Love, Tussles, and Takedowns (Cactus Creek #3)(9)

“Of course, I did.”

She looked around as if she could smell something suspicious in the air. “Did my brothers find you here?”

“Of course, they did.”

With a tired sigh, she surmised, “Let me guess, Caine took a photo of your driver’s license, while one brother borrowed your phone for a minute, and the other just glared at you in silence.”

The woman knew her brothers well. “Don’t forget the part about Caine getting a text message from your friend Dani to let me pass go.”

Lia’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, that one’s new.”

“Really? Because it kind of sounds like it’s her thing to meddle.”

“Oh, it is. But she’s never tried to meddle into my life before. Weird.”

Huh. Clearly, he’d managed to upset the balance of her world order.

Well now they were even.

“That could have something to do with my calling Luke’s phone earlier today…in search of you.”

Her smile was radiantly pleased, and then just plain amused. “You have no idea what you just got yourself into.”

Tell him about it.

He cupped her cheek gently. “I have a feeling you’re worth it.”

She gazed into his eyes and asked softly, “Do you want to go back to my place?”

“Are you just trying to get a rise out of your brothers?” he asked, and then smiled. “Because that’d be okay with me. But that will only be okay with me until we get to your apartment. Your brother is right, you’ve been drinking and you have more pain hidden in you than I think even this whole town realizes, as protective as they are.”

Her brows shot up in surprise.

“And while I’m not drunk, sweetheart, around you I may as well be. So I can be whatever guy you need me to be tonight…except for the one you regret tomorrow morning.”

When she peered up into his eyes, he was surprised to find she looked almost sober.

“Hudson, I may have had a few extra drinks tonight—it’s the one day a year I do—but I’ve never, not once, asked a guy to come home with me until you. And it’s not because of the town’s meddling, or my brothers’ threatening any male within a 10-yard perimeter around me. It’s because I’m a twenty-seven year old virgin widow whose work is her life. And if you have breakfast with me in the morning, I will tell you the whole story. But as far as tonight goes, to be clear, I wasn’t inviting you back to my place for sex.”

He processed the bomb she’d just dropped, and watched her hooded eyes betraying the bravado in her words for a moment before he replied, “Do you have cable? Or at least a DVD player? Because the mobile home my company booked for me for the next few months doesn’t have either. And for some reason, I’m really in the mood to watch some old kung-fu movies tonight, maybe with some really good coffee.”

With that, he caught her hand in his and led them off the side entrance steps and onto the walkway to the parking lot. The woman didn’t have a good poker face. When her expressive eyes flipped from startled to wildly curious, he grinned. “You’re not the only one that can be cryptic and mysterious until morning.”





CHAPTER THREE


HUDSON SHOVED THE throw pillows from the couch up against his ears, flipping over onto his belly to grind the unmistakable evidence of the last four hours of torture down into the sofa cushions.

All because Lia’s apartment had paper-thin walls.

And she was one noisy little sleeper.

Not because she snored or anything remotely humane like that. No, because she moaned, sighed, purred even, and made every other imaginable sound a woman could make when she was having sex dreams about a man. And not just any man. Him. Lia had whispered his name a few times throughout the night, once with a sexy little plea that he knew he’d be getting sainthood points for doing absolutely nothing about.

Truth be told, he could’ve left sometime in the night after she’d fallen asleep on his shoulder during their TV marathon. But he’d wanted to stay close. Keep an eye on her. So after tucking her in, he voluntarily subjected himself to a hard-on that lasted well over the four hours those commercials cautioned men about.

At one point in the night—how, he still had no idea—he eventually passed out from exhaustion for a bit. It was his own damn pre-dawn inner clock that had woken him up.

But it was his sheer proximity to Lia that had kept him up since.

It was still pretty dark out but Hudson noticed that Lia’s breathing had changed slightly over the last ten minutes. She sounded like she was starting to wake up.

Thank God.

He wasn’t sure how much more he could take without going over there and waking her up himself. In about a hundred different ways he’d been fantasizing about all night.

The reminder made him sit and grab the quilted blanket slung over the arm of the sofa when the throw pillows he piled on his lap just made it look like he was building a festive, tassel-fringed teepee over his morning wood. He imagined Lia would be surprised enough to see he’d crashed on her couch last night; she didn’t need to see he pitched a tent out here as well.

Just when he thought he finally had a handle on the situation—pun definitely not intended—he practically went slack-jawed when he heard a soft vibrating hum echo out of her bedroom, through the surely-not-up-to-code sound-un-proof walls and the why-did-I-leave-it-open door.