Mister O(9)

Now, there’s a helluva hot image.

Ah, f*ck.

Bad idea to speculate on her auto-repair skills, because as she struts toward me, I’m mentally drawing a picture of Harper as a hot redheaded mechanic wearing Daisy Dukes and a wife-beater tank stretched over her chest, sexy streaks of grease on her legs. I don’t know why, but women are required to wear Daisy Dukes in any chick-auto-mechanic fantasies. It’s part of the guy rule book, and you cannot deviate from it. Not that I’d want to. It exists for a reason—it’s hot as sin.

“Did you see that?” she asks, beaming as she throws her arms around me to celebrate, and I swat away my out-of-nowhere fantasy so that it’s not completely obvious that I’m getting a hard-on for her right now. But really, she’d look so f*cking good working on my engine.

The ironic thing is I don’t even have a car.

“You didn’t tell me you bowled a three hundred,” I whisper out of the side of my mouth as I reciprocate, wrapping her in my arms, too. Because . . . well, she started it, and she feels fantastic all snug against me like this.

“Nah, I’m not that good,” she says as we separate, snuffing that short-lived moment.

I give her a side-eye stare as she peers into the machine that chugs and cranks up bowling balls from the lanes. “That was your second strike of the night,” I remind her. “You’re a ringer. You kept that little fact to yourself.”

She shrugs playfully. “A girl’s gotta have some secrets.”

And, hell, do I want to know hers.

“That may be true,” I say, then lower my voice even more, though it would be hard for anyone to hear a word above the Go-Go’s tune that’s blasting on the bowling alley’s sound system. “But if you keep killing it, I might as well be a dead man in negotiations.”

She claps her hand over her mouth. “Oh, shoot,” she whispers through her fingers. “Are we that close to winning? I’ve been so busy being your Velcro I nearly forgot.”

She raises her eyes the slightest bit to a tiny brunette parked next to Gino. Her name is Franci. She works in promotions, and she’s wearing a crotch-length skirt, as she usually does. When I first arrived tonight, she sauntered over to me, then quickly turned the other way when she spotted Harper by my side. Now, she’s making the moves on Gino, which is perfect, since he’ll think he beat me in that regard, too. But little does he know I’m having the last laugh. A few months ago, Franci tried to find me on Tinder. Turns out she found my brother Wyatt instead, since I’m not on Tinder. Wyatt’s a carpenter turned big-time contractor, with a business that’s growing like crazy, and apparently she was quite pleased with his tools. Or so he told me. I told him that was TMI, but TMI pretty much describes my brother.

As the machine spits up the ball, I grab it for Harper, bring it to my chest, and wrap my hands around it. I drop my voice. “I hate to ask, but I need you to throw the next frame.”

Her shoulders sag. “Really?”

“He’s going to go crazy if we crush him. He wants his team to win and raise the most money for charity. He wants his picture to be the one they send to all the trade mags.”

She sighs heavily. “Throw it like the 1919 World Series?”

I nod. “Do it just like the White Sox did.”

She frowns. “This pains me.”

“I know. But drinks for life . . . and cake for life, too, ’kay?”

She nods resolutely and reaches for the ball in my arms. For the briefest of moments, her fingers graze the fabric of my shirt, a casual button-down that’s untucked and rolled up at the cuffs. Maybe I’m imagining things, but it feels like her fingers linger on my pecs longer than they need to.

I do what any sane man would do—clutch the ball tighter so she’ll have to move in closer. She does, and yes, her fingertips are definitely touching me.

Good thing I can hold this ball for a very long time. All night long, if I’m lucky.

“Nick,” she whispers in a plea, and it sounds so damn good, the way her voice goes feathery when she says my name. Instantly I hear that inflection, and all that follows it, in my imagination—more, harder, please, now, yes, yes, yes. “May I have the ball, please? It’s the only way I can f*ck up the next turn.”

I blink and hand it over to her.

I lean against the ball machine and watch as she heads to her spot, brings the ball to her chest, and pistons her arm behind her. She takes a few fast steps before releasing it. I tense because she looks just as polished as she did when she nailed that strike.

But the girl is good. Her arm swings the slightest bit wider, and the pink orb rolls straight for a second, then veers, and soon acquaints itself with the gutter.

I utter a silent yes, even though it’s a damn shame to ask her to blow the game. I have no doubt she’d rack up even more points, and look spectacular doing so. She is a sight to behold tonight, in her dark blue skinny jeans, a purple-and-green argyle sweater, and white-and-red bowling shoes. Her hair is pinned up in a twist, all those silky red strands piled high on her head. Her neck is long and elegant, and I’ve got this feeling her skin tastes spectacular there, and everywhere. I wonder if she’d enjoy soft, lingering kisses along her neck, across the column of her throat, up to her ear. Whether she’d moan, and sigh, and lean into me, her body asking for more.