Page 35 of Jonas

“Don’t leave me hanging, J Dog. Spill.”

“J Dog? Thought I was Casanova.”

“You were but then you called me Delilah and I promised never to call you that again. So, J Dog it is.”

His lips twitched. Damn those lips and the fuller bottom one I wanted to pull between my teeth before I ran my tongue over it. Lips I wanted to feel on mine.

“I’m vetoing J Dog,” he told me.

“Fine, but you only get one more veto, then you’re stuck with whatever I come up with.”

There was a flash of white teeth. I’d never taken myself for someone with a tooth fetish but there I was fantasizing about how they’d feel nibbling my sensitive parts.

A tooth fetish?

What the hell was wrong with me?

“Stop stalling and tell me why Brenda’s not a keeper.”

“I’m not stalling. I’m trying to figure out how a woman as smart and beautiful as you are is such shit at coming up with a nickname.”

Warmth coated my insides at his compliment. However, the warmth quickly turned to ice when he finished his comment.

“I’ve never given anyone a nickname,” I stupidly admitted, then insanely went on to share more. “They weren’t allowed when I was growing up.”

“Not allowed?”

I shifted in my seat, taking my gaze from Jonas to the windshield.

Playtime was over. The bubble of safety I’d conjured up burst. This wasn’t a fairytale. Jonas wasn’t the prince and I wasn’t a lowly maiden in a prairie dress needing to be saved. I’d left those dresses behind when I saved myself.

The past was the past.

There was no reason to pull back the tape and let the trauma spill out.

“Forget I said that,” I mumbled.

“Can’t forget it, but I’ll let it go if you don’t want to talk about it.”

Where was one of those Men in Black memory wiper device thingies when you needed one?

“Thanks.”

The good guy I was coming to understand Jonas was changed the subject.

“Brenda,” he announced. “Hot but fake. Some men don’t mind fake, some get off on the attitude and high maintenance. But no man likes a bitch and the woman bleeds bitch. She can’t hide it even though she tries. Men will take a bitch to their bed when it’s packaged right, but they’re not going to keep her there. That building you lived in costs some cake, but my guess is the people who live there are living paycheck to paycheck trying to keep up appearances. If she’s looking for a rich man, she won’t find him living at the Hemingway. At least not the wealth she’s after, and that chick has gold digger etched right under bitch.”

I couldn’t disagree with his assessment, so I didn’t. I kept my eyes on the car in front of us like I was being paid to memorize every speck of dirt on its bumper.

“I didn’t say thank you.”

Forgetting I was supposed to be watching the traffic, I glanced back at Jonas. The seriousness in his tone and his posture drove me to lighten the mood.

“For what? My awesome nickname, or is it my award winning conversational skills?”

“Sweetheart, I hate to break it to you in case you think you got nickname game, but you don’t. And just a warning—you call me J Dog in front of my team, there will be retribution.”

I really wanted to know what Jonas’s idea of retribution was. In my imagination he’d be a spanker. But the fantasy of him draping me over his knee and reddening my ass didn’t get a chance to fully form before he continued.