Ready or Not (Ready #4)(8)

“Ew-uh…come on! I’m, like, right here!” I begged as a growl echoed through the phone.

Seriously? A growl?

“Down, boy.” She laughed. “Let me talk to Liv. I’ll be off the phone in a few minutes, Garrett!”

“Five minutes.”

Those two words were so heated that I almost had to fan myself.

Lucky bitch.

“Okay, and then I’m all yours,” Mia finally said breathlessly.

I laughed. “You called me, remember?”

“What? Oh, right! The hot dad!”

“Yeah. What about him?” I said, playing it off with a bit of nonchalance.

“What about him? He was gorgeous, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off of you.”

Really?

“He was probably staring at me like a person would look at a rare bird in the zoo. I was just something exotic and different.”

“There was that definitely. I’m used to seeing people look at you in that way, but no, this was different. He was into you—or at least, he was attracted to you.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” I asked.

“No, absolutely not. You can be attracted to someone but not be into that person. The sexy celebrity on the cover of this weeks’ People Magazine? Yeah, he’s attractive, but I’m not into him.”

Note to self: Go back to store and buy People Magazine.

I found myself nodding even though she wasn’t around to see it. “Okay, I get that. But none of this matters. I don’t date my clients.”

“Most of your clients are under the age of eighteen,” she scoffed.

“You know what I mean—no entanglements. It’s unethical.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she answered. “But you have to agree, he was hot.”

A wicked grin escaped my lips. “He was the sexiest damn thing to ever walk through my door,” I admitted.

“Good. Well, at least he’ll make good eye-candy for a while.”

Other than a noncommittal, “Mmm,” I didn’t answer.

Mia had signed a nondisclosure to work in my office. She understood that what happened in my office stayed there, but I would still make sure to keep all my clients’ personal business to myself. Whether or not Jackson and Noah would come back to me was up in the air, but explaining that to Mia would require giving her more information on Noah than I was willing to divulge.

“Hey, you never told me about your new neighbors,” she said, obviously catching on to my silence.

“There’s not much to tell. I haven’t met them yet. But I plan to—soon.”

“That sounds ominous.”

I huffed out a frustrated breath. “They destroyed Mrs. Reid’s flower garden between our houses.”

“The one you’ve been maintaining for her?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s awful. Who would be so careless? What are you going to do?”

“Put my groceries away. Have a relaxing nice dinner, and then I’m going to march over there and introduce myself to the smoldering *.”

“Smoldering?” she questioned.

“Never mind.”

~Jackson~

I was never going to move again—ever.

I’d die old and fat in this little old house with that creepy toilet themed wallpaper, and shag carpet. My ass was never leaving.

How did two people accumulate so much shit?

Just when I’d thought I cleared through a decent amount of boxes, I’d turn around to find more waiting for me. Were they multiplying?

“Hey, Noah! You want to offer a hand here, kid?” I hollered up the stairs as I arched and stretched my sore, stiff back.

There was no answer.

“Noah!”

“What?” he yelled back.

This was what life had become in our house—screaming between floors.

“Come down and help unpack some of these boxes!”

He miraculously appeared at the top of the stairs with his phone in hand. “Do I have to?”

“No, it was just a suggestion. Carry on,” I remarked sarcastically.

He rolled his eyes and trotted down the stairs.

“Do me a favor, and put the phone away for ten minutes. Do you think you could manage that?”

“Yeah, okay,” he answered as he swung his dark blond hair out of his eyes.

“So, how was your meeting with Miss Prescott?” I asked as I cut open another box labeled Living Room.

“It was okay.” He sat down next to me and started shuffling through a box.

Kids are so descriptive.

“Okay? Just okay? You nearly bounced out of there like you’d just visited an Xbox convention.”

“She’s just fun to hang out with. She’s easy to talk to I guess.”

“Well, what kinds of things did she talk to you about?” I pressed, pulling a few knickknacks out of tissue paper and placing them on the mantel.

“I don’t know. Stuff.”

“Like?”

“Like, just stuff, Dad, okay?” He popped up to a standing position, shoving his palms in his pockets.

I held my hands up, waving my white flag, as I tried to calm him. “Okay, no more questions. Sorry.”