Her relief was a living, breathing thing in the car. “Will you come with me?”
“Of course.”
Alexis didn’t respond. With her free hand, she turned on their favorite satellite radio station, and they rode the rest of the way like that.
Music doing the talking. Saying the things he couldn’t.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Beefcake was nowhere to be seen when they walked back into her house. Noah helped her carry leftovers to the kitchen.
A red leash on the counter caught his attention. He picked it up. “What’s this?”
“A cat harness. For Beefcake.”
“A cat harness?”
“The vet said he needs more exercise, but I don’t think I should let him out anymore, so I got him this leash thing to take him for walks.”
“You’re going to take Beefcake for walks?”
“I think he’ll like it.”
She said it with the kind of innocence with which children swear they heard reindeer on the roof on Christmas Eve. Alexis had a mile-wide naive streak about Beefcake. If she only knew the number of dead things that cat had dropped at Noah’s feet over the past year . . .
She didn’t know, though, because Noah always got rid of the evidence before she could find out. “Have you tried to put it on him yet?”
“Not yet. I need to figure it out. Want to help?”
He eyed it skeptically. He had no idea how the contraption was supposed to work, but he knew with one hundred percent certainty if it involved Beefcake, it was going to end badly.
Alexis called out to the cat in her singsongy way. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.”
A yowling noise in the hallway behind him made the air catch in Noah’s lungs. He swallowed and turned around. Beefcake stood a few feet away. “Here he is,” he rasped.
Lexa brushed past him. Beefcake glared at Noah through slitted eyes as Lexa cradled him to her chest and walked back to the kitchen.
“How about if I hold him while you put the harness on him?” she said.
It was the worst idea he’d ever heard, but he wasn’t going to disappoint Lexa. He picked up the harness from where she’d left it on the table and approached woman and beast slowly.
A low growly noise was coming from Beefcake’s chest. It was the closest thing he ever got to purring.
“I think we’re supposed to wrap it around him and snap it across his belly before we do the leg part,” Alexis said, turning and turning the cat over in her arms.
Noah gulped and held out the harness. He met Beefcake’s eyes and saw his own murder flash through them. Carefully, Noah draped the harness on Beefcake’s back.
Nothing happened.
Alexis lifted Beefcake higher so Noah could reach under and—he froze as the cat stopped purring. Everyone knew a cat’s belly was the danger zone. But this cat especially. Noah had made the mistake of trying to pet him there exactly once.
“He’s okay,” Alexis said. “Can you snap it closed?”
Noah winced instinctively as he reached beneath Beefcake and located both ends of the straps. Holding his breath again, Noah gingerly connected the two ends with a quiet but firm snap.
Beefcake barely moved.
“Awww, look! He likes it.” Alexis scratched Beefcake’s ears and made lovey-dovey noises at him. “You really are such a good boy.”
A really good boy were words that had never, ever been spoken about Beefcake.
“Now what?” Noah asked.
“Now I think we loop the other part around each leg.”
Noah did the engineering in his head and decided the plans were flawed from the design stage. Because there was no way Beefcake was going to willingly put his legs through the holes of that thing.
As if reading his mind, Beefcake bared his claws.
The rest happened in slow motion.
Beefcake made a noise like a rabid raccoon and went full Crouching Tiger. He lifted his back legs, planted them in the center of Noah’s chest, and dug in. Before Noah could even register the fact that he’d just been impaled, Beefcake shoved off and flew from Lexa’s hands.
Noah clutched his chest and fell backward as Alexis gasped. “Beefcake, no!”
Dear God, he’d been stabbed. Noah collapsed against the wall, hand covering his heart. Or what was left of it. He was afraid to pull his hand away because he’d likely find it covered in blood.
“Oh my God, did he hurt you?” Alexis asked, running toward him.
“I’m fine.” Noah’s voice registered high enough to summon bats.
“Move your hand,” she ordered. And just in case he wasn’t going to obey, she peeled his fingers away.
“Oh no,” she breathed. “You’re bleeding.”
Noah was afraid to look down, so he squinted and slowly dipped his chin.
Twin red splotches had soaked through his white T-shirt.
“We need to look at it. Cat scratches can get infected.”
“It’s not that bad.”
She nodded toward the hallway. “Go in the bathroom. I’ll be right there. We need to clean it.”
“Lexa—”
She pointed toward the door with a look that ended the argument. He trudged back to the bathroom, turned on the light, and shut the door halfway. Then he grabbed the collar of his shirt at the nape of his neck and pulled it over his head. Two inch-long cuts between his pecs oozed blood beneath the dark mat of hair.
He heard Alexis’s footsteps in the hallway, and suddenly the door swung open all the way. “There’s some washcloths under the sink— Oh.”
She stopped.
Stared.
Blinked.
Looked away quickly.
Circles of pink rose high on her cheeks. “Sorry. I . . . should have knocked.”
“It’s okay.” Noah stepped back to make room for her, his own face getting hot as he watched her open the cabinet beneath the sink. She grabbed a washcloth and a basket of first aid stuff. She turned around, looked at him and then away again.
