Nick and Lilac by Marian Tee Read Free Book Online

her R.K.
    He grimaced. “Forget I asked.”
    A giggle escaped Lilac, the surprising but enchanting sound stirring something inside him that wasn’t just his cock.
    As she led them to their assigned stations, he asked, “Why do they call you R.K.?” Her cheeks turned a faint color of pink. He was even more enchanted and aroused, last night’s disastrous meeting fading into the background.
    “It…stands for Rurouni Kenshin,” Lilac admitted as they took their seats next to each other. His gaze remained blank after her answer, and she couldn’t help smiling at that. He really was so out of place here, and everyone knew it, judging by the way most people kept looking at them.
    “RK is…my favorite anime. It’s about this…really cool wandering samurai and…” She trailed off, seeing that she wasn’t going anywhere with Nick. It was as if she could not imagine a grownup voluntarily watching Japanese cartoons. “I’ll…let you see it one day,” she said gently instead.
    As Lilac showed Nick the controls and walked him through the objectives of the game, she kept waiting for Nick to demand that they go somewhere else. But he didn’t. Instead, he listened carefully to her explanation, frowning as if he was doing his best to memorize life’s most important lesson.
    “Why,” he asked slowly, his gaze on the screen, “do they keep wielding their knives when they start running out of their base?”
    “Mm…I guess…out of habit?” She watched Nick test the same action with his own character. And then he took off his pistol and started shooting.
    Lilac gasped. “Wait. Nick…you might---”
    “What the fuck, man?” the guy next to them exclaimed angrily as his character’s life points went down.
    “---shoot…your own teammates,” she ended lamely. Behind them, his bodyguards were audibly doing their best to muffle their laughter.
    Dark color stained Nick’s cheeks as he realized what he had just done. “Sorry,” he forced himself to mutter to Lilac before snapping his head back to glare at his security team. “Shut up or I’ll fire the two of you,” he warned them in Greek.
    Lilac bent forward to peek at Nick’s face, worried at the curt tone he had used with his guards. “I’m…sorry,” she whispered. “I…forgot to tell you this game has friendly fire on.”
    If anything, the frown on Nick’s face became even more pronounced. “It wasn’t your fault. It’s mine. But I’ll do my best to get the hang of this.”
    She could see that he meant it, the way he was gazing at his screen and experimenting with the controls. For some reason, that only made her heart beat faster. Lilac mentally shook her head. Her heart needed reconfiguring. It wasn’t supposed to beat for the silliest things.
    An hour later, Lilac nearly jumped in her seat when Nick suddenly lifted her headset. “You’re too good.” His whisper tickled her exposed ear.
    And there, Lilac thought morosely, went her heartbeat once more. Even so, she couldn’t help the smile tugging her lips when she peeked at Nick and found him gazing at her screen, his lip curling when her mouse accidentally highlighted Nick’s own kill-death ratio.
    Lilac’s record: 54 kills, 4 deaths.
    Nick’s record: 2 kills, 23 deaths.
    “I play like shit,” Nick muttered.
    Lilac tried to suppress the laughter brimming on her lips as she clicked on exit to temporarily take herself out of the game. “No…you don’t.”
    His blue eyes bored into her. “Yes. I do.”
    The softest chuckle escaped as she said obediently, “Okay…you do.” Unaware of how her nervousness over stuttering disappeared whenever she was talking about something she enjoyed, Lilac added soothingly, “I…can teach you if you like.”
    “You should have offered earlier.”
    She relaxed even more, Nick’s grumbling retort making her lips twitch. “I…never thought someone like Nick Christakos would be bad at something.” Her head cocked to the side as a thoughtful