Love, Tussles, and Takedowns (Cactus Creek #3)(20)

“I lied,” he admitted gruffly, the sound of her voice already easing the pain in his hand. How did she do that? He could almost picture her cute pixie-like smile, and those deep, incredible catlike eyes of hers—the way they sparked with a delicately witty humor and razor sharp intelligence, overflowed with unending empathy and yes, at times, pain.

Even in his memories, she took his breath away.

“Hudson?”

“Yeah.”

Pause.

“So you did do a little recon on me,” came the lightly playful reply.

“I’d hardly call it recon, sweetheart. You leave your number on the bottom of your shop’s ‘closed’ sign.” The reminder of that filled him with the same protective worry he’d had this morning when he first saw it. “That’s just a big ass blinking welcome sign for every psycho stalker out there.”

“Clearly,” she deadpanned.

“I’m not kidding, Lia. It’s not safe. At least consider getting a second number.”

“This is my second number.”

Well then. Geez, how the woman managed to ground him one minute and tie him up in tangled fishing knots the next was beyond him.

“My brothers did their little magic to make sure my phone was unstalkable.”

That only made him feel marginally better. Because when it came down to it, unstalkable or not, he just didn’t want strange men calling her, especially not ones who knew she lived right around the corner in an isolated studio apartment above a brewery with a hoppable gate and lots of dark alleyways.

Okay, okay. He just didn’t want other men calling her, period.

Cave man, party of one?

Funny thing was that he’d never been like this before.

Just imagining another man with Lia had his hands fisting in reflex; imagining one breaking into her apartment and hurting her? That made him…rabid.

“Well, you certainly have the stalker breathing thing down pat,” she commented, a teasing smile curling around her words.

He grinned. “And still you haven’t hung up on me.”

“It’s been a slow day. And you have a nice voice as far as stalkers go.”

He heard a small shuffle on her end as her voice mellowed out mid-sentence.

“Did you just lie down? No wait, don’t answer that.”

She chuckled.

Yeah, she was definitely lying down now.

This really shouldn’t be that sexy.

“Why are you calling, Hudson.”

“Like I said, I lied.”

“When?”

“Earlier, when I said goodbye to you.”

Her silence was deafening over the phone line.

“Even though I spent the last three hours driving away from you, even though in a few months’ time, I’ll be living even farther away from you—my goodbye to you this morning was a lie I told myself I had to keep up when it was the furthest thing from the truth.”

“The truth being…”

Damn, she wasn’t going to make this easy on him.

“The truth being that I don’t want to stop thinking about you. I don’t want to say goodbye. Not yet. Probably not ever. But for the time being, we’ll just work on, ‘not yet.’”

“So what are you suggesting? Us becoming pen pals?” Her smiling voice gently teased him over the phone line. “Facebook friends? Phone buddies? Skype partners? Wait, scratch that. I’m Skype-challenged. But I could get into Twitter if that’s your thing.”

He chuckled. “Why don’t we keep it simple. Phone buddies sounds good.”

“Done.” She paused again before asking suspiciously, “Wait, you’re not thinking we’re going to be the what-are-you-wearing-right-now kind of phone buddies are you? Because I have zero experience with that.”

He burst out laughing. “No, just plain old ‘how-was-your-day’ phone buddies. Not sure my patience and restraint could survive otherwise.”

“Okay.” Her voice smiled at him again. “So ‘how was your day,’ buddy?”

Some soft shuffling on her end turned into muzzlier breathing soon after.

“You falling asleep on me, honey?”

“Trying not to. But like I said, it’s been a long day.”

“You want to call it a night?”

“No, that’s okay,” she said, sounding like she was snuggling into a pillow. “I kind of want your voice to be the last one I hear tonight.”

Christ, the woman had no idea what she did to him.

“Lia?”

“Hmmm?”

“So what are you wearing?”

She chuckled sleepily. “Right now? A smile with your name on it.”

He groaned. She was way better at this sort of phone call than she thought.





CHAPTER SIX


THIS WAS OFFICIALLY the strangest friendship Lia had ever had.

And it was making her act strange, too.

Here she was, in the middle of a sparring workout at her favorite gym and her mind was miles away. Two hundred miles to be exact.

Yes, she’d googled it.

Despite Hudson’s crazy schedule working nearly around the clock rehearsing fight choreography, training cast members, and working set design and the prop crew, he barely had pockets of time to rest in between. But he always made sure to call her or at least text a few times a day. And in the hours in between, she thought about him constantly.