Noah blinked and looked down at his naked chest.
Was she checking him out? No. That was ridiculous. The guys had planted too many fucking seeds in his head. It was just wishful thinking. But she’d stared so openly, so hotly, that his chest hair had damn near ignited.
She turned around and soaked the washcloth in hot water. Looking everywhere but at his eyes, she then pressed the fabric to the first scratch. He instinctively sucked in a breath. She yanked the towel back. “I’m sorry. Does it hurt?”
He cleared this throat. “It’s fine.”
“Maybe we should go to the ER.”
“For a cat scratch?”
“Cat scratches can be bad.”
“This one isn’t.”
“It’s pretty deep.”
“Lexa, I’m fine.”
She returned to her cleaning, every swipe of the fabric a creeping torture he’d never experienced before. But then she set the washcloth down and dabbed antibiotic cream on her fingers, and the torture began anew.
Because this time, she was touching him directly. Hot fingertips against his hot skin.
She looked up. “Does it hurt?”
He shook his head, amazed he could talk at all. “It’s fine.”
Except he wasn’t fine. He was nearly hyperventilating. Not from pain, at least not from the pain of the scratch. Her touch was like a branding iron against his naked skin.
God strike him down for the most inappropriate reaction of all time given everything she was going through, but the first thing he thought was how amazing it would be to feel her hands on other parts of him, and suddenly his groin got the misguided idea that now would be the perfect time to stand at attention. Fuck.
He jerked away from her. “That’s good.”
Alexis
blinked up at him, cheeks growing pinker. “I’m sorry. I—I’ll get you a new shirt.”
* * *
* * *
Alexis escaped to her bedroom upstairs and sank to the edge of the bed. She pressed her hands to her eyes. Nope. Didn’t work. She could still see him.
Shirtless.
As in naked from the waist up.
As in trim hips encased in faded denim rising to a wide V of shoulders, bulging triceps, and toned pecs that played peekaboo beneath a layer of dark hair that gathered in the valley between before descending in a straight line down taut abs toward . . .
No. She wouldn’t think about the toward part.
Holy shit, how did she not know he looked like that under his comic book T-shirts? And double holy shit, she had just ogled her best friend, and he knew it.
“Lexa.”
She shot to her feet and turned toward his voice. He hovered in the doorway as if afraid to cross the threshold. In the play of light and shadow from the single lamp, his face was angular and sharp.
“You have a tattoo on your back,” she blurted.
“Yeah. Didn’t . . . Didn’t you know?”
“No.”
He took a tentative step into the room. “It’s the date of my dad’s death.”
Her eyes fell to the wide spread of his shoulders. And then farther down to the hard ridge of his collarbone, and farther still to the dark hair covering defined pecs and tight . . .
“Lexa . . .” His voice was strained. Maybe even embarrassed.
Crap. She’d just been busted again.
Alexis quickstepped to her closet, threw it open, and yanked a sweatshirt from a hanger. It was his. He’d given it to her last winter to wear when she spilled spaghetti sauce on herself. She’d never returned it, and he never asked for it back.
He took it from her. “Thanks.”
She shrugged. “It’s yours.”
Alexis sidestepped him to return to the other side of the bed, a safer distance. She looked at the floor as he pulled the sweatshirt over his head.
“I’m decent,” he said, trying and failing to make a joke out of the sexual tension that made the air sizzle and crack like a fire.
She glanced up through hooded lashes. “Are you . . . Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry about Beefcake. He’s just—”
“I’m fine, Lexa.” The corner of his mouth quirked up in a half smile that sent her heart into a rapid flutter. “But I don’t think he likes the harness.”
She laughed all nervous-like and then cringed at how unnatural it sounded. “Right. No, I think maybe I won’t be using it.”
She met his eyes and then quickly looked away, but her gaze instead fell to the bed, but that suddenly seemed way too intimate, so she looked back at him, and then, oh shit, her cheeks blazed as hot as if she’d just pulled fresh muffins from the oven.
This was ridiculous. She was acting like a teenager with her first crush. “Are you staying?” she blurted.
His expression went blank. “I— Do you want me to?”
“I—I was just asking. I mean, it’s late, so I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to go home, but you can stay if you want. I just—”
Her words became a jumbled run-on sentence as he walked toward her. He stopped inches away, and her breath lodged in her chest.
“Alexis.” His voice was strained again.
She gulped. “What?”
“Do you want me to stay again tonight?”
She noticed everything at once—the low register of his voice, the clean, manly scent of him, his muscled forearms, the overpowering size of him. And heat. It radiated off him in waves as if he generated his own solar power.
Yes. I want you to stay. The words were there, but she couldn’t get them out. Something was wrong with her. She was itchy in her own skin, jumbled in her own thoughts, unsure of her own emotions.
She put a foot of distance between them. “I’m okay,” she whispered. “You can go.”
