LOL: Laugh Out Loud (After Oscar, #2)(31)

Half-asleep, he reached back and grabbed my wrist, dragging my arm across him, shivering when the cold of my chest pressed against his back. “Chilly,” he mumbled.

“Sorry,” I whispered into his hair.

“S’okay. I’ll warm you up.” He hooked a foot behind my calf, pulling me closer.

I fell asleep exactly where I wanted to be.





I knew it was a dream because there was an orange-feathered snake tickling my nose and giggling. And there was no such thing as a laughing orange-feathered snake in real life.

I sneezed and batted it away.

It came right back.

“Fuck off.”

“Mommy, the naked man said a bad word,” a little voice shouted in my ear.

My eyes shot open to see two huge brown eyes right in my face and a long feather dancing by my nose. “Holy god,” I cried, scrambling back. Where the hell was I?

“Aunt Goldie!” the little girl screamed. “He’s awake!”

In my haste to escape the child, I ran right over a dead body in my bed, further freaking me the hell out.

“What?” I tried in vain to figure out where I was and what was happening.

I sucked in a breath when I saw the dead body was a blond-haired man with very nice muscles lying underneath me.

“Oh god, wake up,” I begged, poking him and pushing him. “Don’t be dead, oh my god.”

He moaned and told me to stop.

Good, one dead man back alive. That was something at least.

My brain was so mixed up from the sudden wake-up, the strange location, the unknown child, and the—was that a car alarm going off?—that it took me a second before I remembered Scotty.

His eyes blinked up at me. “Why are you on my face?” he choked. “Can’t breathe.”

I moved to the far side of him and shoved him toward the kid, making sure the bedding stayed pulled up above our shoulders. Maybe he knew who it was. “We’re under some kind of attack.”

Both of us stared at the little girl. She was probably around six years old with a good four or five ponytails sticking out at all angles and enormous brown eyes blinking at us in curiosity.

Scotty stage-whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Do you think she’s the distraction while her accomplice steals the car?”

I wondered why I’d thought he was dead. “I think I watch too much Forensic Files,” I muttered.

“Relevance?” he said, poking my side. “Who is that?”

Why was he asking me? “How am I supposed to know? Maybe she stowed away in… oh I don’t know… a horse trailer?”

“That’s rude,” Scotty scoffed. “I thought we were past that.”

I grinned. “That’s not something you get past. It’s something you bring back up over and over because it’s flipping fantastic.”

“Mpfh.”

I leaned my chin on Scotty’s shoulder but didn’t get any closer to the girl. “Sweetie, where’s your mommy?”

Just then a wild-haired woman in denim overalls and neon green rainboots came tearing into the room. The moment she spied the little girl she came to a stop, fisting her hands on her hips. “There you are. I told you to leave him alone.”

“You said just the one, though,” the little girl said, pointing. “Technically I wasn’t breaking the rules.”

The woman looked up and realized there was more than one “him” here. “Oh Christ on a Christmas tree,” she muttered. “There’s two of ’em.”

“Ma’am,” I began, as politely as I could. “Would you be so kind as to—”

“We’re naked here,” Scotty said bluntly. “Unless you want to start her education young, maybe you could give us a minute to get some clothes on? That’d be super fantastic.”

The woman actually snorted. Which made her laugh, which only set her off more until she was full-on giggle-snorting as she led the girl from the room.

I heard her call out as she closed the door behind her, “Oh by the way, my jackass boyfriend just stole someone’s black SUV. Hope it wasn’t yours.”

I lay back and put my hands over my face, but Scotty pulled them off. Wrinkles of concern on his forehead warred with a smirk on his swollen lips.

“Your SUV?”

“Yep.”

“You have any idea who that was?”

“Nope.”





11





Scotty





Ten Tips For Hosting A Killer Brunch On Short Notice



After Roman and I quickly pulled on clothes and made our way downstairs, we—or at least I—were surprised to see more than just the woman and the little girl. Six people stood around the kitchen making merry with mimosas.

“You didn’t tell me it was a house party,” I said under my breath. Roman’s hand held mine in a vice grip for some reason, which surprised me since it was a kind of semi-public claiming I wouldn’t have expected from him.

“I didn’t know it was. I’m supposed to have the place to myself.”

That’s when they noticed us hovering in the doorway. A younger man in a pink polo with a popped collar and pastel madras pants looked up, and his eyes narrowed when they landed on Roman. “Do I know you? I swear you look familiar.”