Andy was between us with his back to me, so I rubbed my towel slowly across my breast, cupping it and stroking it more than drying my suit.
“You’re not helping,” Lucas said with a growl, but the heat in his eyes told me he enjoyed the show.
I was about to take it further—Lucas made me want to be bold, and I was not a bold girl by nature—when Andy turned back to me, causing me to pat myself dry with the towel like a normal person. Not like someone dying to have Lucas’s hands all over them again. And soon.
“So, are you gonna have pizza with us?”
I looked past Andy to Lucas, to gauge how I should answer. Did he want me to have pizza with Andy and him? Or was I just helpful for the pool part of their guy day because I was Andy’s instructor?
I waited, staring at Lucas, who stared back. I could see a hundred emotions playing across his gorgeous face, but I couldn’t read them.
“It’s a Saturday night, buddy,” he finally said to Andy, though his eyes didn’t leave mine. “Lily might have big plans. Might have another party to go to.” There was that pissiness again, and it thrilled me.
Childish, I know. But I felt the same way. The thought of Lucas out at a party, no doubt with some girl—or two or three—trying to get with him, made me insane. It was an emotion I had no right to, no claim of any kind. And yet…I felt it.
And I knew Lucas felt it too.
“Am I invited for pizza?” I said quietly to Lucas. My chin raised in answer to his tone, challenging him.
“Yes,” he said, deep and throaty, at the same time as Andy’s sweet little voice said the same thing.
“Then I’d love to come,” I said.
“I’d love to watch you…come,” Lucas said, with an eighth-grade boy’s maturity.
I should have rolled my eyes at the bad pun, and the pervy tone in his voice. Instead, I just looked back at him and mouthed, “You will.”
Andy smiled and said, “Yay, Lily’s coming,” then plucked his towel from the bench and began haphazardly to dry himself off.
“Here, let me help,” I said, sitting on the bench and motioning for Andy to stand in front of me, which he did.
I took his towel from him and began to dry him off, as I did with the little girls in my swim class when we went into the locker room.
“Probably no sense in doing this now,” I said, though I continued to do so. “You’re going to take a shower soon and get all wet again.”
Andy shrugged his little shoulders, and only turned around and held his arms out from his sides so I could dry his back.
Lucas still watched us from the pool, I assumed still trying to gain control. I silently wished him luck with that, because I seemed to have lost all sense of control from the moment I saw Lucas Kade sitting on these very bleachers.
He rose from the water then. Instead of using the ladder as Andy and I had, he hoisted himself out with his arms onto the side of the pool deck.
God, those glorious arms, bulging and flexing with the weight and effort. Water ran down his muscled chest. I longed to trail my tongue along the ridges and hard muscle that the moisture followed.
I took Andy’s scrawny arms in the towel and gave them a quick drying, absently wondering if Lucas’s magnificent build came more from his mother or father. If Andy would one day be as big and strong as his older half brother.
As Lucas walked over to us and grabbed his own towel, I tried to remember their mother. She’d brought Andy the first week of lessons but hadn’t stayed to talk with me. The week after that, she had again quickly left as soon as Andy was out of the locker room, not waiting to speak with me about Andy’s progress. I hadn’t even gotten the girls out of the locker room before Andy was gone. Then this past week it had been Lucas, and then Stick, who had picked up Andy from his lesson.
My mind searched for an image of Andy and Lucas’s mother, though I had only basically seen the back of her as she’d herded Andy down the hall.
Not that I expected she’d have the build of a college football star, but I seemed to remember her coloring was more like Lucas’s—dark—as opposed to Andy’s fair hair and skin.
“Okay, buddy, let’s get going so Lily can go change,” Lucas said, placing his hand on Andy’s shoulder.
Andy seemed reluctant to leave the warm petting I was giving him with the towel, but when Lucas placed his hand on Andy’s shoulder, the little boy melted into his brother’s body, snaking a small arm up and around Lucas’s back.
A place I couldn’t wait to snake my hands around, too.
“Meet you in front of the locker rooms?” Lucas said, as we all started moving toward the locker room doors. I waved a goodbye to Freddy, who answered with a wave of his own.
