“Sure.” Zach smiled at her, seeming way too comfortable surrounded by her big, badass cousins. He made some comment to Alex that Jessie didn’t catch as he handed him the spatula, and not only did Alex laugh, so did Jason, Eddie, Riley, Chelle, and Jamie.
What the hell could he have said that had been soo funny?
Completely ignoring her entire family, she spun around and, for the second time this morning, almost walked right into her sisters.
When she stopped short, they both pivoted to the side, creating a path for her and Zach to walk through. As they walked out of the kitchen, she thought briefly about conducting their little meeting in the front room, but since she knew there would be ten sets of nosy ears—eleven if you counted Joey’s—that would be eavesdropping, she quickly decided against that.
Her other options were down to the basement or upstairs. Basement was quicker, but she was afraid it would still be in earshot. Decision made. Upstairs it was.
She saw her suitcases sitting at the bottom of the staircase. Perfect. She could kill two birds with one stone.
Wrapping her fingers around each handle, she was about to pick them up when she felt them jerked out of her hold. Her head spun around and she saw Zach standing there, holding her luggage, with the same expression he’d had on his face about the door.
Screw it. She did not have the time or the energy to go all women’s lib on him right now. If he wanted to be chivalrous and carry her bags up the steep staircase, who was she to stop him?
Jessie double-timed it up the stairs. She could feel the heat of Zach right behind her. Actually, it wasn’t so much body heat as it was body presence. Just his being within arm’s length was enough to make the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand up and cause goose bumps to break out all over her skin.
It was irritating as shit!
Trying to get some distance, she took the last half of the stairs two at a time. The sooner she convinced Zach to leave the house, the sooner she could get her family to take their nosy asses back to HC.
Walking straight into Zach’s room, she noticed her red lace bra and dress were on the floor, and she quickly leaned and picked them up so he wouldn’t see her lacy delicates.
“Hmm, nice red panties.” His voice came from directly behind her as she heard the door click into place.
Damn. She’d just bent over right in front of him. In an attempt to keep him from seeing a bra that was lying on the floor, she’d flashed him the underwear that was on her body. Smooth. Real smooth. Standing up, she spun around, but by the look on his face, she knew the damage was done.
Good job, Jessie. Way to keep it classy.
* * *
Zach hadn’t meant to embarrass Jessie by pointing out the fact that she’d just given him a fairly nice peek-a-boo shot when she’d bent over. The words had escaped his mouth like inmates jumping into the bay at Alcatraz. His mind, which usually guarded against prison breaks, had obviously been too busy taking in the view of the Golden Gate Bridge to notice.
A crimson color crept up Jessie’s smooth cheeks, and he wanted to kick his own ass for putting it there.
“Sorry,” he apologized lamely, not knowing what else to do.
Her brow furrowed and she shook her head as she downplayed the situation, “For what? I’m sure you see girls in their underwear all the time, Playboy.”
Most of the time, his nickname didn’t bother him. But there was something about hearing it come out of Jessie’s mouth that made him want to cringe.
“Anyway,” she continued with purpose, “I should be the one apologizing for that familial ambush. I had no idea that my cousins or their families were coming. In fact, I specifically told my sisters not to tell them. I can’t believe they just showed up.”
“Why?” Zach had only hung out with the Sloan clan for about an hour, but he didn’t think he’d ever met more chill, down-to-earth, genuinely good people in his life.
Growing up, he’d always dreamed of having a huge family. Until he was ten, he had his grandparents and his mom, three people who’d loved him unconditionally. But after he’d lost both of his grandparents in a car accident the summer between fifth and sixth grade, it had just been him and his mom.
After he started training at Gianni’s when he was eighteen, he definitely felt like he’d had an extended family, but not a real family. A real family that he would spend holidays and birthdays with, barbecue on the weekends with and go to their kids’ recitals and baseball games.
Downstairs, Joey had been telling Zach all about how big his cheering section was when he played little league games, explaining in great detail that he had more people come to see him than any other kids on his team did.
Zach had never had that growing up, and there was nothing he could do now to change that. But if he ever became a dad, that was exactly what he wanted for his kid.
Jessie was still just staring at him as if she didn’t understand the simple question he’d asked her. While Zach waited for her response, he let himself really soak in the fact that she was standing in front of him, her hair piled haphazardly on the top of her head, her face bare, and his favorite shirt hanging off her tiny frame.
As he looked down at her, all he could think was, mine. Thankfully, he’d been able to refrain from verbally expressing that totally inappropriate sentiment.
“Why did they come?” Jessie shrugged her shoulders and lifted her hands. “Ummm, I think they wanted to meet you. I would love to say that it was because they were being protective of me, but I think it is pretty obvious that wasn’t the case. They’re big boxing fans and—”
Jessie stopped talking suddenly and pressed her lips tightly together. Zach had seen her do that several times now, and it looked to him like she was trying to keep herself from saying any more. Which he couldn’t understand since it wasn’t like words flowed out of her like a waterfall. It was more like one of those drinking fountains in elementary school where you had to turn the handle all the way and barely enough water would spray out to make an arch.
“Why didn’t you want them to come?” Zach clarified.
