The Austen Playbook (London Celebrities #4)(34)

“And?”

“And she was doing a decent job in a sea of general shite.”

“Anything to add to that?”

“Steve Lemmon has done the seemingly impossible and made Lydia Bennet an even more irritating character than the original.” Griff tucked the papers under his arm. Charlie was grinning at him. “Mind your own business.”

“It’s so weird. I wouldn’t have picked it in a million years. She’s such a sunny wee rocket, and you’re such a bad-tempered bastard most of the time. I’d have thought you’d want to strangle her.”

He did. He also wanted his hands sliding along her skin, and her irrepressible smile against his cheek, and her insane hair on his pillow. His fingers curled into a fist.

“Well,” Charlie murmured, “when you retreat to your lair and start giving her the freeze-out, let me know, will you? I do a good shoulder to cry on, and I think she’s a love. And she does have a very nice arse. It’s so...round.”

His little brother had been trying to push him into losing his cool from the moment he’d learned to walk, talk, and get in Griff’s way.

For the first time in the twenty-six years since Charlie had yelled his way into the world, it worked.

When Griff turned abruptly, Charlie actually took a step back and raised his hands. “Hey. I was kidding. Mostly.” The humour faded from his countenance. “Really not just a quickie snog in the back room, then. Jesus. Are you actually—”

“I don’t know.” Which really encompassed his feelings about the entire situation. Griff cleared his face of expression. He wasn’t sure what he’d just presented to Charlie, but suspected it fell under the heading of homicidal.

He didn’t know what she was doing to him. The physical attraction had hit him hard and early, but it was the rest that was sinking into him, changing the rules of the game.

With every nonscripted word Freddy spoke, every spontaneous move she made, she became a real person, not the half-fictional character that all human beings were to most of the world around them. He crossed paths with people every day, he worked with them, occasionally he was physically intimate with them, but in almost every case, they were and would always be a construct. Comprised of the front they put on, the curated side of themselves that they allowed to be seen in public, and his own projection and judgment, what he expected them to be and therefore what he saw. There were few people he would ever really know, see as they were and not through a hundred different filters of perception.

When he touched Freddy, when he looked into her eyes, he felt as if he was starting to see her. It was sexual, it was physical, but it was also the tentative stirring of a connection that he couldn’t explain, couldn’t put into words even in his own mind.

It was just there. And while part of him wanted to push it aside, reject the unknown, a bigger part of him felt instinctively protective. Wanted to uncover it, shelter it, lay bare the big mystery.

As Freddy had pointed out, he was a researcher by nature.

Charlie shook his head. “You really fancy her.”

“Yeah,” Griff said wryly, in the biggest understatement of his life. “I really fancy her.”

When he walked around to where he’d parked his car on the rear sweep of driveway, he wasn’t surprised to find her there. She seemed to be everywhere, either in body or flitting about his mind when he was trying to clear through the backlog of work.

What he wasn’t expecting was to find her halfway up a tree.

“What the hell are you doing?” He unlocked the car, dropped his things on the backseat, and went to the base of the trunk, automatically examining the branch she was standing on, to make sure she wasn’t about to make a more violent descent than intended. It seemed solid enough. Her skirt had risen high on her soft, curvy thighs, revealing a flash of lace, and a man with better manners might have averted his eyes.

“The wind earlier.” Her voice came through a thick sheaf of leaves. From the neck up, she was hidden in foliage. “It blew my empty crisps bag up here.”

“You decided to shin up a tree like Jack and his beanstalk because of a crisps packet?” Griff grabbed her ankle to steady her when her trainer slipped on a patch of moss. “You’ve got stitches in your leg, for God’s sake. And half of these trees wouldn’t even bear the weight of a cat.” He didn’t bother to keep the bite from his voice. It was exactly the sort of irrational behaviour his parents and Charlie would accept without question.

The universe seemed determined to surround him with people who could go off half-cocked at any moment, with zero warning. Trying to anticipate and thwart their impending disasters took a lot of energy he didn’t have to spare.

“Well, I couldn’t leave it up there. That’s littering.” Thanks to Freddy’s tone, he somehow ended up feeling reprimanded, as if he’d just advocated in favour of dumping toxic waste. “My leg’s fine,” she said. “It’s itchy so it must be healing. And your family might let you talk them like you’re Mr. Brocklehurst, but I won’t. You can be as rude to me as you like in print, but I’m not into it off the clock. Knock it off.”

After some quiet scrabbling and rustling above his head, she dropped back to solid ground and turned. He was standing close enough to catch her if she slipped, and she ended up pressed lightly against his body. His hands seemed to move naturally to the curves of her hips. Her skin was warm though the thin fabric of her dress, the material sticking to her in the heat.