America's Geekheart (Bro Code #2)(18)

No one speculating about where I came from or who my parents are.

I just might’ve pulled this off.

“You two were really cute on the video,” my best friend tells me, leaving no doubt where she falls on the scale. “I can totally see tons of people making the same mistake as everyone at the nature center this morning. Not that an underwear model could ever be another Trent Fornicus—I mean, they stuff the briefs before they shoot the pictures, right?—but it’s your fifteen minutes of fame and you’re using it to save the giraffes.”

That’s it.

That’s my opening.

I suck in a deep breath to tell her, but she impulsively hugs me. “Seriously, I’m so proud of you. Where’s your jersey? The game’s on in ten minutes.”

And the moment is gone.

I change, pop popcorn, use some of my mom’s old meditation techniques to forget Mackenzie brought up Trent and to clear my mind enough to focus on how I’m going to tell her I’ve basically been lying to her for almost a decade, and we’ve just turned the TV on when she leaps to her feet and dashes to the kitchen.

“Wha—” I start, but then I hear voices at the back door.

Now familiar voices.

“Hey. Am I late?”

“No! Come in! Come in! Wait. What’s that? We don’t eat cotton candy during baseball games. It’s bad luck. Throw it away. But is that Fletchers caramel corn? Oooh, we haven’t tried that yet.”

Meda’s once again sitting on the top of the recliner. She gives me the seriously, the underwear model again? stare, and her blue eye looks a little more irritated than her amber eye, which makes me wonder if she, too, is having conflicting thoughts about him.

I shrug and ignore the little blip in my pulse.

He’s not here for me.

He’s here because it looks good.

Except…why come in the back door if that’s the case? Isn’t the point to get caught coming to see me?

Mackenzie shoves him into the living room. “Sarah! Look who wants to watch the game with us.”

He smiles a self-deprecating smile that exudes sexual masculinity and the suggestion that he knows what to do with his equipment, which I also know is most likely a Hollywood lie, or if not, I can at least take comfort in that old rumor so I don’t feel like I might be missing out on something.

“Gotta go with what works to keep the team winning,” he tells me.

“That’s your line?” I ask.

“You remember that year they went to the World Series?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Sarah grew up in Oregon,” Mackenzie says, and I wince, which she doesn’t notice at all. “I converted her.”

“Oregon, huh?”’

Oregon, Los Angeles, it’s all the same. Except not really, but for my purposes, it counts.

Until today.

I really, really need to tell her. But not with Beck here. “Mm-hmm.”

He grins, because that’s apparently all he ever does. “Portland’s awesome.”

“Mm,” I agree again. “Game’s starting.”

Mackenzie shoos me over so Beck can sit in the same seat he was in last night, which puts his long frame right up next to my padded hips.

He smells like bergamot and fresh cut grass today, and he’s sporting thicker scruff than he had last night. If he slept as poorly as I did, you can’t tell by looking at him.

He pops the lid on the popcorn tin and angles it toward me. “For luck?”

Of course he got the kind with caramel and cheese corn mixed together. That’s my favorite.

“Where’s Charlie?” I ask while I help myself, because it’s not weird to be sitting here with an underwear model who insulted me on Twitter two nights ago, let me taser him yesterday morning and then came back for an apology video last night, and randomly showed up for good luck for our favorite baseball team today.

And by it’s not weird, I definitely mean a wormhole opened in my living room.

I wonder if he’s irritated by loud chewers, because I don’t think I can chew popcorn quietly, and it’s going to be crunching in his ear, and that has to be the least attractive sound in the universe.

Not that I care if I’m attractive to him.

Just like maybe he’s a loud chewer and that’ll be perfect because I’m not attracted to him at all.

Or curious about why he’s really here.

“Charlie’s on a conference call with my management team,” he tells me.

“So you escaped?”

“Actually, they chased me off so I didn’t fuck anything up.”

“How’d Mackenzie know you were coming?”

“Psychic powers.” He grins at me, and I swear that makes thirty-two panty-melting grins in four minutes, and the real dig is that I’m wearing RYDE panties, because they are so damn comfortable that I couldn’t bring myself to burn them with the decreasing number of women posting videos on Twitter of themselves doing just that to stand with me in solidarity.

I’m betraying my biggest supporters.

But it’s not like burning my panties takes any dollar bills out of his bank account. I already bought them. I won’t buy more.

“Yes! That’s how you start a game!” Mackenzie pumps a fist in the air. The Fireballs just led off with a single.