“Because.” Jessie let out a small, forced laugh, holding up her hands in explanation. “This is my life, totally separate from them. It’s none of their business.”
He heard the words coming out of her mouth, but he was having a very hard time reconciling them with the girl who had stood before him with a splinter in her finger. That girl had been sweet and open. The way she was acting now seemed cold and shut off.
“You move in with a guy none of your family knows and you think it’s none of their business?” Zach knew that Jessie was smarter than that. There was no way that she actually believed what she was saying.
“No, it’s not.” Jessie crossed her arms in front of her chest, stood her ground, and tilted her head.
“Damn, you’re cute.” The words were out of Zach’s mouth before he could do anything about it. There had been another verbal jailbreak.
Jessie’s eyes widened and she shook her head with a sarcastic laugh. “I am not cute.”
The disdain that she said the word with implied that she’d thought it was a derogatory statement. That was not at all how he’d meant it, and he wasn’t about to let her turn his compliment into something it wasn’t. But he didn’t want to get in an argument over her being or not being cute.
“You know what they say. Cute is in the eye of the beholder.”
She tilted her head and looked at him as if she wasn’t impressed, but he saw the corners of her mouth twitching. He figured he should get out on a high note and before he did something he would regret.
“I’m going to go eat breakfast with your unwelcome family.”
He made it all the way to the door before she stopped him.
“Wait.”
Zach turned halfway back towards her. She looked flustered. He’d only known her a short time, but he had a feeling that she might be a control freak and this morning had probably turned her worl
d inside out and upside down.
“I wanted to tell you that…you can leave.”
Yep. Total control freak.
“Oookay.” Zach turned back around. He could have been a smartass, telling her in some clever way that that was exactly what he was doing, but he figured he’d give her a pass on this one.
“No, I mean you can leave the house.”
Zach knew that Jessie wasn’t crazy, so he was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt. But it really sounded like she was kicking him out of his own house.
“What?” He figured that he might have misheard her.
Suddenly, she was between him and his bedroom door, beside her suitcases he’d brought upstairs. No more than two inches were between them, and the top of her head was hitting right at his chest. She slowly raised her eyes to look straight into his, and just like every time they found themselves alone, in close quarters, his body responded like a sailor coming off a nine-month deployment. Zach could smell a sweet coconut scent he assumed was her shampoo, and it made him want to growl with male appreciation.
“Thanks,” she said, the sweet side of her shining through like the morning sun.
“Thanks?” He really was not tracking with her at all this morning.
“For bringing the suitcases upstairs.” Her large doe-eyes were shining up at him beneath inky, dark lashes. He felt a tightness in his chest and his balls. All he would have to do was lean down so he could press his lips to her soft, pink mouth.
He could feel the energy between them like it was a tangible thing. He’d heard the expression ‘you could cut the tension with a knife.’ Well, their sexual tension was so thick that he wasn’t sure a knife would do the job. Someone might have to take a chainsaw to get through it.
Shaking her head slightly and blinking, Jessie motioned towards his king-sized bed pushed up against the far wall. “And for letting, or insisting, I stay up here. I got a very good night’s sleep.”
“No problem.” Zach’s face spread into an easy smile. He was hoping that on the outside he seemed cool as a cucumber. Because inside he was desperately hoping that Jessie would move to the side and let him leave. Now.
The very last thing Zach needed to do was imagine Jessie sleeping in his bed. He’d done his fair share of that last night while he’d tossed and turned restlessly on the old couch and again this morning in the shower, where he’d taken matters into his own hands to try to alleviate some of the discomfort he found himself experiencing more and more each time he saw Jessie. He was scared that, now that they lived together, they would have to change his nickname at the gym from “Playboy” to “Blue Balls.”
Zach fisted his hands at his sides and tried to calm the arousal that was now pulsing through his body as if he’d tied off his arm and shot the stuff directly into his vein. At least this was what he’d imagined drugs or steroids hitting your system like that would feel like. He’d never messed with anything stronger than weed, and that was before he started boxing.
Zach had always appreciated women. Loved them, really. Even as a kid, he had never bought into the ‘girls have cooties’ club. He’d always been attracted to the opposite sex.
One of Zach’s earliest memories of his interactions with the opposite sex was getting in trouble in kindergarten for running his hands through Missy Chandler’s long, golden-blond hair under the slide during recess. Missy hadn’t complained, but some of the other kids had told the yard duty, and he’d had to sit inside during recess for a week. It had been worth it though, because when he’d been allowed to go back out on the playground, the first thing Missy did was walk up to him and plant a kiss right on his mouth. His first kiss.
Thinking about his first kiss made his eyes automatically focus on Jessie’s pink, full lips, which were so close that he could feel the heat of her breath through the thin cotton of his t-shirt. Her pink tongue appeared between her luscious lips for a moment as she moistened her mouth, and then it disappeared again. A groan rumbled from deep in his chest.
Just like Zach had never been jealous of a straw before he watched Jessie suck from one, he’d also never experienced tongue envy before. But that was exactly what he was feeling right now. His mouth watered with desire to lick a path along Jessie’s now glistening, juicy lips.
