Revealing Us (Inside Out #3)(20)

Amber returns to her chair. “She can’t even speak to Sophie, Chris.”

“Who’s Sophie?” I ask.

“The housekeeper,” she replies, surprising me when her deep blue eyes meet my light green ones. “She doesn’t speak English.”

“Amber,” Chris warns, and he turns to me. “We’ll get by the language stuf, baby. And Sophie only comes once a week.”

The doorbell rings and Chris glances at his watch. “I guess I can’t wonder who the heck would be here at this time of the night, since it’s three in the afternoon here.” He sets his cup down and glances at Amber. “It’s more a question of who even knows I’m here.”

She holds up her hands. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t have time to tell anyone.”

I stand up as he heads down the stairs. “Don’t you need a shirt?”

He glances over his shoulder. “Wanna give me that one?”

“Get your own,” I call back, smiling, as he disappears around the corner. But as I turn back to the table and ind myself alone with Amber, it fades quickly. For several seconds we just stare at each other and the silence eats away at the few nerve endings this day has left me with. I can’t stand the empty space, so I blurt out, “Who’s Tristan?”

Her lips curve like a cat that’s about to capture a canary, with me soon to be a feather in those lips. “A tattoo artist I work with,” she explains. “A wickedly sexy, talented one. Cus-tomers wait for a good two months to get his ink.”

This tells me nothing of why Chris wouldn’t want me around Tristan. But I’m guessing it must be his connection to Amber, and maybe hers to the BDSM world. I want to be as far away from that topic with her as possible, and I say, “You did Chris’s dragon. It’s brilliant. You’re quite gifted.”

Her eyes register surprise and then pride. “Yes. I did it many, many moons ago, and it’s still some of my best work. I was . . .

inspired. It was a coming of age for both him and me.”

“It certainly shows in the work,” I manage, past a knot in my throat caused by her sentimental tone that reaches beyond sex to a deep history of friendship, and yes, passion.

She tilts her head and studies my face, and something lares in her eyes that I don’t understand. Her gaze drops and travels over what she can see of my body, and the hot, sultry inspection is as far from hate as it gets. “You know,” she purrs, her dark lashes lifting, “I could ink that beautiful pale skin of yours with a dragon to match Chris’s. It would be . . . breathtaking.”

I can feel heat spreading across my chest and up my neck.

Is she coming on to me? No, that’s pure craziness. I’m confused and uncomfortable. One minute she’s looking at me as if she wants to kill me, and the next like she wants to strip me naked again.

My irst instinct is to seek out Chris, but that might be exactly what she hopes for. I have to establish that I will not be pushed around, and do it quickly. Still, I sit there and say nothing. Me. The nervous rambler.

“I have a three-month wait, but I’ll get you in right away,”

she adds, leaning forward to narrow the distance over the counter. “We’ll surprise Chris.”

We’ll surprise Chris? Is she . . . surely not. Or is she? Does she want us to be a threesome? That’s not happening. I don’t share, and if I thought for a moment Chris did, I’d be on a plane back to the States. But she knows him. She’s had sex with him.

Kinky sex.

I swallow hard. Past. Present. Past. Present. I repeat these words in my head, feeling like I’ll be using them a lot in the near future. “No ink for me,” I say, my voice strained with discomfort. “Thanks, though.”

Amber notices; I see the gleam in her intelligent eyes. She’s smart, and that makes her dangerous. She pushes of her chair to stand, a good two or three inches above my ive feet four inches. “Too bad,” she says. “I could have told you all of his secrets while I worked on you.”

I ignore the soft little rasp emphasizing “worked on you.”

She’s deinitely playing some head game with me, and I hate that it’s working a little. Chris is the one to share his secrets with me, but still . . . does she know all the things about him I don’t? Maybe. Probably. Some things, for sure. She’s the one who lured him into the BDSM world. Well, he didn’t use the word lure, and he isn’t the type to be lured into anything. Past.

Present. Maybe he had been the type back then? And Amber certainly is the type to lure someone into something. I almost laugh out loud. This is the man who, as a teen, responded to the French kids’ teasing by beating the crap out of them and getting in trouble.



Amber rounds the island and walks toward me, and I am hopeful she is leaving. Instead, she stops beside me and shocks me by pressing her hand to my bare arm and running it up under Chris’s shirt to close around my bare shoulder.

My gaze jerks to hers and it’s all I can do not to pull back, but I’ve had enough people play intimidation games with me to know not to respond.

“Right here,” she says, her ingers lexing on my shoulder.

“I’ll do a perfect duplicate of Chris’s dragon. It would be delicious fun to re-create it.” Her hand slides away and her lips curve. “He likes inked skin.”