Thick Love (Thin Love, #2)(41)
“Some things never change,” Dad said, stuffing trash into a bag when I headed back toward the kitchen.
“They were like this in college?”
He glanced at me, shaking his head. “They weren’t this bad in college.”
“Age gives you confidence, Hale,” Leann shouted.
My father loved bickering with Leann, said it was some residual throw back to their CPU days when Leann thought he wasn’t good enough for her sweet little cousin and Dad said and did shit just to piss her off. That certainly hadn’t changed in the years since then.
His laughter followed me into the kitchen, my arms weighed down with dirty champagne flutes, but then I caught sight of Aly and my mind went blank. She reached to the topmost cabinet with a cup in her hand, stretching, trying to get it onto the shelf. As she twisted up and lifted on the tip of her toes, that dress she wore caught on the countertop and rode up further than it should have, giving me a clear view of the curve of her naked ass.
It was firm, perfectly round and I tightened my grip on one of the flutes, hearing it splinter as Aly cursed low under her breath. Then it became apparent that my mind wasn’t the only thing I had no control over as my dick got twitchy the longer I stared at her.
Behind me, my father’s voice drifted, then completely stopped, but I didn’t hear him, was too caught by the sight of Aly’s bare, beautiful skin. My head moved forward and I nearly dropped the flutes when my father popped me in the back of the head, catching me in my creepy gawk and scaring the shit out of me.
Dad’s glare was enough to deflate my twitchy dick and I deposited the flutes in the sink, barely hearing my father offer to give Aly a hand.
Later Leann pulled Aly from the kitchen to dance with her, my parents laughing at them from the sofa and me staring from the open bar near the den. It made the memory of her bare ass and my knotted up emotions worse. I laughed right along with them at first as Leann moved her hips, tried like hell to match what we’d all seen in the Shakira video when she sang about her hips not lying, but she couldn’t quite manage that twist and shimmy. Aly could and set about showing my cousin how to move her hips in impossible angles.
“No, bend your knees more, cheri. Straighten one leg, then, boom…shimmy.”
Jesus did she. That short little dress moved, flashed against her thighs, perfect, smooth tawny skin teasing with every shake, but my eyes were transfixed, unmovable as Aly turned in a circle and her hips went up and down, up and down. Boom indeed. Boom went my heart as she moved, boom went that thud in my stomach, the one that told me I needed to get myself together and stop acting like a little punk about this girl.
She was hot. There, I admitted it, but that didn’t give me the right to stand around watching her like I couldn’t control myself.
Aly turned in a complete spin and those hips worked faster, the shimmy so mesmerizing my damn parents clapped and cheered her on. My eyes went a little dry because I didn’t blink, couldn’t.
Nope. I couldn’t control myself around her at all. So I disappeared to check on Koa as he slept, using the pretense of making sure the music hadn’t woken him to give me the space I clearly needed from Aly.
You’re so weak, that voice hummed and I swore it sounded smug.
“I damn well know it,” I said, brushing back the hair from my little brother’s face, wishing I could sleep as peacefully as he did.
Maybe it was all of that—me acting like a jealous * to my teammates, me drooling after Aly in the kitchen, seeing that evil seduction her hips worked in me while she danced—that all led to what happened next.
Maybe I was just a horny idiot incapable of any kind of self-control when I was around her.
Whatever it was, I somehow ended up leaving Koa’s room later than I’d wanted, finding the living room empty and Leann’s Cadillac missing from the driveway. I figured Aly had driven back to Metairie with her. Guessed that she thought I’d crashed and didn’t want to wake me before she left.
She’s not your girlfriend, dumbass. Why would she say goodbye?
“Damn,” I said to the empty room, leaning against the piano.
“Ransom?”
She stood in the kitchen doorway, her feet bare, wearing an old Kona Hale Fangirl t-shirt and a pair of sleep shorts I knew were my mom’s. “I thought you left,” I told her, feeling like an idiot for just gawking at her the way I did.
“Keira has an early doctor’s appointment in the morning. They’re worried about her feet swelling.” She walked toward me with her arms across her chest and that subtle brush of her hand up one arm had me realizing she wasn’t wearing a bra. “She asked me to stay the night since it was so late by the time we got everything cleaned up.”
Son of a bitch.
Nodding, I sat at the piano, trying like hell to block out the cluster of stupid that moved around my head. I wanted her to sit next to me. I wanted her to leave my house and never come back. I wanted to find out if she really went commando tonight or if she was wearing a thong.
I really wanted to not to care about any of that.
“You alright?” she asked me, coming closer toward the piano to rest her elbows against the lid. “You disappeared.”
My fingers went across the keys slowly as I played something soft. Rhiannon. A song Mom always sang with me when things got too much for me and I was too angry for anything to make sense. I wasn’t angry just then, but Aly being there, Aly just being Aly definitely had sense out of my reach.