“What I meant before was that you can leave the house now if you want. Until I get rid of my family. Usually, I am an excellent communicator. I mean, in the sense that I can clearly communicate what I want to. Not that I communicate all that often. I don’t. Well, around you I do, but not well. You seem to have caused a short circuit between my brain and my mouth.”
Once again, she stopped talking abruptly and squeezed her lips together like she’d just bitten down on a sour lemon.
“Why do you keep doing that?” Zach asked.
Jessie’s eyes widened. “Doing what?”
“You talk really fast and then you stop and do this.” Zach demonstrated her sour-lemon lips, and she did not seem impressed.
“I do not.” A disconcerted expression appeared on Jessie’s face for just a beat. Then she shook her head slightly. “Anyway, I should have them gone in a few hours so—”
“I’m not leaving,” Zach said, interrupting. From the look on her face and what he was feeling, it seemed he’d shocked both of them equally.
His plan today had been to go to the gym for a six-hour workout and then head over to see his mom. Again, the words had slipped by him while whichever brain cell should have been manning the ‘don’t say anything stupid’ tower was obviously not doing its job. “I’m going to the gym a little later and then I’m going to see my mom, but I’ll be here for a few hours.”
Right now, spending the morning getting to know Jessie’s family sounded like more fun than he’d had since he’d taken the splinter out of Jessie’s hand last week, and before that, he couldn’t remember.
“Oh, okay.” Jessie nodded with a completely blank, unreadable expression on her face.
Zach couldn’t tell if she wanted to say more but was just picking her battles or if she’d really been fine with the fact that he wasn’t going anywhere. Either way, he was getting the hell out of there before she came up with another argument or he stripped her out of his t-shirt, tossed her on his bed, and made sweet love to her while her family ate breakfast downstairs.
Scooting around her, he slipped out the door while she stayed staring at the place that he had just vacated.
So many thoughts were filling his mind that he could hardly think straight as he headed back downstairs. If he could barely control himself when they were only semi-alone with a house full of people downstairs, how in the hell did he think he’d be able to do it day in and day out when they were truly alone?
Zach heard Margie’s voice coming from the kitchen as he hit the bottom step. “So don’t you just think that those kids make the cutest couple?”
He froze.
What the hell is she doing here?
Oh shit. He didn’t think that Jessie’s cousins and future brother-in-law knew about their fake arrangement. They seemed like cool-enough guys when he’d just been Jessie’s new roommate, but he didn’t think that they would appreciate the fact that he was pretending to be her live-in boyfriend.
“Yes. They do,” he heard one of her sisters or cousins-in-law say. He’d met so many people today that the only one he knew for sure was Joey. The kid.
Fuck. He needed to go in there and do damage control. He just hoped he wasn’t too late.
As he stepped back into the kitchen, he saw that both Margie and Mabel were there dressed in their signature velour track suits. Today, Margie’s was green and Mabel’s was orange.
“Good morning, Margie, Mabel. I wasn’t expecting to see you two this morning,” Zach remarked casually. He hoped it had been casual anyway. One thing he knew for sure—it was a lot better than what he’d really wanted to say, which was, ‘What in the hell are you two doing here?’
“We brought donuts,” they sings
onged in unison as they both pointed to the pink cardboard box filled with what looked like two dozen donuts. Joey was sitting on the counter beside it, and from the looks of the powder residue and red jelly lining his mouth, he’d already had one.
“And you’ll be seeing a lot of us,” Mabel said as she came over and gave him a quick hug.
Ever since the morning that he’d signed the lease, the women had been “getting some sugar” and hugging him every opportunity they’d had. Yesterday, when he’d met the cable guy here, they’d stopped by with a repairman to fix some piping that ran to the washer in the basement. The sisters had only been there a few minutes, but Mabel must have hugged him at least ten times, Margie at least five.
After she patted his back twice and released him from the bear hug, her blue eyes sparkled as a cheery smile pushed her rounded cheeks. “You’ll be seeing us a lot of us because…” Holding her hands out like she was saying, Ta-da, she announced, “We live right upstairs.”
What the fuck?
“What?” he heard Jessie’s voice squeak from behind him.
Uh oh.
Chapter Eight
“Okay, show of hands. I know we are all madly in love with our men, but who here has a small crush on Mr. Zach Courtland?” Krista asked as she raised her hand high above her head.
Jessie walked out of her bathroom, where she was finishing unpacking all of her toiletries, and found that Jason’s wife Katie, Riley’s wife Chelle, and Alex’s wife Jamie all had their hands up as well. The lone holdouts in the group of girls were herself and her oldest sister Haley.
“Really, Hales?” Krista asked suspiciously. “The man does nothing for you?”
“No comment,” Haley responded as she sat on Jessie’s bed and folded clothes.
Chelle and Jamie smiled as they turned back to finish hanging the last of Jessie’s artwork.
Katie, who was folding clothes on the bed with Haley, said, “In my experience, and I think the PR queen can back me up on this, ‘no comment’ means that it’s true.”
Haley playfully threw a sock at their cousin-in-law.
Actually Love - Jessie & Zach (The Crossroads Series) Page 8
