Isha
Jude stared at me.
And I stared right back, though, on the inside, I was cringing so hard I was surprised my eyes didn’t bug out of my head. I had no idea what had induced me to call him sweetheart. It was an endearment I only ever used for Dom’s fella, Lucky, and that was only because he really was—he had to be to have melted Dom’s ice grill.
“What?” I said finally. “You thought I was some married chump loitering on Grindr to get cock behind my wife’s back?”
Jude shrugged with zero denial. “You don’t wear a ring, but you’ve got a closeted vibe about you.”
“So? What business is it of yours?”
“None. I just—” Jude shook his head. “It’s none of my business, but it’s kinda freaky with you rocking up with your kids a few days later.”
“You knew that would happen. No one forced you to go through with fucking me.”
Jude glanced at the door, but I forced myself not to share his wariness. The shop was closed for the night. He might not have heard me coming, but I wasn’t in the business of letting anyone sneak up on me.
“I know you didn’t force me,” Jude said. “But maybe it was a bad decision all round. I’m not used to dealing with Grindr drama in my shop.”
“Who’s having drama? It was a hook up, and this is real life. Just forget about it.”
If only. I’d fucking dreamed about Jude last night, and I hated myself—and him—for getting under my skin. But I wasn’t about to take shit from him for drama I hadn’t created. If he had a stick up his arse about a situation he’d known was coming, that was his problem. In any case, as his mutinous glare remained, coated in a loaded silence that made the hairs on the back of my neck stick up, it was clear he’d run out of things to say to me.
Whatever. I shrugged and turned to leave. Stopping by Madfall had made me late for a meeting in London. Dom was going to bitch me out hard, and resolving absolutely nothing with Jude had pretty much guaranteed that I’d respond in kind.
“Wait.”
Jude’s electric fingers closed around my wrist. My body stopped moving as though it had been shocked into stillness. His touch burned through me, and I was instantly back in that hotel room, fucking him as if my life depended on it, while his magic hands roamed every part of me he could reach.
I didn’t raise my gaze. Couldn’t. “What?”
Jude’s grip tightened. “Look, I’m sorry, okay? For making assumptions about you. It was a dick move, but that’s me. I’m good with animals, but shit with people. I’m not—fuck.” He sighed. “I’m not a good communicator. I try, but nothing makes sense unless I’m pissed off.”
It was far more than I’d expected him to say. I tore my gaze from his hand on my wrist and made myself look at him. Absorbed the earnest frustration in his moody blue eyes, and the cruel way his teeth mauled his bottom lip. “Are you telling me the only way you can talk about something is if you get angry about it?”
“Sometimes. I’m epileptic and some of the meds I take, and the seizures I’ve had, mess with my brain. It’s not an excuse for being a prick, but it…I don’t know. It affects me.”
Epileptic. I recalled the leather necklace Jude had left dangling around his neck as I’d fucked him on every available surface. At the time, I’d dimly recognised it as medical alert jewellery, but it had slipped my mind since. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
“I’m not. I’m explaining myself in general for no reason whatsoever.” Jude’s hand dropped from my wrist. “Forget it, okay? I just wanted you to know I’m not always an arsehole on purpose.”
“Who is? But thanks. I appreciate the sentiment, and for what it’s worth, sometimes I really am just an arsehole.”
My heart screamed at me to stay where I was, to spend a little more time with him to ease the tension that still flowed between us. But my head forced me to turn and continue on my way out of the shop.
* * *
Jude
“What the fuck are you doing down there?”
I glanced up. My mate Rae stood over me, eyebrow raised, and I had nothing. Somehow, I’d fallen into a vortex of sitting on the floor in the snake room, handling whichever creature was amenable, and completely missing the jangling bell of the shop door. “It’s you,” I said stupidly.
Rae grinned and bent to pluck my blue-eyed girl from my hands.
I let him. And he knew me well enough to get that it was a sign of affection. I hadn’t seen Rae in weeks, and I’d missed him. Letting him handle a snake he hadn’t seen before was the best way of telling him so.
He straightened with the python coiled around his arms. I scrambled to my feet and nudged him. “I thought you were dead.”