells in my mind. Be careful, be careful… The refrain repeats over and over again in my mind, but my body overrides it every single time.

  As soon as the waitress steps away from the table, I open my mouth. “Yeah. I do want to know your name.” I have this sense that if I don’t jump on this chance right now, I’ll lose my nerve, and it’s forcing words out of my mouth that I don’t think I’d say otherwise. “I wanted to know in the club, but…”

  “Your friend didn’t like me.” God, his half smile makes me want to climb over the table and put my lips on his right this second. How can he seem so at ease and so wound up at the same time?

  I shake my head. “She liked you too much, I think. She was a little—”

  “Mad that I wanted you instead?”

  Wanted you instead. A shiver runs down my arms from my shoulders to my fingertips.

  “Wanted me?” It’s stupid. It’s not a sexy thing to say. I don’t care. I just want him to keep talking.

  Sawyer narrows his eyes a little, leans forward, cutting the distance between us. “The second I saw you, I wanted to…talk to you.”

  I look down at the table for a moment, a denial ready on my lips. There’s nothing very interesting about me. But I hate when women say that kind of thing, so I bite back the words and turn my attention back to his blue eyes. They change color with the rays of shifting light coming in through the front window of the bar. Every time a cloud goes over the sun, it casts across Sawyer’s eyes, too.

  “It’s a good thing we ran into each other, then.”

  A light flickers in his eyes. “Damn right it was.”

  “So, seriously—what brought you to my neighborhood?” I’m dying to know. I’m dying to know who he’s visiting—a girlfriend? A relative? Is this just some weird not-date that will fizzle out once I find out he’s seeing someone else?

  He presses his lips together, and I can see that he’s deciding something, weighing whether or not to tell me the truth. He drums his fingers on the tabletop, one two three, one two three.

  “My dad. I’m staying with my aunt, though.”

  “Oh, really? Where does she live?” Obviously close enough to walk, but—

  “Three houses down from the corner we were standing on.”

  “Toward the yellow house, or across the street?” I have to know.

  “Toward the yellow house.”

  I bite my lip again. Should I tell him? “That is in the neighborhood.”

  The short laugh he lets out, and the widening smile, is going to melt me right into the booth. “Let me take a wild guess,” Sawyer says, grabbing both the menus and tucking them back into the wire holder. “You live next door.”

  “Not—not quite.” I might as well come clean. Eventually he’s going to walk me home, and I don’t want to have to circle the block until he’s inside his own place. “My parents’ house is on the corner.”

  “You live with your parents?”

  This is making me look like a damn teenager. “Well, not in my childhood bedroom, or anything like that.�
��

  He cocks his head, narrowing his eyes. “No?”

  “No, they moved to that house when I was in college and had the basement refurbished into a guest apartment. I’m renting from them while I finish my degree.”

  His smile dims a little, settling into something a little less brilliant. “College?”

  “Grad school, actually.”

  Sawyer nods. “Very fancy.”

  I make a face. “Not really. It’s an online master’s degree. I don’t—” I cut myself off, then wonder why I’m bothering. “I don’t know why I’m doing it, really.”

  “To get a job. Isn’t that why anyone gets a million degrees?”

  I laugh. “Two degrees is not anywhere close to a million.”

  “What kind of degree is it?”

  “A master’s of library science.”

  His eyes widen, and the sparkle returns. “You want to be a librarian?”

  I lean in like I’m about to tell him a secret, and then say, in a low voice, “You’re never going to guess this, but I already am a librarian.”

  He laughs out loud, hard and deep, and the tension between us shatters.

  Chapter 16

  Sawyer

  This is too perfect.

  A fucking librarian.

  Not only is Zelda a gorgeous woman with the kind of face you could look at all day and all night and into forever, she’s a librarian. There’s no possible way she has any kind of wild side if her chosen profession is literally to shelve books.

  There is no possible way I can keep seeing her. People who can handle what I do—what I am—aren’t going to be found working in the public library.

  Or worse, a school library.

  There’s no possible way that I can keep seeing her, but I’m going to. I know it already, even while I try to tell myself that this is a disaster waiting to happen. People like Zelda aren’t okay with people like me, not once they know the truth. And the longer this keeps going, the more she’ll want to know about why I’m in town. How the hell am I going to look at her and tell her about—?

  About my dad, about all of it? I don’t talk about that shit. Not with my aunt, not with anyone I’ve met in the city in the five years I’ve been there. Nobody. The only person who even has an inkling about it is Domino, because he wouldn’t hire me until he knew what the hell sent me running to the city in the first place.

  I come down from laughing over her comment, and even though my mind is telling me that this is just a train wreck happening in real-time, something in my chest has relaxed, given way.

  “What kind of librarian?” It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. But I ask the question anyway.

  “The sexy kind, obviously.” Her eyes are still on mine, shining, and there’s a hopeful curve to her mouth. Two jokes in less than a minute. This girl is after my damn heart.

  “You’re not wrong about that.”

  Her green eyes get brighter, and she presses her lips together for a split second. Then she shrugs, one shoulder moving up and down a quarter of an inch. “I work out.”

  “Me, too. We should work out together sometime.”

  She turns her head just slightly to the side. “I don’t think you go to my gym. I would have noticed you there.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “Well, you’re obviously a sexy—” She narrows her eyes, considering. “A sexy…fireman?”

