Chapter 2
AVALON
Flynn
The look on Davin’s face was the dictionary definition of dubious, and for some reason, I thought it was the cutest fucking thing in the history of ever.
“But why does it have glitter at all?” he was asking the server, a very confused young woman who clearly just wanted him to hurry up and understand food trends so she could sell a dessert and have done with it.
“That’s just how it comes. It’s edible glitter, I promise.” Her tone turned bright on that last, like maybe she thought he’d been worried that they were trying to feed us plastic kids’ craft glitter on our dessert.
He just blinked up at her, confused and unimpressed.
While he was willing to try new things with me, Davin’s taste in food definitely tended toward the . . . well, I didn’t want to say stodgy, but a little. If it wasn’t basic meat and potatoes, he was initially suspicious.
Well, unless my mother fed it to him, in which case, it could have been a bowl of white glue with craft glitter floating in it, and he’d have been game to give it a shot.
Once I got him past his initial suspicion, he usually enjoyed new things, even if he didn’t like to admit it. So I smiled up at the server and nodded. “Sounds delicious. We’ll try it.”
Instead of taking that as her cue to get out of there before Davin had more questions, her brows drew together. “I don’t think the glitter has a flavor, actually. It’s just—”
“Fine,” I told her, trying to beam my thoughts into her head to let her know that I was just trying to get her out of explaining the glitter to Davin, not declaring my love for eating powdered mica.
“If it doesn’t have a flavor, why put it in food?” Davin asked, and I had to stifle a laugh.
Welp, she’d stepped in it now.
I threw up my hands and let her stammer through a conversation with Davin about how she thought they were just trying to make the chocolate torte extra pretty.
Seriously, she was talking to a man whose cultural dish of choice was bacon and cabbage. Was it delicious? Absolutely. But it looked like scraps meant for the trash and smelled like . . . well, like cabbage. Really salty cabbage, because salt was apparently Ireland’s main—only?—seasoning.
Eventually, she brought us the torte and two spoons, and frankly, the glitter seemed like a silly addition to me too.
It was a wedge of fudgy chocolate cake covered with a layer of dark chocolate mousse, with small scoops of ice cream on either side and drizzled in both chocolate and caramel sauce.
The edible glitter was a waste, because why did that need to be any prettier than it was?
Glittery food was just weird. Like when rich people ate things that were coated with gold foil.
What was the point of that, when gold didn’t taste good and was toxic to humans?
The point of food was either to be nourishing or to taste good. It didn’t need to be pretty, did it?
Still, I wasn’t going to be weird and bring that back up, since Davin had finally let the subject drop and was just enjoying the dessert.
We hadn’t managed to go on a lot of dates between getting our business going and dealing with the drama of his past with vampires and my being a dragon, so I wasn’t going to waste a minute of it on boring things like how shiny my chocolate was.
For whatever it was worth, it was quite shiny.
After settling the check, we went back to Davin’s hot car, the one I’d spent my whole youth coveting, and headed toward his apartment, a small one-bedroom place a mile or so from the shop.
I wasn’t going to complain about that either, since what was essentially my place—the shop itself—didn’t have a bed at all.
And I had . . . hopes. For the night.
We’d had a few weeks between crises, and I was starting to hope we were going to get a breather. At least, enough of one to stop and smell the roses. Or, you know, fall into bed.
I hadn’t gotten laid in too damn long, and I really wanted my boyfriend to take me to bed, dammit.
Clearly, he felt the same way, as halfway to the apartment, he actually took a hand off the steering wheel and reached over to set it on my thigh, his thumb rhythmically stroking the outside seam of my jeans.
Maybe I was a little overstimulated, but if he kept doing that for long, it might be hard to walk inside, at least without giving the whole neighborhood a show of how much I was enjoying myself.
I was struggling to care.
Instead of worrying, I leaned into him, pressing our arms together and letting my head fall onto his shoulder. He squeezed my thigh, and those perfect lips turned up into that tiny smile.
He was never flashy, my Davin. No giant grins or huge gestures. Just tiny things, like that smile. Like squeezing my thigh. It was perfect for me.
He was perfect for me.
In a rather out of character move, he stopped the car with a little jerk, rather than his usual perfect, smooth ride. He put it in park and turned it off, then instead of immediately climbing out of the car, he turned to me, tiny smirk still in place.
Well, at least it was until it went out of my line of sight entirely, because he pressed our lips together.
I could almost taste the smirk on him. That and deep, dark chocolate, which was the perfect complement for my boyfriend, really.
