LOL: Laugh Out Loud (After Oscar, #2)(13)
“Why does it matter what kind of horse it is…? … how many hands? She doesn’t have hands. She’s a horse. She has paws, or whatever. Hooves.”
I glanced around the doorframe. Roman paced the length of the kitchen, waving a hand as he talked. “No… I don’t know… listen, let me let you talk to the horse’s owner. He’s busy right now, but…”
I decided to save the poor man.
“I’m here,” I said, wandering into the kitchen as confidently as possible like I’d meant to only be wearing a towel. I wasn’t intimidated by this movie star seeing my little scrawny body at all. Not one single bit. It didn’t matter. At all.
The moment he saw me, Roman’s eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped for a split second before he shook his head. He glanced away, then back at me, then away again. “Hi. Oh… hi. You’re… here. With a towel. On. With a towel on.”
I raised a brow and smirked at him. “Did you want me to talk to the person on the phone?”
He looked at me blankly. “What person?”
I gestured to the phone. “I thought maybe you were talking to someone on the phone. Perhaps I was mistaken, my bad.” I turned to walk out of the room.
“Oh! Yes. The person on the phone. Here.” He thrust the phone toward me without an explanation.
“I assume it’s about Nugget?” I asked with a grin. “You were saying something about a horse?”
“Yeah. You need to talk to a man about a horse. Wait. The man about the horse. Yeah.”
Roman bit his lip as if to stop himself from blurting out more nonsense. It made him fucking adorable as hell, which was not something I needed to notice. He was already hot enough without being cute on top of it. I needed to remember he was an ass. A job-ruining ass of the highest order.
Even asses needed a good fuck…
I took the phone and turned away, wiggling my hips to calm my excited dick down. “This is Scotty,” I said, trying to ignore the faint trace of Roman’s aftershave on the phone.
The man on the other end asked me a bunch of questions related to transporting Nugget to a barn in Vermont. When I realized just how far away she would be from me, I asked the man to hold for a moment.
“Vermont?” I hissed, spinning to face Roman. “There are stables in New Jersey for god’s sake.”
Roman held up his hands. “Calm down. The barn is at the farm where I’ll be staying for the next few weeks. I figure Nugget would be better there since I’ll be able to keep an eye on her myself.”
A small part of me swooned at the fact that Roman cared enough about Nugget to want to keep an eye on her rather than ship her off to some random stable. But the rest of me was pretty ticked off about him taking my horse so far away.
“And what about me?” I asked. “I’m just supposed to trust you? I’m supposed to let you take my fucking horse and, what? Hope I’ll hear from you someday?”
“I’m going to give you money to help tide you over,” he said calmly. “But first we need to get Nugget out of my house. This is the best solution I’ve found, and it’s the one I’m offering. If you have a better one, I’m willing to listen.”
“Yeah, how about a barn somewhere closer?” I knew beggars couldn’t be choosers, but still. The thought of being that far away from Nugget made my heart hurt.
Roman’s expression was sympathetic. “I called every barn in an hour’s radius. None of them can stable a new horse right now. Not on such short notice.”
I pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead. He was right. There were no other options. I should be grateful Roman was willing to help at all. And that he would be there to check on Nugget personally would be a relief.
Then I remembered that Roman was the reason I was having to ship Nugget off in the first place. If it hadn’t been for his carriagejacking, I’d still have my job and Nugget would be tucked in her stall at the Clinton Park Stables.
But anger at Roman wasn’t going to solve this problem. I needed to be reasonable about the situation. At least five weeks on a farm in Vermont would satisfy the regulation for carriage horses’ annual vacations. And it wouldn’t cost me a thing.
“Fine,” I sighed before turning back to the man on the phone and finishing the arrangements.
While I wrapped things up on the call, I studied Roman from the corner of my eye. His gaze meandered over my bare skin like a curious and arousing fingertip. His cheeks flushed and after a minute, he shifted in his seat like he was rearranging something annoying in his pants.
Hm. Interesting. After hanging up, I decided to test the waters a little bit with a surreptitious butt wiggle as I sauntered toward the stairs. I felt the towel slip lower around my hips as I moved and wondered how well the twist would hold together. When I got downstairs, instead of slipping immediately into the clean clothes, I readjusted the towel lower, even allowing some of the blond curls at the base of my happy trail to show above the edge of the cotton. Then I sauntered back up the stairs and past the kitchen door.
A plate crashed to the floor and a muttered curse rang out, but he didn’t come after me or say another word. I made it back to the bedroom unscathed and changed into my last clean clothes. I tried not to be too disappointed by that fact.
Two hours later I was footloose and fancy-free, meandering down Broadway with a fat stack of cash in my backpack and a spring in my step. Just that morning I’d been facing the very real prospect of losing my horse and my best friend for good, and now I’d not only found a place for her to stay, I had enough money to tide me over while I searched for a new job. For the first time in two weeks, I felt optimistic about the future.