Put Me Back Together (25 page)

“Mario works part-time at the club,” Lucas explained as he helped me off with my coat. “He’s a culinary student, and this is his other job. The owners let him practice recipes on his days off or after hours. He brought these lobster puffs in to work once and they were so delicious Brit almost cried when she saw I’d eaten the last one. He made a special menu for us tonight. I hope you like pork chops with fudge sauce.”

I paused halfway through unfolding my napkin in my lap. “Did you say fudge sauce?” I asked, finding my voice again.

“Yup,” Lucas said with a self-satisfied smile.

I looked around the room. “I think I’m really going to like this place,” I said.

“I think I really like you,” Lucas said, his gaze intense, and I bowed my head as a blush spread across my cheeks. “And that dress,” he went on. “Did I mention yet how much I’m liking it?”

“You didn’t,” I said.

Reaching out, he ran the back of two of his fingers down my arm, causing a throb to take up inside me.

He said, “I like it so much it’s making me forget what we’re doing here.”

“Now, now, Lucas,” I said sternly as I saw Mario approaching with the first course. “Don’t get distracted.”

“With you around?” he said. “Impossible.”

Our eyes met as Mario set our salads in front of us and lifted their covers. “
Bon appetit
!” he said.

The meal was like one long dessert, with each course seemingly impossible to top until the next course did. We began with a salad of romaine lettuce, cucumbers, and berries with pecans and dark chocolate flakes. This was followed by a potato soup with bacon and chocolate chunks, braised pork chops, mashed potatoes, and green beans with fudge sauce, and a cheese and milk chocolate plate. By the time Mario was serving us our Nutella-filled churros I was basically having an orgasm at the table with every bite.

“Do I have chocolate all over my face?” I asked Lucas as I cleaned my plate. I’d basically been gobbling everything in front of me like a starving orphan. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my entire face was covered in chocolate by now.

“Nope,” Lucas answered. “Oh, but wait. You just have a little bit here…” He leaned forward and placed his lips a little to the right of my own, and I felt his tongue slowly lick at the corner of my mouth. His lips were warm and so tantalizingly close. I had only to turn my head a little to capture his mouth entirely, but before I could he pulled away. I had to suppress a whimper.

“No second dessert until we’re alone,” he warned.

“And when will that be?” I said, eyeing his lips, not caring if I sounded desperate. At that moment I
was
desperate to feel his lips on mine again.

“As soon as humanly possible,” Lucas said, and I saw him catch Mario’s eye and make a gesture with his hand that I presumed indicated he wanted to wrap things up. Now.

There was no check to pay, since we weren’t official customers. I assumed from the way Mario and he shook hands that they’d organized some alternate form of payment. I hoped Lucas didn’t have to take too many of Mario’s shifts at the club to cover the evening.

“She loved it, man,” I overheard Lucas saying as he patted Mario on the back. “I owe you big.”

“You’re a chocolate God and I would marry you if I could,” I said to Mario as I slipped on my coat.

He smiled widely as I said this and kept hold of my hand even once we’d stopped shaking.

“All right, enough of that,” Lucas said, taking back my hand and gripping it firmly. He didn’t seem to like the way Mario was looking at me at all, which amused me to no end.

As we went out the doors, I looked back at Mario and whispered, just loud enough for Lucas to hear, “Call me!”

Lucas growled and playfully grabbed me by the waist as we walked through the restaurant. “He can’t have you, you’re mine,” he murmured into my ear.

Yes I am
, I thought but didn’t say.

When we reached the car, I snatched the keys out of his hand and opened the driver’s side door. “Maybe I should drive, since you had so much trouble with it earlier,” I teased, and though Lucas grinned, his mood seemed to have shifted.

It was snowing very lightly, insubstantial flakes that melted as soon as they hit the ground. The temperature was meant to go even higher tomorrow, so I knew that even if a light layer fell overnight, it would be gone by midday, snow that wasn’t meant to last. Lucas held out his hand to catch some flakes and we both watched as they melted in his palm.

Then he approached me and took my face in his hands. I yearned for him to kiss me again, and I was sure he would, but he spoke instead.

“The night of the party—why’d you run away?” he said.

The fear I’d been holding at bay crept into my body, gurgling in my stomach. I exhaled and looked down at the ground, trying to avoid his gaze. “You really want to talk about this now?” I said. “While I’m wearing this dress?” I wanted to distract him, to arouse him, anything to not have to answer this question, but he wasn’t letting it go.

“I want to know everything about you, Katie,” he said, running his hands over my hair and lightly pulling the strands all the way to their tips. “I want to understand you inside and out. I want to know your every thought, even if you’re thinking there’s something about me you don’t like.”

Something about him, or something about me? He had no idea what he was asking.

“What if I don’t want to tell you everything?” I said, trying to sound defiant, but ending up sounding like a whiny child instead.

“Then I’ll keep asking until you’re ready to tell,” he answered.

Gazing into Lucas’s honey-coloured eyes, I felt something click into place. I believed him. I believed he would wait for me to be ready to tell him all my secrets, and I thought I might just trust him enough to tell him one. Just one to start. A baby step secret. One piece of the whole giant puzzle, which, I was pretty sure, I’d never let him see. Not completely. That would probably kill me. But one secret wouldn’t hurt too badly, I thought. A first secret for a first date.

“When you…knocked down that…guy,” I began haltingly.

