Ready for You (Ready #3)(15)

What had I done to this man? Had I really thought this would be better? No answers, no closure had turned into just anger and lost hopes. I’d done this.

It was just another reason he deserved so much more.

After another few minutes, I heard his movements slow and return to a normal pace until he stopped altogether, and I heard him empty a bottle of water in a few chugs. The broom then began making slow, methodical sweeps across the room, and I figured it might be a safe time to enter.

All that double-time pace must have caused him to work up quite a sweat. When I came into my living room, I was faced with Garrett the God. Holy shit, that man should warn people before he takes his shirt off. There were a lot of new additions to the twenty-five-year-old Garrett, starting with a set of eight-pack abs and a chiseled chest that made me think dirty, dirty things. Garrett 2.0 also came with a few tattoos, which I usually wasn’t attracted to. But on him? Yum.

I realized about a half a second too late that I’d been caught in my oglefest, and I immediately turned away, trying to hide the blush spreading across my horrified face.

“Um…I can do the sweeping if you want to take a break,” I offered, still unable to turn toward him.

If I looked at him, I would be looking at all of him, and then we’d be back to where we were a few minutes earlier—me swimming in my own drool, thinking of all the various ways I could get him up to my bedroom and the many, many things I could do with him once we were there.

“All right,” he said, holding out the broom just inches from his glistening body.

The pads of my fingers grazed his stomach as I took the broom, and I was pretty sure I’d whimpered as that tiny part of my body came into contact with his. Up until that moment, I’d thought eight-packs were a myth, a legend told by magazine editors and sorority girls, but no, they were real. That eight-pack was no joke.

I felt his eyes on me as I finished sweeping up the mess he’d made, and then he quietly watched me as I bent down and picked up each and every nail that had been strewn around the room.

Sick of feeling like an animal in the zoo, I decided to end the silence. “I thought you worked, like, a billion hours a week? How have you managed to get so much time away from the office?”

He seemed a bit taken aback by my question, but he gave a hint of a smile. His eyes always crinkled in the corners when he smiled. It made him appear younger, more like the boy I remembered.

“Been talking to Leah about me?”

“I mean, she was talking about you. I didn’t ask,” I answered, basically repeating the words he’d said to me days earlier.

“Hmm…well, to answer your question, I don’t have to work a billion hours a week. I just choose to.”

“Why? Why would anyone want to work that much?” I asked.

His eyes flew to mine in a heated glare. “Some people enjoy what they do. Maybe I’m just driven.”

“What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m in pharmaceutical sales.”

“Oh, please!” I said, laughing, “That’s total bullshit! You? In sales? You have to hate it. The Garrett I knew would have cut off his left arm before taking a job like that.”

I could see by his expression that I’d hit home. His eyes lost focus, and he wouldn’t meet mine.

“Yeah, well…I guess we all change, don’t we? The girl I knew would have never become a tight-ass accountant, so I guess we didn’t know each other as well as we thought we did.”

“No, I guess not.”

The rest of the evening was spent in stifling silence as I tried to remember the boy I once knew. I wondered if I would ever understand the man who was standing before me.

Do I deserve to?

~Garrett~

“You look lovely, sweetie,” my mother said over my shoulder.

I gazed into the floor-length mirror wedged in the corner of my parents’ bedroom. I’d snuck in here a few minutes earlier to try and adjust the monstrosity of a bow tie that was currently choking the life out of my windpipes.

“I feel like a penguin,” I muttered. I readjusted the bow tie for the hundredth time.

“A very handsome penguin,” she amended.

She spun me around, which was not an easy task. I was only sixteen, but I was a football player, and I practiced every waking moment. I was a walking, talking muscle machine, not that I was bragging.

“Are you ready for tonight?” she asked.

“Mom, it’s just a dinner.” A dinner I had to wear a freaking tuxedo for.

“Garrett, Mia’s family is different from ours.”

“I know, Mom. They’re loaded,” I scoffed.

“It’s more than that. They think very highly of themselves and the people they associate with. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Mia would never hurt me,” I said adamantly.

“You really like this girl, don’t you?”

“I love her, Mom.”

Vibrations on the nightstand next to my bed tore me from my dream, bringing me back to reality. My eyes blinked open, and I groggily searched around in the dark for the source of what had awoken me. Palming my phone, I hit a button, hoping it would end the incessant buzzing.

Without bothering to see who the hell was calling me at this unholy hour, I said, “Hello?”