* * *
* * *
The drive from her house to his had never been so long, and Noah was pretty sure he’d left more than a chunk of his skin behind. He’d obviously left his common sense. Because it was a test of willpower in the entire twenty-minute drive to not turn around, return to her bedroom, drag her into his arms, and beg her to touch him again.
That was pathetic enough. But even worse was that the only thing stopping him was a sliver of uncertainty that he’d imagined the whole thing.
Noah pulled into his driveway and squinted as motion lights flooded the lawn and garage with a yellow glow. Noah turned off his car, dragged his hands down his face, and groaned out loud as he dropped his head against the seat.
No, he hadn’t imagined it. He’d been naked in front of enough women—not a lot, but enough—that he recognized the look on Alexis’s face. Desire. And he had no idea what to do about that, which is why part of him was grateful she’d told him to go home. The other part of him? Noah shook his head. The other part of him needed a cold shower.
He unlocked his front door, punched in the alarm code on the keypad inside, and dropped his keys on the entryway table his mother had insisted he buy. Marsh, of course, had scoffed and said a man should decorate his own damn house.
Noah bypassed the stairs because there was no point even trying to go to bed. So he grabbed a beer from the fridge and wandered to the living room to collapse on his couch. He surfed the channels on his TV for ten minutes before giving up and turning the whole thing off. He could text her, of course. They often did to say good night, but after writing and deleting ten different messages, he gave up and tossed his phone onto the coffee table. It landed next to a plastic bag.
The book.
Great. He should’ve thrown the damn thing away.
Noah flipped it off. He wasn’t going to read that stupid thing. What the hell was it going to teach him that he didn’t already know? Marsh’s voice was a mocking whisper in the back of his mind. What kind of man reads a romance novel to figure out how the fuck to tell his woman that he’s in love with her?
Noah downed the last warm swallow of beer, still glaring at the bag.
Fine. He couldn’t sleep anyway. He grabbed the book, cracked it open, and started to read.
AJ Sutherland’s first mistake was going two miles over the speed limit in a dinky town like Bay Springs, Michigan, where the cops had nothing better to do than hide in dark alcoves with radar guns.
His second mistake was thinking anything had changed in the eighteen years since he’d been back to the northern resort town where he spent his summers as a teenager.
He banged his hand against the metal bars of the jail cell. “You know you can’t hold me indefinitely, right?”
The officer who pulled him over and arrested him regarded him with a mixture of boredom and outright hostility. “You have a right to remain silent. You might want to use it.”
AJ uttered an “argh” and ran his hands through his hair. “Look, Mr. Alvarez—”
“Mister?”
“Chief Alvarez. I get that you don’t like me and never have, but you can’t just throw me in jail for it.”
“Son, I didn’t arrest you because I don’t like you. I arrested you because you have an outstanding warrant.”
“Bullshit. For what?”
“Watch your language. You might be a big, bad NFL player to the rest of the world, but around here you’re just a cocky punk who walked away from his responsibilities.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Daddy, stop.” The female voice that interrupted their conversation was straight out of AJ’s memory bank, and he’d be lying if he wasn’t terrified to hear it. Because there was only one person on Earth who hated him more than Chief Sandoval
Alvarez, and that was the chief’s daughter, Missy.
She walked down the hallway and stood next to her father in a long, dark trench coat and with a briefcase in her hand.
“Missy?” AJ croaked.
She sighed. “No one has called me that in a long time.”
“Sorry. Melissa, then?”
A single eyebrow arched. “What brings you back after all these years?”
“I have some decisions to make. This seemed like a good place to make them.”
Her expression remained unchanged and unimpressed. “I heard about that. You’re thinking of retiring.”
“Thirty-six is old for a quarterback.”
She looked at her father. “Let him go.”
“Can’t do that, sweetie. He’s under arrest.”
“On what charge?” AJ barked.
“Eighteen years of unpaid child support.”
AJ tipped his head back to laugh but it died on his lips at the look on Missy’s face. He blinked rapidly as his vision blurred. “Wh-What is he talking about?”
Missy looked at the floor and pinched her nose.
“Missy, what the hell is he talking about?”
She looked up. “You have a daughter.”
CHAPTER NINE
By the time he pulled into the parking lot behind Mack’s building the next morning, Noah was more than twenty minutes late and looking for a fight. Because he’d slept like shit, and that book? What the fuck was that? What kind of romance novel was about a guy who abandoned his child? He should have listened to his first instinct and thrown the thing away.
He stormed in the back door just in time to hear a loud clap and a man’s commanding voice. “Work those glutes, kids. Squeeze those cheeks.”
Oh no. No way. He absolutely did not have the energy for this today. Noah spun on his heel and was just about to nope the fuck out of there when he heard Mack’s voice.
“Where the hell have you been? We had to start without you.”
A frustrated growl emerged from Noah’s throat as he turned back around. Mack stood at the end of the long hallway that led to the bar area. He wore long track pants, a T-shirt bearing the logo for his bar, and a whiskered scowl.
Crazy Stupid Bromance Page 8