“Buck?” Lucas said.

I nodded, staring at his chin. “Your face changed. You were furious with him. You looked like you wanted to tear him apart.”

“I did,” Lucas said simply. “He was hurting you.”

I lowered my eyes farther still. “I didn’t like it,” I said.

“Most girls like it if you come to their defense,” Lucas said. “You know, knight in shining armour and all that.” He seemed truly confused, which only made it harder to go on.

“Not me,” I said. “I don’t like that side of guys, that violent side.”

“You’re the one who punched him!” Lucas said.

I met his eyes with a serious look. “I shouldn’t have,” I said. “I scared myself. And you scared me.”

Lucas seemed to consider this. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I never want you to be afraid of me. But you can’t expect me to stand back and let someone hurt you. When I stepped into that room and saw you screaming at him to let you go, saw his hands pressing into your arms, I just…” A muscle flexed in his jaw and he couldn’t seem to go on.

“You lost your head,” I finished for him. This was something I understood. This was something I had experience with. “Most people would say it was a natural reaction and just brush it off. But I’m not most people. I can’t have that kind of…behaviour around me. I can’t have you hitting people for me, not ever. I need you to promise.”

His eyes were almost fearful as they looked at me now. He drew his arms around me, holding me lightly by the waist, as if he thought putting too much pressure on my body might break me into pieces. “God, Katie,” he whispered, searching my eyes, “what did he do to you?”

I turned my head and looked out at the snowflakes. I was
not
going to explain. I was not going to address the “he” Lucas had referred to. He might want to know everything about me, but that didn’t mean I was willing to tell him everything, or even that he’d like what he found out. Telling him about Brandon and the reason aggressive guys made me run for the hills wasn’t a first date secret. It was a last date secret.

“Promise me,” I repeated.

Letting my eyes creep back to his face, I saw the muscles in his jaw working overtime as though he was picturing Buck Mullard with his hands gripping my wrists again. “I can’t say I won’t get furious if someone tries to hurt you again,” he said carefully. “But I can say that I’ll try to control myself. How does that sound?”

I nodded, but my trust was waning. I knew I was the one who’d asked for his promise, but now that I had it, it didn’t seem like enough.

“I’m not a violent guy, Katie,” Lucas persisted. “You know that, don’t you?”

They never are
, I thought.
Until they are
.

“I want you to stay like this,” I said, sadly stroking his cheek. “I don’t want you to change.” I think a part of me had forgotten I was saying any of this out loud. My sorrow at the idea that I’d have to give Lucas up had taken control of my mouth. Even though I’d known it would probably turn out that way all along, it devastated me. I was like a little girl holding a puppy that wasn’t hers.

I wanted to keep him forever.

“I won’t change,” Lucas said. “I don’t know why you think I will, but I won’t. I’m not pretending, Katie. When I said yesterday that I’m the real me with you, I really meant it.”

He looked so sure of himself, so harmless with his soft hands and his beautiful face. I so wanted it to be true.

“Can you do one more thing for me, Lucas?” I said.

“Anything,” he replied.

I sat down in the driver’s seat and looked up at him.

“Kiss me,” I said.

He followed me into the car as I moved backwards over the gearshift and into the passenger’s seat. He grinned and his face looked nothing like the animal I’d seen in him that night. He was just himself, the guy who was stealing my heart.

“Oh yeah, I can do that,” he said as his lips met mine.

15

“Mmm,” Lucas said, “you taste like chocolate.” I smiled against his mouth because so did he, and the glorious taste had me kissing him more hungrily than I ever had before.

One of his hands grasped the back of my neck as he lavished his appreciation on my mouth while he placed the other lightly on my knee. Within two minutes of being in the car our coats had come off, though I had no real memory of taking them off. His bulky suit jacket was a barrier to my hands, which were itching to explore his chest, but I was too shy to ask him to take it off, as well, or worse yet, to undo the buttons myself. I worried over this for a moment as Lucas’s mouth traveled down my neck, but when he delved farther, feathering kisses over the bare skin of my upper chest, I pushed both my hands into his hair and concentrated instead on the heat of his lips and the explosion of feeling wherever he placed them. Both his hands moved to my waist as he pressed his mouth into my neck just below my ear. I felt almost delirious with heat, as though I were actually losing my senses. I was wishing his tentative fingers would move higher when, as if at my command, they did. The moment his right hand brushed ever so lightly over my breast I moaned into Lucas’s ear, my fingers digging into his arms.

We fell back against the seat, which was still in its leaned-back position. I wasn’t exactly sure how Lucas had maneuvered his body over the gearshift, but he didn’t seem particularly bothered about it.

“When you make that noise, it makes me lose my mind,” he whispered, and I responded by lightly biting his bottom lip, too overwhelmed to form words of my own.

Then two things happened at once. Lucas placed his hand on my bare thigh, and pretty high up on my thigh, since the skirt of my dress was pooled around my waist—and to be honest I had no real idea of where, or how much of my legs were actually showing—and I turned my head to the side and saw a middle-aged Chinese woman glancing at us through the window of the car as she walked by.

“Oh my God,” I cried, turning my back to the window, which coincidentally brought my hips exactly in line with Lucas’s—a fact he seemed to be a big fan of.

Lucas was still busily ravaging my neck, his kisses moving back up toward my mouth, his hands wandering every which way as I struggled to rearrange my dress.