She wasn’t so lucky the second time. A longer strand escaped the fork as she shoveled it in her mouth, requiring her to suck it up, and Della was excruciatingly aware of him watching her cheeks hollow out, watching the strand get shorter and shorter. Watching that last couple of millimeters disappear between her lips and the quick dart of her tongue as it lapped up the excess cream.

His eyes darkened. “You missed a big old drip,” he murmured, pointing to her chin.

Damn it. She reached for her napkin. “Don’t you dare say it.”

“I told you so?” He chuckled. “I would never be so ungentlemanly.”

But he watched her intently as she wiped the sauce away, and that felt very, very ungentlemanly.

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Two hours later, they were riding the elevator to Wade and CC’s apartment. With three cocktails under her belt, Della definitely had a buzz. Tucker sure seemed looser than usual, too, as he regaled Della with the details of a prank he, Drew, and Arlo had played when they’d been in junior high. It involved getting up at the ass crack of dawn every day to dye all the chicken eggs from the school farm blue for an entire week.

“You should have seen all those farm kids proclaiming it was some kind of miracle. Like blue chicken eggs were a sign of how well they were going to do at the state fair.” He hooted out a laugh as the doors opened into the penthouse.

“What happened? Did you ever get found out?”

“Hell yeah,” Tucker confirmed as he strode out of the elevator. “Randy Studebaker—he was the president of the high school FFA—caught us red-handed one morning. Actually, blue handed.”

He laughed again, and Della joined him as she stepped into the apartment. The milky white light of a full moon flooded in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. “Were you punished?” The elevator doors swished quietly closed behind them.

“School suspended us for a week, but my mom? She was so mad I washed glasses at Jack’s for an entire summer as punishment.”

Della shook her head. Try as she might, she couldn’t imagine her brother up to that kind of mischief. “It’s hard to imagine Arlo going along with something like that.” Her brother was so damn by the book, him being a rule breaker just didn’t compute.

Tucker snorted. “It was Arlo’s idea.”

“I would have liked to have known that Arlo.” The only Arlo she knew was the stern, stoic guy who had busted down her door and dragged her out of hell. Sure, he’d been kind and gentle and patient and understanding and protective, too, but this devil-may-care rabble-rouser? That didn’t seem right.

“Yeah.” Tucker glanced down at her. “He was a fun guy.”

“Is it because of me?” she asked, searching Tucker’s face. “That he’s different?”