Page 95 of Claimed At First Sight

For the next couple of hours, Rory zigzags us through Chicago. I think she’s trying to introduce me to the city one neighborhood at a time.

Every few minutes she pulls the bike over, either because she spots something she wants to show me or we need a few minutes out of the cold.

One spontaneous stop blends into the next while we talk about everything and nothing.

I’m having the time of my life.

If someone had told me a week ago that I’d be exploring Chicago with a woman I’d only just met, I would have laughed in their face.

I didn’t want to come here and spent ten days dreading this trip, convinced it would be nothing more than another cage dressed up in a different setting.

Yet so far, Chicago keeps surprising me.

Sometime after the first hour of our adventure, I stopped checking over my shoulder for bodyguards. Nobody is hovering nearby or reporting on my movements.

I almost don’t recognize the feeling at first.

Freedom. Or at least the closest thing to it I’ve ever experienced.

Maybe that’s why my smile comes so easily as we continue down another snow-dusted street.

For once, nobody knows where I am. The next few hours belong to me.

Rory parks her motorcycle in front of her apartment. It sits above a tattoo studio in an older brick building, and I stop at the window display to ponder the various designs.

Hmm. I wonder if Maximo has any tattoos.

No, bad girl. We are not thinking about him today.

I’d love to get a tattoo. No woman in my family has one. Honestly, if needles didn’t freak me out, I’d probably get one right here and now before anybody could talk me out of it and remind me how an Accardi woman is supposed to present herself.

Hmm, what would I get?

Perhaps a dandelion, for the reasons I told Maximo.

But then my gaze lands on the tattoo machine, and the idea dies instantly. My throat threatens to close up, and sweat prickles along my forehead. Suddenly, I’m far too warm despite the freezing air.

Nope. I couldn’t do it. I’d pass out before they even finished the outline.

“Do you have a tattoo?” I ask Rory when she rejoins me after securing her bike.

“Several, actually.”

I blink. “Really?”

Rory pushes open the front door to the building. “You sound scandalized.”

“Not at all. I’m impressed. What did you get?”

We start climbing the narrow staircase toward her studio apartment. Halfway up, Rory shrugs out of her leather jacket before rolling up the sleeve of her sweater to her elbow.

“These are a few of them.”

I stop beside her and study her designs. A tiny lightning bolt sits near her wrist, little stars scatter along the inside of her forearm, and a matchstick is inked near her elbow.

There’s no theme to them at all. Yet they are unmistakably Rory.

“I kind of collect them,” she says, starting up the stairs again.