28. TIFFANY
Ieyed him, then I eyed the sandwich. Then, heaving a sigh, I turned my attention to the yard where we were both sitting.
“Why do you keep huffing?”
“No reason,” I muttered, shoving a carrot stick into my hummus.
Hummus was like my favorite food. I considered it a whole food group of its own. That was how much I fucking loved it.
But here? Now?
It was nothing compared to the ham in Sin’s sandwich.
What the fuck was going on with me?
I glowered at the hummus and contemplated tossing the carrot stick into the yard for a bird to eat or something. Then a thought occurred to me. “Do birds eat carrots?”
Sin paused. “I dunno. I’ve never thought about it before. Google it.”
“Nah, I was just thinking out loud.”
“Dangerous brain you’ve got there.”
My lips twitched. “Says you with your Princess Fiona fetish.”
He grinned at me, his eyes twinkling. “I already told you it was before she turned into an ogre.”
“Yeah, right. That’s what all the men say.” I winked at him. “I need to invest in green face paint.”
He snickered. “Save yourself the trouble.”
I pouted. “Killjoy.”
Nudging my shoulder with his, he asked, “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine. Today was rough is all.”
“Why?”
“Tatána was just talking about the journey over here. They were in a truck for eighty hours after they landed in the States. No air, no toilets, no goddamn water.
“It was tough to hear. Really hard for Lily as well.” I grimaced. “Poor Ghost had to translate every word too. Nightmare.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“No, it’s okay. I needed to hear it, but it was just difficult, you know?” I winced. “Fuck, not as hard as what they endured.”
“Hey, you don’t need to qualify that. I understand.”
I leaned into him, silently thanking him for being, well, Sin. To me, he might as well have been called Saint, because he was like the Tiffany Whisperer.
“How did you earn your road name?”
He tensed. “Why do you ask?”
His tension almost made me wish I hadn’t asked. Hissing, I muttered, “That bad, huh?”
“Maybe.”
I eyeballed his ham sandwich which he had hovering in midair because I’d asked the question when he was about to take a bite. “Just a little hint?”
“Seven deadly sins,” he mumbled.
“Huh? What about them?”
“It was when I got back from my final deployment. They said I was all seven of them.”
I arched a brow. “Really? That’s it?”
“Yeah.” His cheeks were red, so I knew I was getting the edited version, but I was okay with that. At least I had an answer. I didn’t need to know about all the sins he’d committed—didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that shit out.
He wasn’t a scout leader, for Christ’s sake. He was a biker. He traded in blood and secrets.
What surprised me the most was why that didn’t bother me. It wasn’t like I had a bad moral code or anything. I’d always been law-abiding before, and it wasn’t like he’d corrupted me…
Had life done that?
I mean, I’d fallen for him way before my world had collapsed, but I’d seen things along the way. Learned shit. Nothing was as peachy as it seemed. Ever. And being rich? That usually came at someone else’s expense.
Even Dad had been a dick on his way to the top. I knew the labor unions had been sniffing his ass because they claimed he wasn’t paying his workers enough overtime—and that had been when he’d been constructing Orange Hills, the subdivision in West Orange that would be his final project.
Life wasn’t black and white, and the blur between wasn’t always gray either. That was too simplistic a view on things.
“You mad?”
“That you have a past? No.”
“Why you looking at me like I’ve grown horns then?”
“You haven’t. I’m just wondering why it doesn’t bother me. I don’t know the shit you get up to?—”
“And you never will, Tiff. You know that, right? Some shit I just won’t be able to tell you.”
“I figured that out along the way,” I said wryly.
“Good. I don’t do it to be a dick. I do it to protect you.”
Was that the case? Or was it a means of stopping my view of him from being tarnished?
Maybe it was both.
“I don’t know what you did that brought you back home, Sin, but I’m glad you did it.”
His eyes darkened, and not in a way I was used to. Anger spiked those dark chocolate orbs, making me wonder who it was aimed at. “Me too, angel. Me too.”
I reached for his hand when he dumped his sandwich on his plate. I felt like a real bitch for checking the trajectory, watching the ham tumble out of the bread thanks to the fall, then I muttered, “Didn’t mean to drag up the past.”
“You didn’t. Just…” He blew out a breath. “Never mind.”
I wanted to offer to be an open ear for him, but I knew he didn’t want that from me, so I cleared my throat. “Sin?”
“Yeah?”
“I know the answer to this but…the Sinners don’t trade women, do they?”
He snorted. “I’d be mad at you for even thinking to ask me that question if I didn’t know what Tatána had been talking about. It’s only natural you’d ask, but no, we don’t.”
“I mean, I did know that, but I just wanted to confirm it.”
He reached over and bopped me on the end of my nose. The move made me sneeze of all things, which had him chuckling like I’d told the best joke in the world.
Sheepishly, I grinned at him. “I think it was the mustard. You must have some on your finger.” He stuck said digit into his mouth and licked it clean. When he did, this time, his eyes darkened in a way I was totally used to.
Need unfurled in my core as I watched him suck on his finger, and within seconds, we were both dealing with one of the deadly sins...
Lust.