I forgot my own name for a second, staring up at him.
Brain, I know this is hard right now, but I need you to please ignore how handsome this man is and process the question he asked me.
Belatedly, it complied.
“Hmm…it might,” I said. “Tell me, have you ever confessed a deep, undying love for Barack Obama when in Jack’s company?”
He frowned a little in response. “I don’t think so?”
“A deep, undying love for labor unions?”
His frown deepened. “Huh?”
“Told him you even once voted democrat?”
“We haven’t really discussed politics.”
I tapped my chin with a gloved finger. “The mystery deepens.”
“Uh…” He seemed unsettled, not being in on the joke. I liked that. It put us on more equal footing.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Ben. I apologize in advance for my dogs. They lose their minds around new people.”
With that, I led him up the porch stairs and into the house.
Chapter 2: Ben
The dogs were on me the second I stepped into the house, leaping, sniffing, and whining in such an excited frenzy that it was like there were five of them instead of two. Suddenly I was back on the training field, only instead of blocking tackles, I was fending off a pair of aggressively friendly dogs.
Ella raised her voice over the racket they were making. “Sam, Fred, meet Ben. Ben, I’d advise you not to let them touch you with their tongues. You’d understand why if you saw what else they’ve licked today.”
I might have cracked a smile at that if I wasn’t so keyed up.
Where the hell is Jack?
Knowing my gruff neighbor, he was probably in the living room stacking more logs on the fire. I’d made the mistake of telling him I was originally from Hawaii, and now he worried I would freeze to death if the house fell below 80 degrees, regardless of the fact that I also told him I’d lived in the Midwest for a while and was used to the cold.
He’d acted as though this was all brand-new information. Like he had no idea who I was.
I snuck a glance at Ella. She definitely knew who I was. It was obvious from the deer-in-headlights look she gave me in the driveway,though she recovered quick enough. Now I just needed to see what she’d do with this knowledge. If she was good people, like Jack claimed, she’d respect my privacy. But part of me, the part that had grown hard and bitter and disillusioned with humanity, was waiting for her to whip out her cellphone and upload my face and location to Twitter for all the world to see, ruining the peace and quiet I’d managed to find here.
I snuck several more glances at her in between dodging the probing noses of her dogs. She moved to the coat rack, stepped out of her boots, and then shoved down her snow pants, revealing lilac-colored leggings with little white reindeer prancing across them in a horizontal pattern. She was tall, maybe 5’9” or 5’10”, with narrow hips and the long, solid legs of a distance runner.
I peeled my gaze away from her and ruffled the fur of the dog trying to dart past my defenses with his plague-tongue. I liked to think that I didn’t have a “type”, but if I was being honest with myself, that was bullshit. Looking back over my years of dating revealed a definitive pattern of tall, athletic women. Women who could help hold themselves up if we had sex in a shower or against a wall. Women who could wrap their muscular legs around my torso and use their strength to pull me closer, or flex their toned thighs over and over as they rose and fell above me.
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up to seethistall, athletic woman pull off her coat. Beneath it, she wore an olive-green long-sleeved running top. I’d had just enough fashion lessons crammed down my throat over the past decade to recognize how spectacularly the outfit clashed. It looked like she got dressed in the dark.
She glanced down and froze at the sight of herself, eyes wide, lips twitching open in horror. Her head started to turn toward me – likelyto check if I’d noticed her fashion faux pas – and I shifted my gaze back to her dogs before she could catch me staring.
I risked another peek a minute later, just in time to watch her pull her shirt down a few inches and rest the hem of it against the fabric of her leggings to double-check that, yes, those colors were truly heinous together. She let it go with a huff, then yanked off her knitted hat. A rat’s nest of flame-colored, sweat-damp hair tumbled loose.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the hall mirror, made a choking noise, and raked the mess into a ponytail. “Of all the frigging days,” she muttered.
The whole debacle was kind of endearing to witness, but I’d learned that people didn’t like to be laughed at when they were embarrassed, so I hid my amusement.
The Huskies had used my momentary distraction to press themselves closer, wiggling their butts so quickly that they almost blurred. One managed to sneak past my guard. A blast of hot, stinking breath hit my nose – the only warning I had before a slimy tongue slipped up the side of my neck.
“Jesus,” I said, straightening back to my full height, out of their reach. I loved dogs, but they could be gross sometimes.
