Page 14 of Breaking All The Rules
“Yes.” Bea lowered her eyes as she shoveled the fork into her mouth. She was a little embarrassed about her behavior yesterday. Everything she’d said she’d meant, but she barely knew this guy, and she must have come across as slightly nutty.
Annie interrupted with Austin’s food, placing the plate in front of him. “You want more, doll?” she asked, assessing Bea’s almost empty plate.
Bea wanted more pancakes with a craving that was entirely foreign—this was the peril of succumbing to simple carbohydrates. But she was almost full, and she was taking pie to go, so… “Thanks, but no. I’ll be over for my pie soon.”
“Already boxed up for you.” Bea had decided to go with a whole pie this time because it should see her all the way through to episode twenty.
Annie departed, and Bea returned her attention to what was left of her food and the hole that Austin had already made in his—he clearly liked his pancakes. “So,” he said around a mouthful of food, “you’re determined to break some rules, huh? Any thoughts on which ones?”
Bea wondered what ordinance she was breaking now, thinking about drizzling maple syrup all over Austin’s abs. In public. “Well, that depends,” Bea said, eyeing him speculatively. “Is this Austin asking, or is it Officer Cooper?”
“Well, that depends.” He smiled at his repetition. “If you want to know the number of each law you intend to break, then it’s Officer Cooper. If you just want to shoot the breeze about it, then it’s Austin.”
“Can I take a little bit of A and the rest B?”
“Beatrice,” he said, his loaded fork poised between the plate and his mouth, “you can take whatever you like.”
Beatrice.
Only her grandmother called her Beatrice. It had seemed drearily old-fashioned as a kid, when all the other girls had been called Kimberly and Crystal. So she’d grabbed hold of the shortened version, Bea, and run with it. But this guy using her full name? That was something else. It rolled off his tongue soft as a caress and made it sound contemporary.
And…swoony.
Austin Cooper seemed to know all her swoon buttons, and she hadn’t even known she possessed any. Hell, she hadn’t even known swoon buttons were a thing.
And then he grinned, his face so arrestingly sexy and his damn…teeth so straight and white and even and…young. Popping the food into his mouth, he ate with relish, forcing Bea to look out the window to stop herself from wondering if he was a fan of eating things other than food, and she didn’t want to take that into her dream world tonight.
Younger men were a hard limit. Even in her sleep.
“So, come on,” he said, after he’d swallowed and before his next pornographic swipe of his tongue across sticky maple-syrup lips. “Spill. What’s on your rule-breaking list?”
“I don’t have a list.”
“That’s a pity.” He shook his head, his expression faux crestfallen before his gaze locked on hers. “You said you were going to be my worst nightmare. I was looking forward to that.”
Bea’s breath hitched at the low note in his voice. “I was suffering from a sugar rush. I may have exaggerated.”
He grinned. “I would never have guessed.”
She shot him a quelling look. “I’m just not sure I want to be on that corporate treadmill anymore. Working all hours of the day and night and being the same boring, predictable Beatrice with no life.”
“Okay, so that’s what you don’t want. What do you want?”
There was a challenge in his voice that needled at Bea. How could a twenty-five-year-old dude have his shit together more than she did? To be fair, she’d had her shit together waaay back in her twenties, too. Why hadn’t anyone told her she was going to regret the hell out of that?
“I just want to be…” She shied away from the word impulsive because that was synonymous with her mom. “I want to live a little. For a change.”
Not forever. Just for now. She’d held back from doing things other people had told her not to do her entire life. Maybe it was time, while she was taking a break from the rat race, to do exactly the opposite. To do everything she’d been told not to do.
He nodded encouragingly. “Like?”
“I don’t know.” Bea cast a net for something impulsive and outrageous. “Flash somebody. Or maybe moon them. Or…go skinny-dipping.” Her grandmother, who had practically raised her, was very specific about the perils associated with a lack of feminine modesty.
“Ooh, now…that’s badass. They all fall under ordinance seven four two, subsection three of the public nudity act.”
Bea blinked. She was badass? And there was a public nudity act? “You’re just making this shit up now.”
“God’s truth,” he said, placing his hand over his heart, but he was smiling in such a way that Bea still didn’t believe him. “What else?”
