Five Ways to Fall (Ten Tiny Breaths, #4)(61)

I hear a “dumbass” slip out as Nate walks away, followed by that low chuckle of his.

“Your friend looks like he wants to kill you,” Reese, ever observant, says as we make our way to find a seat. I’m catching a lot of nods and smiles thrown my way from familiar faces. Pretty much the entire staff of Penny’s—anyone who knows Storm, anyway—is here.

“That’s why you’re here. To make sure he doesn’t.” She lets me entwine my fingers through her hand as I lead her toward the back right corner and into two available seats, as far away from Mercy as possible. “Remember that girl who came by my office?”

“The Twinkie?”

“Mercy, yeah. I need to keep things platonic between us and you are going to help me do that. But you can’t be mean to her, okay?”

“Moi?” Reese says with mock innocence, her free hand clutching her chest as she scans the crowd, quickly settling on the back of Mercy’s head.

“I’m serious, Reese. She’s a friend, but I think she may have gotten the wrong idea.”

Reese’s glare is full of suspicion as she asks dryly, “And why would she get the wrong idea, Ben?”

I give her a knowing look. “Kind of hard to say no to her when she’s throwing herself at me.”

Shaking her head, she mutters, “You don’t even try to hide what you are, do you?”

All I’ve got to answer that with is a shrug.

“I guess you did kind of save the day for me with my ex last week,” she says with a sigh, though clearly unimpressed.

“And you didn’t exactly hate it, did you,” I remind her with a smile. And she didn’t hate the afternoon at my mama’s, either.

“God, you are so damn cocky.” The tiniest smile softens her tone. With a heavy sigh, she reaches up to lay a hand on my cheek. She pulls my face closer, until I feel her hot breath against my ear. Her lip grazes my lobe as she asks in a low voice, “Is this amorous enough?”

“Uh . . .” I clear my throat as shivers run down my back. “Yeah, that’ll work.” To give me a raging hard-on before the bride even walks down the aisle. If the incident with Mrs. Cooke the other day tells me anything, it’s that I’m gonna regret asking Reese to do this by the end of the night. This girl enjoys torturing me.

Reaching up to finger a strand of hair at the nape of my neck, her mouth still against my ear, she laughs softly. “What would your mama say about all this?”

I curl my arm around her shoulder as Dan and Trent take their spots under the arch in tuxes. “She taught me to be nice to girls. She didn’t specify exactly how.” I think my mama has a pretty good idea how I do that.

Pulling away, Reese regards me with an unreadable expression.

I shrug. “What?”

“You’re a special breed, Benjamin Morris,” she finally answers, though that tells me nothing about what she’s really thinking.

But when I take a gamble and draw her close to lay a quick kiss on her lips, she doesn’t pull away. Or punch my junk. “The Twinkie’s not watching,” she confirms wryly, without even glancing to check.

“Really? How about now?” I don’t wait before I steal another kiss. Another one she doesn’t refuse.

Her eyes do narrow slightly, though, as I pull away.

She’s definitely gonna make me pay for this by the end of tonight.





Chapter 19




REESE





“I like your friends!” I holler, my shoes dangling from my fingertips as my naked toes relish the cool, wet sand along the beach.

“More than you like me?”

“Yeah, but that’s not hard.” I turn and begin walking backwards as I absorb Ben’s responding grin, perfectly visible in the light of the full moon. Maybe it’s the Jim Beam, but I’m finding it even more charming than usual tonight. In fact, the entire package—whore and all—has had me checking my hair in the mirror and sending little shocks of electricity through me the entire evening. Even with his shirt hanging out of his pants and his tie long since removed, the big jock looks sharp in a suit. I’m kind of glad he doesn’t wear one around the office all the time. It would be distracting.

“Is that so? Is that why you’ve been all over me tonight?” he asks, his brow raised as if he knows some little secret.

I can’t contain the bark of laughter. “What? You gave me a task and I like to overachieve.” It’s funny, when we first stepped around the corner and into a wedding scene, the only thing that stopped me from wrapping my hands around his neck and choking him was knowing my hands wouldn’t cover even half the span needed to succeed. But I quickly adapted to the situation and met a few of his friends—who I can tell I’d actually like.

Especially that redhead, Kacey, the maid of honor. She’s got a wicked sense of humor. She kept her promise, spending a good fifteen minutes scrolling through her phone to show me “the best of the best” from Ben’s farewell party. Which turned out to be the “worst of the worst.” There were a few she wouldn’t show me, though, and I’m thinking they involved the strippers. I guess she assumes that, as Ben’s date, seeing pictures of Ben getting molested by other women would bother me. When I accidently caught the one of the Twinkie straddling his lap and my stomach twisted uncomfortably, I thought I might agree with her.