Better Than You: part 10

10.

 

“Won’t he hear us?” Delta asked at the top of the staircase. She swore she could feel Tam glaring at her through the walls as she glanced down the narrow, dark hall that stretched away from the landing.

 

Mike caught the hem of her sweater between two fingers and tried to tow her through the open door beside them, but she stood rooted in place. “Depends. How much noise are you planning to make?” She swatted him away and his smile became exasperated. “What?”

 

She folded her arms and watched him rake a hand through his hair. “It’s just a little…uncomfortable is all.”

 

“What, that my best friend is sleeping down the hall?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“But it’s not uncomfortable that you’re sleeping with someone else?”

 

He said it so calmly, and with such a bland expression, it took a moment for the full effect to hit Delta, and then guilt gave a sharp tug at her conscience. Here she was turning her nose up because his friend was asleep down the hall from them, while she’d as much as admitted playing two men against each other. She hadn’t planned on saying anything, but her sudden wash of shame brought the words up out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I haven’t been with Greg since I started seeing you,” she said, arms still wrapped around her middle, almost flinching as she looked up into his face.

 

She thought he almost smiled, but he caught himself. “So when’s that? Since today?”

 

“Since your stupid ass came into my store trying to destroy the whole perfume counter, okay?” she threw up her hands in defeat. “I am not sleeping with both of you.”

 

His smile was still in check somehow. “That’s probably a good thing for Greg. No way would he measure up.”

 

“Do you ever get tired of being so charming?” she asked with a sigh, and his smile finally broke, white and brilliant.

 

“You like it.” He hooked a finger through a front belt loop on her jeans. “Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.”

 

**

 

His bedroom was dominated by a wall of windows that showcased the skyline as a net of lights against a black on indigo backdrop. Delta stared at the pinpricks of yellow through the gaps in the vertical blinds as she caught her breath, the gray satin sheets sticking to her damp skin. Mike thought he was some kind of pimp or ladykiller or some such bullshit with his king size bed – at least, that’s what she’d wanted to think until she’d remembered him crowding her out of her queen at home. And she’d quit berating the satin once she felt it against her skin. And now she lay on her back in the dark, planning her escape and hating the idea of it.

 

There was a soft hissing sound as the sheets parted and Mike’s hand slid across her stomach and hooked around her hip. No, I have to leave, she thought, but let him pull her into his chest. He was on his side, propped up on the arm that wasn’t wrapped around her, and even in the dark, there was enough ambient city glow to make out the whites of his eyes, the green irises looking black. Delta glanced away from them and out somewhere over the shadow that was his shoulder.

 

“I should probably get going,” she said, and heard hesitancy in her voice. On some level, she wanted to see if he would protest; wanted him to, even.

 

“What time do you have to be at work tomorrow?” he asked, fingers drumming slowly against her hip.

 

“Nine,” she admitted, knowing what he would say.

 

“So tell me what time to set the alarm and you can stop by your place to doll yourself up on the way in,” he didn’t ask, but told her.

 

If she hadn’t still been flushed and limp, she might have argued. How had he not figured out that the male chauvinist routine didn’t work with her? She wasn’t someone who was told what to do. But when her eyes found his again, she thought there was a certain softness to them that wasn’t the product of shadows or her imagination. And as his hand went up and down the curve of her waist, she remembered the way he’d taken her hand in the bar parking lot the night before, the way he’d walked her to her door. Under his obnoxious, persistent outer shell, he was a guy who worried about a girl’s safety, and that was too rare anymore.

 

“And just like that you think you can get me to spend the night?” she had to ask.

 

He grinned, his teeth a fast glimmer of white. “If I let you go, you’d tell everyone you know what a douche I am for making you drive home at one in the morning and you know it.”

 

“I might tell them you’re a douche anyway.”

 

“But I’m a chivalrous douche.”

 

Delta snorted a laugh, “Do you ever stop?”

 

“Never.” His hand left her as he twisted around and reached for the alarm clock on his nightstand. “What time?”

 

“Six-thirty.”

 

“Damn,” he murmured as he fiddled with the buttons in the dark. “No way do you need that long to do your makeup.”

 

“You’ll change your mind about that when you see me in the morning,” she said, pushing her hair back behind her ears. The thought left her stomach jumping in an unhappy way.

 

“Doubt it.” The clock went back to the nightstand. “Okay, six-thirty it is. You need anything else, your majesty?”

