This time, both Novak and Joey busted out laughing.

The absolute silence brought Angel up from the depths of dreamless sleep, and she stirred against the pillows with a sigh. It had been a fun night with Joey and Novak as they finally managed to prop up their new barbecue long enough to grill some steaks that had been swimming in a Worcestershire-garlic marinade for hours. Then they invited her to watch a movie with them but she politely declined, wanting to text Twist in private to explain she was sorry for her bad timing and lack of foresight. He didn't respond, which didn't surprise her, but it did worry her. Grimly she told herself not to borrow trouble until she knew for a fact that she had something to worry about.

Then she saw the news broadcast, and she was certain she did.

As she waited through the other big headlines of the day-a murdered teenage girl in Garfield Park, a potential explosive device at the Wrigley building and a possible trade for a wide receiver for the Chicago Bears-her tension ratcheted up with each pa.s.sing second. By the time the familiar House Of Payne logo flashed onscreen, she was ready to climb the walls.

Luckily, Payne was the focus of the camera's attention. She kept her eyes on Twist in the background, and she cringed a little when he fished his phone out to clearly silence the text chime. But he didn't put it away after doing so, and all things considered, that was probably a mistake on his part. By the time the news piece was over, Twist had turned his back completely on the media, and there was a tension in his shoulders that didn't bode well at all.

When she'd gone to bed soon after, she hadn't expected to fall asleep straight away, especially with Twist weighing so heavily on her mind. But she'd been exhausted after such a full day, and now with the silence wrapping cozily around her senses, she was ready to drift off again when several things. .h.i.t her at once.

It was silent in the room. The familiar ticking of her bedside clock had vanished.

The soft weight of the comforter and sheet had been carefully peeled back, and gentle hands were sliding up her thighs.

She started. "What-"

"It's me, Angel," came Twist's rumble-quiet voice, reaching out to her through the dark like a velvet caress. "Sorry I startled you, baby. You okay?"

"Yeah, I'm... yeah." The caressing hands skimmed under her nightie and pulled her panties off, his lips and tongue coming to savor a line from above her knee to the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. Her heart began to pound for another reason entirely. "The, uh... the clock not ticking woke me."

"It's back in the freezer where I can't hear it. That reminds me... how do you feel about digital alarms, or using your phone as an alarm?"

"They're not aesthetically appealing."

"But they get the job done."

"True."

"Does that mean you're willing to make the transition?"

"Sure." Her breath caught when he moved up her leg, his hands hooking under her knees to spread her thighs wide apart. "Ah... I take it you're not mad at me, then?"

"Oh, I am. Can't you tell?"

Angel pulled in a breath to inform him that if this was how he displayed anger, she'd be happy to p.i.s.s him off on a regular basis. But the remark got drowned in a ragged gasp that whispered into the darkness when his fingers reached the juncture of her thighs.

"Let's see now." With his free hand, he pushed up her chemise so that he could skim his mouth up her leg to her hip bone. "What was it that you said you liked? First on that list was licking, as I recall, right? Yeah, I think I'm right about that."

Oh, my goodness.

A shiver rippled her spine when his long hair tickled her inner thigh. His hand teased her, easing apart the heated folds of her s.e.x before gliding over the sensitized nub. Her body jumped with the shock of pleasure, and she whimpered. The sound turned into a low moan that was his name, while he stroked her with a determined yet oddly cherishing relentlessness.

"You're the most exciting thing in the world to touch, did you know that?" His breath whispered over her bared skin, and his words were so low she almost missed them as he built the sensual tension inside her until every nerve screamed with it. "I'm addicted to it. Addicted to your sounds, your responsiveness, the way your whole body clenches and tells me it likes what I'm doing. Even the way you breathe gets me off. The way it hitches in that crazy, sweet way. You've become my favorite thing to do."

"Prove it." Her breathing was shallow, and heat throbbed so urgently in her cleft her intimate tissues ached with it. "Put your money where your mouth is."

"Don't you mean, put my mouth... here?" For as long as he could, he kept his eyes on her as he slowly lowered his head, and the antic.i.p.ation was so exquisite she stopped breathing. Then at last his gaze was lost to her a scant second before his tongue slid along her channel. Pleasure blazed through her, mingling with pulsing excitement to create an intoxicating mix that flooded every corner of her world.

No way was she going to survive this.

Shivery delight ebbed and flowed through her-consuming her in eddies of blissful madness. At some point she reached down to tangle her fingers in his hair and hold him to her like her life depended on it. That was what it felt like. If he stopped now, she'd die.

He didn't stop, beautiful man that he was. He made love to her with his mouth until her hips pumped to his rhythm and every breath carried his name. He kept her dancing on the edge of insanity, before he closed his lips on her and gave her what she wanted.

He sucked her in.

Her head dug into the pillow while her back bowed off the bed, and a breathless scream ripped its way out of her throat. Blood rushed to the surface of her skin where he administered to her, intensifying the throbbing sensation all the more as he toyed with her with his tongue. It was too much to endure for more than a second or two, and then the tension inside her snapped. She slipped off the edge of control and into a wild o.r.g.a.s.m that blew her mind so totally apart she knew she'd never be put back together the exact same way again.

Her release was still going strong when he rose above her, applied protection and drove hard into her. His groans of completion soon joined hers, but it wasn't until several minutes later, when he'd half-collapsed on her and buried his face into her neck, that her brain refocused on reality.

"What's grdmwla?"

His head came up so he could stare at her through the dark. "What?"

"Grdmwla. It was the last thing you texted. I figured I'd made you so angry you were texting in Tongues. Here, look." Stretching, she reached for her phone charging on the nightstand, flicked a couple of b.u.t.tons, and handed it to him. "See? Grdmwla."

He stared at the screen, clearly baffled, before he began to grin. "I couldn't handle what you were doing to me, so I just shoved my phone into my back pocket so I wouldn't see any more messages. Obviously you had me so worked up I forgot to close out the texting app."

"Aha. So this was a b.u.t.t text. I've never received one of those before."

"You're lucky that's all I could send you. I wanted to crawl through the phone and wring your d.a.m.n neck. And then kiss you. Then f.u.c.k your brains out."

"Now you've done it, my beautiful man." Smiling, she set aside her phone and rolled back to hover her lips over his. "Whenever I hear grdmwla I'm going to think it's your personal code for 'let's f.u.c.k our brains out.' Not that I'm going to ever hear it again, mind you."

"Grdmwla." Smiling, he kissed her slow and deep, then rolled on top of her while sliding his hand between them. "Definitely, we need to grdmwla again."

With a laugh, she let him grdmwla her until she thought it might actually be a real word.

Chapter Fifteen.

"This shouldn't take too long."

In response, Angel nodded sleepily. Twist smiled to himself and steered her up the neat, flower-lined walkway to the front door of his house, a two-story red brick bungalow with a steeply pitched gable roof. He'd kept her up until the wee hours of the morning, so it wasn't all that surprising she was operating on a zombie-shuffle level. But as far as he was concerned, she deserved it. After what she'd put him through yesterday, she was lucky she still had the ability to walk.

"Flowers?" As he dug out his keys, he glanced over at her and saw she was staring at the snapdragons and pansies on either side of the walk. "Huh. Weird."

"What's weird?"

"You've never struck me as the gardening type."

"I'm not. My mother is." Absurdly pleased that she now knew him so well she could spot the one thing around that wasn't a part of him, he pushed open the door and hauled her in over the threshold. "I just need to change my clothes and pack up a couple extra things. Then we can be on our way to your parents' place."

"Take your time," Angel mumbled around a yawn. As Twist headed toward his bedroom he tried imagining what it was like to see his place through her eyes. Unlike her place, which was girly and had bits and pieces of her love of Alice in Wonderland scattered throughout, his s.p.a.ce was well-lived in, not overly messy, but otherwise not that interesting. His living room was kind of a mancave, with an overstuffed brown leather sectional focused on the entertainment center that had a comfortable layer of dust on it. A sixty-inch smart TV held the place of honor, surrounded by the latest gaming system that he hadn't yet had time to break in. His collection of movies and vinyl also had a fine layer of dust on them, and the air itself had a stale smell to it-the scent of neglect. Ever since Angel had gotten her head rammed into her car almost a week ago, he'd barely been home.

Considering how he'd been spending his time, he hadn't missed it a bit.

"You have a nice place," he heard Angel say as he propped the front door open to air the house out, but kept the screen door latched. "Do you do all your creative work at the House, or do you have a place around here that's kind of like a studio for you?"

"It's not kind of like a studio. It is a studio-a converted bedroom that gets great southern exposure. I have some of your art hanging in there, remember? Gretel."

"Oh, that's right." Her gaze came to him, and there was such a sweet softness in the way they touched on him that it made his blood simmer. "I still can't believe you bought my work."

"Seeing is believing." With a grin he grabbed her hand and walked her down a short hall to the open door to his studio. "Look for yourself."

He couldn't stop from smiling as she hesitantly stepped inside, as if she thought she might be intruding on hallowed ground despite being invited in. She took in the curtainless windows of the converted bedroom, the bare concrete floor dotted here and there with balled-up rejects that hadn't made it all the way into the waste basket, the cluttered drafting table, and the projects he had pinned all over the walls. When she zeroed in on one wall-the wall that had her rendition of Gretel on display, along with several of his works-she almost reached out to one of his designs before pulling back as if burned.

"If I didn't know better," she said on a shaky laugh that seemed on a higher pitch than normal, "I would swear that this is the same type of drawing you did of me back at my parents' place."

"Oh, yeah. That's because it is." Coming to stand behind her, Twist wrapped his arms around her, one around her waist, one around her shoulders, and pulled her back against him. "What do you think?"

"It's... it's unbelievable."

"This rendition of you has more detail obviously, and is less like a caricature-the hair and the wings have a lot more work going on. But it's basically the same you."

She stared for a long time at the pen and ink drawing. "I don't have wings."

"Artistic license. You're an angel, Angel."

"My b.o.o.bs aren't that big."

"Yeah, they are." His hand slipped from her shoulder to cup a breast, marveling as he always did at how perfectly she fit into his palm. "If anything, I didn't do them the justice they deserve. Or your legs. For a shorty you've got some long stems, baby, and I love how they pull me in deep when I'm inside you."

"One of my favorite things to do as well." She leaned her head back against his shoulder to look up at him with those big, doll-like eyes that had the power to turn him inside-out. Like that, his body sprang to life, and the sweet heaviness of desire sank like a narcotic into his system to pool in his suddenly pulsing c.o.c.k. "Why draw me?"

"I draw whatever's in my mind." His blood burned with the head-swimming fever of need. Holding her to him, he pushed his swelling flesh against the curve of her a.s.s. Slowly he closed his eyes when she offered up the sweetest response by reaching behind her to pull him even closer. "And you're always on my mind, baby."

She arched her neck so that her lips could just brush the line of his jaw. "I like the sound of that."

The hand at her waist found the b.u.t.ton of her jeans, undid it, and slid inside the material. "And I like the sounds you make when I touch you right-"

"h.e.l.lo?" The sound of the doorbell and an intrusive-and highly deflating-woman's voice came from the front of the house. "Anyone home?"

"f.u.c.k." A growl escaped him, and as his skin cooled and his d.i.c.k's elevation did a depressing nosedive, he could only shake his head at the unfulfilled hunger now sitting like an anvil in the pit of his gut. "I can't believe this s.h.i.t. I swear to G.o.d, they have this place under f.u.c.king surveillance."

"Who?"Angel had stiffened, quickly re-b.u.t.toning her jeans as the doorbell rang again. "Who is that?"

"My mom. Hopefully she's alone, but I need you to be prepared for her not to be, babe. My family... well, let's put it this way. They have a tendency to travel in a pack."

"Oh." her eyes widened, and she shot a vaguely alarmed look at the open door. "Uh, I could always hide in here..."

He frowned at her. "Don't be stupid, I'm not going to hide you." Then the frown deepened as a thought suddenly struck. "Wait, are you saying you don't want to meet her?"

"Uh..."

"Honey, Daddy's gonna break the screen door in if you don't answer in the next thirty seconds."

"What the h.e.l.l, Lynnette, I ain't gonna do that. Some freakin' cop could come along and arrest me for breaking and entering," came his father's voice, sounding as exasperated at Twist felt.

"Just like I thought. She's not alone." With a rough sigh, Twist dragged a hand through his hair before he caught her fingers in his. "Might as well get this over with, little girl. I'm not in the mood to worry about screen door breakage or bailing my dad out of jail today."

"Look, if you need some private time-"

"Yeah, I do need private time. With you. They get one look at you, and maybe it'll sink in that I'm otherwise engaged." Though knowing his family, ice skating would be taught in h.e.l.l first.

As soon as the screen door came in sight, Twist gave serious consideration to turning right back around and hiding along with Angel in his studio. "s.h.i.t."

"What?" Angel peeked over his shoulder. "Oh. That's... a lot of people."

"Like I said, they move in a pack." Except this was worse than he'd expected. Not only were his parents occupying his front porch, but as far as he could tell, just about every member of his immediate family had decided to visit as well.

"How the h.e.l.l did you even know I was home?" Twist demanded by way of greeting, reaching for the latch.

"What, this is how you say h.e.l.lo?" Looking affronted and not the least bit apologetic, his fireball of a mother barreled right in, her short black hair curling away from her round face, black eyes crackling fire at him. "We've driven by your place every day for a week to see if you're still alive, and you're never home. What's going on with you? I haven't heard from you in forever."

"Forever? Really? I had dinner at your place last Sunday, just like I've done every Sunday for the past four years. Just like I'm going to do day after tomorrow. Why? Because it'll once again be Sunday." As he waved his father, brother, sister-in-law and two nieces inside, he glanced at Angel and saw her staring at the flood of people with a tentative smile and faintly sh.e.l.l-shocked eyes. When those eyes glanced his way he offered a shrug that was both an apology and a gesture of philosophical resignation. Some things could be fought-traffic tickets, signs of aging and the like. But other things, such as his family, death and internet trolls, were inevitable.

The sooner she met them and figured that out, the better off she'd be.

"Hey, man." His younger brother, Nick, clasped his hand and did the familiar half-chest b.u.mp greeting that they'd done since they were kids and had seen their dad do it with their uncle. "Sorry about landing on you like this. We just came from having pancakes at Blueberry Hill and Mom got a bee in her bonnet about driving by to check on you. I honestly didn't think you'd be here."

"Uncle Twist, we saw you on TV!"

"You did?" Twist turned his attention to his four-year-old niece by resting his hand on her dark mop of silken curls. "What were you doing up so late, Maya?"

Maya's face crumpled into an unconvincing pout. "It was Fritzi's fault. She wanted water."

"Actually, you were the one who wanted water after you yelled and yelled for us, so much so you woke your sister up." Kara, his sister-in-law, held a sleepy fourteen-month-old Fritzi on her hip, absently doing the mom sway while giving him a quick grin. "Everything is Fritzi's fault nowadays. Mysterious crayon hieroglyphs of doggies and kitties on the wall over the sofa? Fritzi did it. The refrigerator door standing wide open, a can of soda pilfered and subsequently spilled all over our bed-a bed that showed clear signs of someone jumping on it with dirty sneakers the same size as Maya's foot? Fritzi did it. Maya's bologna sandwich that got stuck in Daddy's Xbox? You guessed it-that was Fritzi, too. According to Maya, her baby sister's guilty of everything, despite the fact that we know Fritzi could never reach these places, understand how to manipulate a gaming system, or manage to open a refrigerator or a can of soda. Right, Maya? We know this, don't we?"

"Fritzi's a bad girl." Maya scowled, tightly folding her arms across her tiny chest.

"It's a phase," his father told Kara with an unconcerned shrug. "Oliver blamed Nicholas for everything when they were three and four. Then when Essie came along, both boys blamed her."

A quickly stifled giggle from Angel made Twist glance back at her. "Oliver?"

"h.e.l.lo, h.e.l.lo, who's this?" His mother wheeled around to find Angel standing in the mouth of the hallway behind him, and he almost groaned out loud. He knew that look. Lynette Santiago had a matchmaking mindset that was the equivalent of a heat-seeking missile. "Son, where are your manners? Introduce your lovely lady friend to your family."

"Right." Twist turned and slung an arm around Angel's shoulders, giving them an encouraging squeeze as he did so. "Angel, these are my parents, Lynette and Ed, my brother and sister-in-law, Nick and Kara, and their two gorgeous girls, Maya and Fritzi. Everyone, this is Angel Taylor, from House Of Payne. I'm sure everyone would like to get to know each other better, but we were just heading out."

"Don't be silly." His mom came right up to Angel, plucked her out from under his arm and marched her into the living room. Angel had just enough time to throw a look of alarm over her shoulder at him. "We're going to have fun getting to know each other. Kara, honey, would you mind getting some coffee going? We've heard so much about Oliver's little tattooist friend that I'm just br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with questions. Let's get comfy and settle in for a nice chat."

Angel stood arm-in-arm with Twist at the end of his front walkway and waved his family off, unable to wipe the wide grin off her face as they disappeared down the street.