“They already know the curve of her lips, every freckle on her face, and every speck of green in her coffee-colored eyes.” I stopped, and she briefly lifted her eyes to mine.

She knew I was talking about her, and it was making her nervous. Well, I was going to make my point.

“But sometimes they want to touch her skin. Sometimes they want to smell the spice in her hair and bury themselves in it. Sometimes they want to kiss her throat as she laughs, because the resulting vibration awakens every cell in their bodies.”

Raising her head, Sydney’s eyes spilled over my face, stopping at my lips. “Sounds like an intense threesome.”

When I left my side of the booth and settled next to her, I half expected she’d toss a fork my way or squirt Sriracha in my eyes. Instead, she rested her head against my chest, and I inhaled the fragrance released from her unruly dark locks.

I’d nearly admitted my love for Sydney, and she was holding on to to me like a lifeline.

As I wrapped my arm around her, the noises from the busy diner faded. “Now it’s time to laugh for me, Sydney.” Slipping her hair behind her shoulder, I kissed her neck.

“But it’s usually your face that makes me laugh, and I can’t see it,” she said, relaxing under my lips. “That small chip on your right incisor. Those uneven sideburns that drive Hasidic Jewish men crazy with jealousy. Your wandering eye tha—”

“Shut up.” I laid kisses across her jawline until finally she let out a full, deep laugh, sending that vibration rippling through her throat. “There it is.”

As I started to move a hand underneath her sweatshirt, a black leather billfold slapped onto the table.

“Can’t you lovebirds wait until later?” The gravelly voice of a lifetime smoker broke my hold on Sydney’s neck. We both turned toward a seventy-some-year-old woman in a stained apron with a mop of gray curls on her head. “So sick of you college kids thinking this is a brothel. I have to wipe the booths down more than the tabletops.”

Sydney laughed and reached for her bag, but I laid money on the table first. “Bad day, Lenore?” I asked, reading her aged, yellowed nametag.

Her rough hands snatched the money, and she shoved it in her apron pocket. “One day you’ll figure out it’s not all cuddles and butterflies. One day you’ll wake up after being with the same man for fifty years, and he’ll be trying on your compression stockings and dipping into your Rosalicious pink lipstick. Then you’ll be sorry because you’ve wasted your life on a jerk who’s been screwing your church pastor. The same church pastor who gave you marriage counseling. One da—”

“Lenore!” An old man wearing a paper chef’s hat and bright-red lipstick poked his head through the hot food pass. “Stop telling lies about me and get back here. Next order’s up.”

Lenore delivered a slow headshake of warning and turned back to the kitchen.

“Holy crap,” I said, watching Lenore hobble around the counter.

“That’s a good shade on him,” Sydney joked. Grabbing her bag, she glanced at her phone. “It’s four o’clock. Do you want to hang out some more, Professor Peters?”

“Yes, Miss Porter,” I answered, and she gave me a weird look. “Shit, I thought you were talking about role play.” I knew she wasn’t, but I loved that eye roll she gave me.

“Where are we going?” Sydney asked, flipping through the radio stations, hemming and hawing at each song. “Can’t they play anything decent? It’s all teenagers with boob jobs and voices so auto-tuned a parrot could do better.”

“I’m taking you out of the city,” I answered, entering the highway 30 on-ramp. “You did bring an overnight bag, right?”

I made an executive decision to take Sydney away from campus. Away from Katharine. Away from Sunday Lane. Away from the dark clouds looming over her head… and mine.

“Gray, are you kidnapping me?” Her shocked tone was laced with excitement.

“Yes. Twenty-four hours. It’s just going to be us. No Jack, Allison, Fernando, or Chance. I want you all to myself.” Giving her a sidelong glance, I tried to gauge her reaction. She’d pulled her hat down and was chewing nervously on her lower lip. “Or I can take you back to campus, and we can go our separate wa—”

“No,” she said, placing her hand on my lap. “I think I’d like to be kidnapped, but you have to be gentle.”

“Gentle?”

“Yes. The skin on my wrists and ankles is sensitive. No rough ropes.”

I shifted in my seat, trying to hide my growing erection. “Don’t test me, Sydney.”

Letting out a loud laugh, she rolled down the window and tapped her fingers along the frame. “So, Snake, where are you taking me? You headed west, and we’re on one of two highways leading to 101, hmmm.” A high-beam smile erupted on her face. “The coast?”

I nodded, and Sydney grabbed my hand, pulling it into her lap.

“I haven’t been to the coast since… well, since Dad.”

“Really? Well, it’s about time, Sinister. New beginnings, right?”

“For comrades,” she added.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

After two hours on a single-lane highway, we made our way to a tiny coastal town. It was quiet and filled with old cabins built in the 1940s, set by the ocean. Multimillion-dollar homes precariously perched on cliffs above, competed for their views of the Pacific Ocean. The town had one small grocery store with an attached coffee shop. Everything you needed.

Gray parked the car in front of a tiny cabin with worn cedar siding. As I stepped from the car, I tried to tame my hair. Beach wind and humidity is never a woman’s friend.

“Stop it,” Gray said, pulling his art supplies from the trunk. “You look gorgeous.”

“Whose cabin is this?”

“My grandpa’s. Well, it’s the family cabin now, but no one’s been here since he passed, except for Mom.”

I followed him to the side of the cabin, and he stopped in front of an open firewood shed. Like a thick, white bridal veil, a mass of spider webs covered the entrance.

“The keys are in a jar,” he said, pointing blankly to the opening. “In there.”

“Okay,” I said, watching his hands clench into tight fists. “Then go get them.”

“Yuuup.” Rubbing his hands down his pants, he leaned against the side of the cabin. “Nope. Can’t do it.” Two hundred pounds of solid muscle, and he was afraid of spiders?

Rolling my eyes, I entered the shed, wiping the delicate webs away from my face. I grabbed a jar sitting behind an old stack of dried wood and smiled.

“FUCK,” I yelled, rushing outside with the jar. “I ripped open a spider egg sack.”

Gray remained petrified against the house.

“They’re in my hair!” I threw my hat off and ran up to Gray. He released a high-pitched squeal and lifted a leg to block me with a kick. “I can feel them crawling all over my scalp!”

Red-faced and screaming, Gray ran around the back of the cabin. I followed him, trying hard to suppress my laugh, but as I turned the corner, I was met with a blast of water in my face.

“What the hell?”

“Put your head down,” Gray yelled. He kept a wide distance from me but raised a hose above him, thumb covering the nozzle for added blasting pressure. “Sydney, put your head down!”

“No dryer here, but I put your clothes on the deck rail,” Gray said, opening the bathroom door. “Are you warming up yet?”

I was standing in the tiniest shower invented by man, trying to regain the feeling in my toes. “Trying to,” I answered, smoothing my hands over my goose-bumped shoulders. “I can’t believe you hosed me!”

“Never, ever joke about spiders with me, Sinister,” he warned.