 

“Uninterrupted sleep, peasant,” she put on her haughty voice and slid down between the sheets, eyes closed and hands folded over her chest. Then bit down hard on a smile and counted. Impact in five…four…three…

 

She squealed when he tackled her and the whole mattress flexed under them. “Sleep?” he asked against her collar bone and her fingers went through his hair. “You’re underestimating me, sweetheart.”

 

She laughed, anticipation sweeping through her as her hands went down the back of his neck and across the thick bundles of muscle that draped his shoulders. She predicted he’d keep moving lower, but Mike braced up on his hands and held himself above her a long, silent moment. Again his eyes were just shiny spots in his dark face, his body blocking her view of the windows.

 

“What?” she asked, feeling the sudden change that had come over him as she swept her hands up his arms.

 

“I’m not one of those guys who pisses all over his territory,” he said, and she frowned.

 

“Well…thank God for that, I guess.”

 

His face dropped low over hers and she became suddenly aware of just how small and vulnerable she was tucked beneath him like this. He played the idiot well, but he was capable, she realized, of scaring the hell out of someone. Not her – she wasn’t frightened – but he was intimidating all the same. “But I don’t want you to see Greg anymore.”

 

Delta felt her brows shoot up her forehead. “You’re the one who said you wanted to compete. I told you -,”

 

“I know. But I changed my mind.”

 

Her nails dug into his biceps in silent warning. “Are you threatening me?”

 

“No,” he said evenly, “I’m telling you that I’m gonnna threaten him if he doesn’t give up and go away.”

 

She wished for more light so she could read his expression. He sounded serious, though, more so than he had at any time before. “He stopped by my apartment before I came over here tonight,” she said, trying to match his tone. “He’s completely offended that I’m ‘screwing’ you. You won’t have to worry about him anymore.”

 

“Good.” She swore he smiled before he ducked his head and kissed her.

 

**

 

Mike spent more of his lunch break than he could afford trying to decide if Delta would wrinkle her nose at the cliché red roses he finally settled on at the florist’s counter. He decided she’d probably wrinkle her nose at whatever he took her, because that was just the kind of difficult as hell girl she was. He consoled himself over the knowledge that Greg was gone, that she hadn’t been playing him against the guy, that she’d finally fallen asleep tucked against his side and had borrowed his toothbrush and a t-shirt as she’d stood at his bathroom counter, hair a mess, makeup smudged away, bare toes quick on the cold tile. Those images stamped in his head made the difficulty worth it.

 

With his cliché red roses, he stepped into the outer airlock at Nordstrom and checked his reflection in the glass of the interior door before he entered the store. He’d never in his life worried so much about his hair as he did now. Dating Ms. Perfect had a sobering effect on his ego.

 

A sales girl – there was probably some PC title for her aside from “girl” that he didn’t know or care about – met him just inside the entryway. “Good afternoon,” she said with an overly bright smile. He wasn’t sure Delta was even capable of smiling that way. “What can I help you with today?”

 

“Can I talk to your manager?” he asked, just to be cute, and watched fear go skittering across her perky expression.

 

“I…”

 

“Is Delta here?” he asked to save time and her heart rate, “I’m meeting her for lunch.”

 

Her smile didn’t come back, though. “Um,” her hands clasped together almost nervously, “yes, she’s here. She’s with a guest. Would you like to wait and I’ll tell her you’re here? Mr.…?”

 

A tiny note of warning sounded in the back of his head. He tried to shove it aside, but it persisted. “Nah,” he stepped around the girl, “I’ll find her. Is her office in the back?”

 

“Yes, but, sir, customers aren’t allowed back there.” Her low heels clipped along the tile as she started to follow the path he cut between the jewelry and perfume counters.

 

“I’m not a customer,” he said over his shoulder, “I’m her boyfriend.”

 

“Shit,” the girl said under her breath, and that note of warning became a siren flashing red and blue lights around the inside of his head.

 

Delta wasn’t back in her office, but out on the floor, standing between two racks of designer belts. Mike saw her brown eyes, the sharp arches of her brows and the dark sweep of hair at the top of her head over a rack, and followed her gaze to the dark-headed, suit-and-tie asswipe she was talking to.

 

The guy wasn’t much taller than Delta, narrow-shouldered. Medium build and refined, rich-boy facial features. He was clearly old money breeding stock, country club ready right down to the polite frown he was giving her. Greg, Mike knew, and his hand curled into a fist around the stems of the roses, a thorn piercing the tissue paper wrap and biting into his palm.

 

“…I told you,” Delta was saying, her voice snapping through her teeth, “that I -,”

 

Mike couldn’t let her finish. “Told him what?” he asked, loudly enough to snatch both their heads in his direction, “that he was the only one you were banging? Or was that little story just for me?”