  Oh, so we’re going to play this game. “Nope.”

  “A sexy…paramedic.”

  “Nope.” Not even close. I’m the opposite of a paramedic. Paramedics are sometimes called in to help undo the damage I’ve done, and my heart fucking sinks when I realize that eventually, if this continues, I’m going to have to tell Zelda about it. There’s no way around it.

  Why am I suddenly so damn ashamed?

  I push that feeling down into the pit of my gut and focus on her. She screws up her lips, thinking. “A sexy fitness trainer?”

  “If I tell you, do you promise not to tell anyone else?”

  My heart pounds in my chest. I don’t know why the fuck I just said that. I’m setting myself up for a lie, and I don’t think I can tell it to her. Right until this moment, I thought I could lie to her, but with her huge green eyes locked on mine, with her innocent face, I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think I can be that reckless. Not with her.

  She pretends to lock her lips and throw away the key. “I won’t tell. Unless you’re a hit man.”

  It falls a little too close to home, and I feel myself backpedaling in my head. Lie. Lie to her, and get yourself the fuck out of this.

  “I’m not a hit man.” I try to say it with a laugh, but it comes off as insincere. If I’m not going to lie about it, I’m going to have to do something else. “What do sexy librarians do in their spare time?”

  She blinks once, then twice, but then the corner of her mouth curves up in a smile. “I see.”

  “See what?”

  “You’re embarrassed about your job.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Give me a hint.”

  Just then, it comes to me, the perfect way out of this. “I work in security.”

  She shakes her head, wrinkling her forehead. “That’s not embarrassing.”

  “It’s not for the best…company.”

  “Which company?”

  “I probably shouldn’t say. But one of the side perks is that I have to stay in shape.”

  Her eyes travel down over my body again, and a flame lights in her green eyes. “That is a perk.”

  Maybe she’s not as innocent as I thought.

  My cock goes hard against the fabric of my jeans at the hungry look in her eyes. “I take it you like what you see.”

  She doesn't hesitate. Not this time. “Yeah. I like it.”

  I take in a deep breath, trying to get myself under control. I cannot leap across the table and haul her up onto its surface and fuck her right in this bar, no matter how much I want to.

  “Tell me more,” I say, and color floods her cheeks. There’s something she’s not telling me, but I bet it’s not that she’s a heavy for a local drug dealer. “About yourself.”

  Just then, the waitress steps up to the table and slides plastic baskets in front of each of us, burgers piled on top of mountains of fries, and the moment breaks apart. Zelda leans back in her seat to make room for the waitress’s elbows, and then thanks her for the food.

  “You’re welcome,” the waitress says with a smile. “Is there anything else I can get you two?”

  “This looks great,” Zelda answers, and the woman is gone again.

  But the moment is over.

  I let out the breath I had started holding the moment the food arrived. I want to go right back to this conversation, see where it leads, see if she wants to come home with me. Not even that—just take her out of here and start walking. See where we end up. All that matters is that we end up somewhere together.

  But Zelda picks up a fry and puts it into her mouth, then closes her eyes. “These are really good.” Then she smiles at me with a glint in her eyes. “I’m glad I ran into you.”

  “I’m glad I ran into you, too.”

  My nerves settle. This might be heading for certain disaster, but right now, we’re just getting started.

  There’s still plenty of time to figure this all out.

  Chapter 17

  Zelda

  For a second there, I think Sawyer might leap over the table and crush my mouth with his, which would be a huge relief. It would release the tension that’s been building between my legs and soaking my panties the entire time we’ve been together this afternoon…which can’t be more than an hour.

  It’s the longest hour of my life.

  We keep dancing around a flirtation that’s crackling with sexual energy, but just when I think something might change, just when I think that we might move ahead, just when I think he might get up from the table and give me his hand and take me somewhere that we can be alone, t
he waitress appears with the food.

  My stomach growls, and by the time she’s gone, I can breathe again and my heart no longer punches at my rib cage.

  I still want him.

  But I’m also very hungry.

  I see him let out a big breath, but he watches me eat one of the fries and his shoulders relax. He must feel it, too. He must feel the tension pulsing through my veins, so intense that it’s almost giving me a headache.

  I just need a breather.

  I just need to get ahold of myself for a minute, and then I can…

  Then I can what, take him back to my parents’ house? Not a chance. My mom is already wondering where I’ve gone, and every time I get a text, it sets my teeth on edge.

  This is why I need to get out of here. This is why I need to have my own life. This is why I need some freedom to be able to take a damn risk once in a while, and not have my mother worrying about me.

  My stomach twists at the thought because she can’t help it, and it’s pretty bitchy to blame her for being protective. College was hard enough. It was a relief to all of us, I think, when I moved back in with them.

  We’re both silent as we work our way through the first bites of our burgers—mine is juicy and hot and delicious, and it’s all I can do not to close my eyes while I savor it—but Sawyer’s the first to break the silence.

  “So, what’s your deal?”

  He asked me this before, but his voice was deep and husky, and the question had sex written all over it. Now he’s asking about me, Zelda, the person.

  “What do you mean?” I put my burger back on top of the fries and take a sip of my Coke. This is by far the best way to have a burger. I’m going to come back here again, even if Sawyer disappears from town and I never see him again.