Like every vampire I’d ever known, he was also exceptionally dexterous, quick, and ridiculously strong. So when in the space between breaths, he unclasped my seatbelt, wrapped his arms around my waist, and pulled me across the console into his lap? I wasn’t the least bit surprised.
I was, however, definitely not going to be able to get out of the car without everyone knowing exactly how I had felt about that particular maneuver.
He slid his hands up under the back of my shirt, his fingers warm and firm, pressing into my skin, pushing me harder against him as he attacked my mouth again, this time not waiting before plunging his tongue between my lips and exploring every corner of me.
Like a vampire of legend who wanted to completely devour me.
I shivered at the thought, because I had no idea why, but it was sexy as fuck. Odd, that I’d grown up with vampires, and I’d never once thought that before.
Davin, on the other hand, pulled back, bringing a hand around to cup my cheek. “Are you okay? Cold? We can go in. Fuck, I’m mauling you in—”
I cut him off by returning the favor, closing the gap between us and sliding my own tongue into his mouth, pressing it against his, more a caress than some kind of battle for dominance.
I didn’t want to beat him. I wanted to be inside him, and him in me.
I wanted everything he had, and was willing to give him all I had in return.
When I finally pulled back, we were both panting. I drew my own hands up from where they’d been planted on his hip and chest for balance, and cupped his stubbled chin. “I’m not cold at all. Never cold when I’m with you. You’re so fucking hot.”
And the smirk was back. I’d never imagined finding a smirk sexy before. Smirks were for assholes, not sweet computer nerds who had a not-so-secret passion for hot cars. But Davin seemed to be the exception for every rule in my life.
“Do you think so? Because there’s a whole bed upstairs that—”
Both of us froze when a noise filled the car.
Echo and the Bunnymen’s cover of “People are Strange.”
With a groan, Davin let his head fall back against the headrest. “What does your fecking cousin want? Now?”
I cringed, because, well, I was the one who’d given Sexton my phone number. I’d practically taken him in, even though Davin still thought his ultimate goal was to kill me or something else equally sinister.
But he was the only family I had other than my mother, and frankly, I thought Sexton had gotten a bad start in life.
He’d been raised by a father who clearly loved him, sure, but that father had disappeared when he was a teenager, and he’d never had anyone else care about him until me.
Was it any wonder he was a bit of a fuck-up?
All he’d had for most of his life was a giant pile of money.
Not to say that having money wasn’t damn convenient, but being rich and alone sure didn’t make someone a good person.
If anything, it seemed to divorce them from reality.
I was kind of grateful my mother hadn’t raised me to think of myself as rich. Hadn’t just bought me everything I demanded simply because I wanted it. Had I usually gotten what I wanted? Sure. But it had never been treated as a given.
I’d never been treated like a tiny prince who would one day be ruler of all I surveyed.
Sexton definitely had.
“You going to answer or just listen to it ring?” Davin asked, dragging me out of my thoughts to realize I was just sitting there staring at him.
I sighed and reached into my pocket just as the ringtone cycled back to the beginning. Sliding the accept call button, I sighed again into the receiver. Sure, I was going to answer in case it was some kind of emergency, but I wasn’t going to let Sexton think he wasn’t bothering me.
“What’s up?” I asked in my best attempt at a no-nonsense tone, as I held the phone between Davin and me. No reason to pretend he couldn’t hear anything my cousin might say, after all.
But Sexton didn’t say anything.
I scowled. “I swear to everything that’s decent in the world, Sexton, if you’ve butt dialed me in the middle of—”
“Help,” he rasped, forcing me to cut off mid-sentence, and for a second there was only ragged breathing on the line. “Indigo. Can’t . . .” There was a clatter then, and I could barely hear him breathing, then a thud that could only be a body hitting pavement.
Then there was only breathing.
“Sexton?” I demanded, but there was no answer.
Davin scowled, but for once, not simply in annoyance at my cousin being a pain in the ass.
Before I had a chance to scramble off his lap, he’d done it for me, picked me up like I was a doll and set me back in my own seat, even grabbing the seat belt and pulling it across me while demanding, “What’s Indigo, and how do I get there? ”
I presumed—hoped, really—that Sexton had meant a particular fancy French restaurant downtown, so I started giving him directions to get there. It was only a few miles away, but all I could think about was my cousin and his ragged breathing on the phone.
He’d made such strides in the last few months. He’d even met my friends and not been a complete dick to them.
He had to be okay.
Right?