Loretta twisted her upper half, so she faced me. We were a scant few inches apart from one another. “What’s with all the phone calls?”
“Work stuff.” How did I explain to her that my notorious never-work-on-the-weekend assistant finally developed a work ethic and hadn’t stopped calling since I left for the trip?
“You promise?”
“Cross my heart,” I said moving my finger over my chest in the shape of a cross.
She nodded. “Good, because I would be pissed if I found out you had a wife.”
“Understood.” Her possessiveness filled me with more joy than I wanted to admit. She was such a tiny thing and much too young for me, but being around Loretta brought a spark to my life—something I hadn’t had in years. Possibly forever. She made me alive.
“You want to make out?” she asked out of the blue. Right when I thought I’d gotten a leg up in our relationship she caught me off guard with something new.
But only a dumbass would pass up the opportunity to have her lips on me again. “I thought you’d never ask.”
6
Iwas in deep shit.
The deepest of shit. Somehow out in Bear Creek, Colorado, I lost my way and ended up on a pig farm with poop up to my knees. My knowledge of pig fecal matter was severely lacking, as in nonexistent, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out if I kept going, I’d be up to my eyeballs in it.
And the worst part was that I didn’t even care. I wallowed in the stuff like I had a swimming pool full of it and saw only crystal-clear water instead of brown sludge. My mind maintained enough facilities to realize what we were doing was wrong, but I didn’t care enough to stop. I’d fallen too deeply and too fast. I’d never find my way to the surface now.
In the last forty-eight hours I’d fallen head over heels in love with Loretta James.
It didn’t make any sense. She wasn’t my type. I didn’t like blue hair. I didn’t fancy women with too many earrings. And I definitely saw myself falling for someone with better fashion sense. Don’t even get me started on her food preferences. We had nothing in common. We didn’t even live in the same state. Nothing was compatible between Loretta and me, but I didn’t care.
I wanted Loretta—badly.
And that was a problem.
A giant fucking problem because I couldn’t have her.
And I liked her way too much to admit that I couldn’t have her.
Pierce was going to kill me.
The night before I’d almost had her in the biblical way. We lay on the grass and listened to the band with Loretta wrapped around me. Sheer determination held me back from kissing her more. I couldn’t let myself fall for Loretta. She’d hate being stuck with someone as stuffy as me. A man like me might ruin her life. I’d suck the fun and freedom from her.
Still, I didn’t stop thinking of her.
I couldn’t figure out what I was doing or why I didn’t care about any of the things I should have with Loretta. I had a life in New York—a wonderful happy reasonable life—but fly me halfway across the country with a woman I found perplexing and apparently none of that mattered anymore.
My mother spent the last five years trying to set me up with respectable women, but all I needed was for the right blue-haired goddess to fall into my lap. The woman in question slid into the other side of the small table where I sat. The morning plan included breakfast and finding a way out of my mess. A smile stretched across her face as she tucked her hands on her lap.
Fuck, I loved to see the smile on her face. I just wasn’t sure what I had done to earn it. “What?”
“Nothing,” she said but in a way that let me know it very much was something.
The woman purposely tried to irritate me. “You know you’re going to tell me eventually so why not say it now and get it over with?”
She leaned back in her seat, well aware I was right. “Fine, I just find it cute you drink coffee in the morning.”
She found coffee cute? “Everyone drinks coffee in the morning.”
Loretta crinkled her nose again, and I wished we weren’t in public so I could lean over and kiss the tip. “No, only old people drink it in the morning. It’s not really socially acceptable to drink coffee until after one or two.”
The woman had lost her mind. “Who drinks coffee in the afternoon?”
