Page 36 of Tight Spaces

Chapter eight

His friends turned out to be a lot like she’d expected. Which meant they reminded her of Roman and Max. Though one of them was a woman. They set up a rotation of guards, but Max stayed with her all the time.

Someone else might have gotten sick of spending so much time in a hotel suite, but she was used to working on her thesis for days at a time. Besides, she had the distraction of Max.

Totally delicious and wonderful, he used sex to help her work off any tension she built up being in the same two rooms. She didn’t need to go running when he loved her into a puddle of exhausted pleasure. Sex, the perfect cardio.

They kept talking, too, about their more recent pasts and their hopes for the future.

"So, you want to be doing this when you’re ninety?" she asked him at one point.

He shook his head. "Nah. Can’t do what I do when you lose your game."

"So, what does your future look like?"

"There’s a pretty high mortality rate in my profession."

"You plan to be dead?"

"Hell, no."

"Then?"

Well, that answered the question of whether a black man could blush. He could. And it was adorable.

"What? With a reaction like that you can’t not tell me."

"You know I like to cook."

"You want to be a chef?" She wasn’t seeing why that would embarrass him.

"I want to own my own place."

"You want to open a restaurant."

"Nothing big. Not fancy-assed. Something that only serves breakfast and lunch."

"Like a diner."

"More like a deli, but not."

"One of those little food carts?" Maybe he thought former Marines should do something more dangerous, but she thought he’d be really amazing at this.

He loved to feed her...the suite had a mini kitchen, and he did most of the cooking.

"That, or a little coffee shop style place. Though I’m not looking at serving a bunch of fancy-assed coffees either. There are enough places that do that already. Not in Boston, but maybe in California. Mama and her teacher moved there a few years ago and they do enjoy the sunshine."

"Where in California?"

When he named a town only about thirty minutes from the one her parents lived in, Danusia felt the inevitability of destiny shiver across her soul.

#

Max hung up the phone as Danusia stood up and stretched from where she’d been working hunched over the suite’s fairly ample desk for the past six hours. He’d never seen anyone get so lost in deskwork for so long, well except maybe Spazz, but he was too antsy not to get up every hour or so and work off a little of his extreme extra energy.

Her pretty breasts pressed against her top, her nipples hardening as she moved in response to the now flowing blood in her body probably. She turned to him and caught him looking.

He grinned. "Nice view."