My Bad Boy Werewolf Quadrillionaire Space Lord

12 - Fancy Takes Flight

My budding rage vanished faster than my credit at the last bar I had been drinking in, when Luca finally explained the kind of dog fighting he and this inappropriately well tanned chef were talking about.

I mean, how would you react when you went from thinking these two were talking about making starving dogs fight, to playing in toy airplanes that shoot foam darts at each other? I wasn't this excited being backstage with that delicious boy-band group that sings 'Booty Baby'.

"Wait, wait," I said, not completely willing to trust this news. Mostly because I instinctively mistrust anything that makes me really happy. Might explain some of my relationship issues. "They fly around in toy airplanes and have dogfights with Nerf darts? Are you serious?"

"Yeah," Luca confirmed. "Just don't call then Nerf darts. We don't have permission to use their trademark."

"Isn't that a ubiquitous term for a foam dart? Like how you google something even when you're not using Google's search engine?" I asked.

Luca and Antonio looked at each other for a moment, before Luca shrugged. "Point for the pirate lady," Luca said, as he turned in his chair and looked at me. "Eat first, then I'll take us to get mauled by a bunch of nine-year-olds."

"That offer has never sounded so attractive before," I admitted.

"That's because you've never heard me say it before," Luca replied.

"Your arrogance makes you less pretty."

"I do it as a public service, otherwise women would never actually have a conversation with me," Luca said. He chuckled and pointed to Antonio. "You remember when the Duchess of Northumbria had a tour? Spent the entire trip stuttering until I started talking about how I was richer than the next two hundred billionaires combined."

"I remember that. She looked like a teenage boy at a lingerie store. Pretty sure she wouldn't know what colour your eyes were," Antonio reflected.

"You could always try putting a shirt on," I said.

"Would you really want that?"

I sighed and stared down at abs I could probably pop a beer bottle on. "No," I said.

"Some truth at last. Now try that, before it gets cold," Luca said, and he pointed at the still untouched plate in front of me.

The first thing I noticed was that despite the steak being nearly as thick as the length of my pinkie, there was no knife beside my plate. I frowned and looked at Antonio, who only smirked with a conceited grin worthy of Luca. "It's as tender as you wish your mother had been when you were a child," Antonio said.

"Bold words," I said, as I took the fork in my right hand and braced to carve through a steak probably worth more than some cargo I've been hired to haul. I pushed down, and the fork sliced through the meat like my wit through a playboy's ego.

"Damn," I said, willing to admit when I was astonished. Intrigued, I skewered the piece I had effortlessly hacked off, lifted it to my mouth, and...

And holy shit, I've never had steak before.

I kid you not, the meat had all the toughness of warm butter, and the flavour of everything you wish food could be. If someone told me my steak was laced with cocaine, I'd believe them.

"You're a witch," I said to Antonio, gesticulating with the fork before I used it to cut off another piece. I then turned to Luca and pointed my fork at him. "And how are you not obscenely fat? It's almost an insult to this chef's craft that you aren't as wide as you are tall."

"I'm contractually obligated to maintain my figure," Luca said.

"Really?" I asked.

Luca laughed. "Hell no. I could get as fat as I liked. Haven't you seen a billionaire in anything other than a Wattpad smut flick?"