“I’ll agree with the bad mood part.”
I’m a senator, Dixon wrote with a smirk.
Lila chuckled. “Is that so?”
I negotiate between families. I smooth things over when required. You are a family.
Lila heard heavy boots clomping across wood. Tristan poked his head back through the doorway. “Dixon, come on. We have a new lead.”
I know who you are, Elizabeth Randolph.
Lila froze. He’d written her name in large block letters.
Dixon’s eyes twinkled. I could be your senator. He tugged off Lila’s hood and grabbed her around the waist, pressing his forehead to hers.
His eyelashes tickled her cheek.
Lila opened her mouth to say something, anything, not to protest but to ask why. And how? How had he known?
But before she could sort out her thoughts and settle on one question among the press, Dixon tilted his head forward and joined his mouth to hers. He sucked at her lips, nibbling as if she were a particularly sweet strawberry.
Lila didn’t feel the lack of what had been cut away from him. She only felt hunger.
Her helmet hit the ground with an echoing thunk in the empty garage.
Lila barely heard it. She barely heard anything. All thoughts of Tristan’s fight disappeared. All memories of him stealing her palm left her. All memories of their near-drowning vanished. All questions she had for Dixon, about how he’d found out her identity, about why he was kissing her, no longer seemed important.
It all bounced and rolled away like her helmet.
Wrapping her hands around Dixon’s neck, she ran her tongue across his lips, testing, tasting, dimly wondering how and when and why their mouths had joined. Her fingers slipped under his collar, and she felt the cut where a slave chip had been yanked out.
She found that she didn’t care.
The thump of his heart beat against her wrist, the gentle brush of skin against skin. She had missed this, had wanted it, had needed it, and hadn’t had it in a very long time.
Alex had been right. She was starved.
She had a dim realization that she was courting trouble.
Dixon moaned at the brush of her fingers upon his neck and pressed her into him closer, his lips hard against her mouth.
She let her hands fall to his waist, walking him toward one of the truck beds, brain turned off, reduced to only a throbbing, pulsing need.
Lila’s eyes strayed toward the door.
Tristan was gone.
Chapter 12
Lila rode her Firefly directly into the family garage, scarf trailing from her neck in a battered tangle. She barely stopped before swinging her leg over the bike, happy to get off at last. The vibrating engine between her thighs had felt far too pleasant after Dixon’s kiss.
Too bad his kiss hadn’t led to anything more. He’d pulled away before reaching the truck, writing that it didn’t make the most comfortable bed but that he’d wanted to kiss her for a long time. The wait had been worth it, though. For a man with no tongue, Dixon had been good at his job, far better than she could have imagined. She was too hungry not to wonder what else he might be good at. Perhaps the next time she visited the shop, Dixon could show her his room, could kick off those blood-red boots, the purple scarf, his trousers, and whatever else lay beneath. She’d wrap her legs around his waist and let him ease into her—
“No,” Lila chided herself, taking off her helmet. “Totally out of bounds.” The poorer classes frowned on casual sex. Dixon might make more of it than it was.
He might already have.
“What’s out of bounds?” asked Commander Sutton at the open garage door. When Lila didn’t answer, she frowned. “I saw you come in at the front gate, and much too quickly, I might add.”