Right on its heels, Luc sent: I’m kinda hating London, too. Not the place, the job.
Rio sat up. Then come back home. Well, not home-home, which was New York. To SoCal. It’s not too late to fix this, bitch.
Yeah, I dunno. Then, Shit, gotta run. Miss you.
Then, Maybe say hey to Dave for me...? came swooshing in, just as Casey came out of the bathroom.
Rio was sitting there, grinning his ass off, and she incorrectly assumed, “That must be Dave. Say hi for me.”
Rio quickly switched to his text chain with Dave—from which he’d had no reply. “Ten-four,” he told her as he quickly typed, