Free The Sweetest Things by Nikki Winter

the couple’s direction. “Look at them! That’s adorable.”
    He snorted, picking up his menu. “What you see as adorable, they see as sexy, which inevitably means poor Miss Margo is in for a hell of a time later tonight.”
    For giving her that particular mental imagery, Harper kicked him in the shin.
    “Ow! Stop with the abuse!”
    “Stop filling my head with thoughts of your father having sex, you depraved lunatic!”
    Konstantine chuckled, waggling his brows before crooning Marvin Gaye.
    Her lips twitched but she refused to give him the satisfaction of cracking a smile. “You need Jesus.”
    “I’ll neither confirm nor deny that fact.”
    “Can we just have a nice normal night—”
    “ Date,” he corrected.
    “This is not a date. It’s a—”
    “Date.”
    “Koz, I am not—”
    “Sweets,” he said so softly that she looked up from her menu. Locking eyes with her, he responded, “You can call it whatever you want, believe whatever you want, but trust me, it’s a date.”
    “You’re acting weird.”
    “Am I?” Konstantine sat back. “Tell me something.”
    She hated when he started with the tell me something bullshit. It usually meant he was about to step into his role as a lawyer. “What?”
    “When was the last time you spent a Valentine’s Day without me?”
    Harper thought back, tried to remember a year where he wasn’t there after one of her horrible, disastrous encounters. “Never,” she answered softly, a little surprised that the only time he hadn’t been with her physically on Valentine’s Day was when he was out of the country and even then he Skyped her or called. Days later, she would get some small gift with a card.
    He quirked a brow. “My point exactly.”
    She swallowed. “Koz, I don’t get what we’re doing here.”
    “What don’t you get?”
    “Why I’ve all of a sudden become your number one priority. We’re friends—we’ve always been friends—but what’s this new thing between us where everything you say or do doesn’t just feel like you’re teasing me or trying to get under my skin?” It was true. Every day he’d been home all interaction between them, when she wasn’t hiding, didn’t feel like their usual verbal sparring. This was something different . She’d look up to find him watching her with the strangest look on his face...the same look she had when she found herself watching him. It scared the living shit out of her.
    It didn’t exactly help that they’d slept together. Sex between them had been great but now put them in a limbo zone with their friendship.
    Konstantine’s head cocked to the side. “Ask yourself a better question—is it reallynew or something you never stopped to pay attention to before? Am I suddenly making you my priority, or have you alwaysbeen my priority, and now you realize it because after all that shit about being friends all these years, you’re finally seeing what I’ve seen since I kissed you?”
    Harper was saved from having to answer when their waitress came back for their orders but as soon as she left, he was gazing at her, making her shift in her seat.
    She sighed. “What, Koz?”
    “Are you gonna answer me?”
    Shaking her head slowly, she replied, “No.”
    “No?”
    “No.”
    Konstantine smirked. “You can run but you can’t hide, Sweets.”
    “I can and I will.”
    His snort irritated and warmed her. “You’re really aiming for a sore ass today.”
    At his words they both froze, staring at each other before Harper’s lips curled, and then they were laughing. “Don’t. Even. Think. It,” she gasped, pointing at him.
    Konstantine held up his hands. “That was not where my mind went.” His brows winged. “And yet...”
    She kicked him.
    “Ow!”
    “Quit with the skeevey behavior.”
    “I’m gonna tell you something, and I want you to listen to me closely,” he whispered, leaning towards her. “I’m a man. It’s in my DNA to be skeevey. I fucked you within an inch of your life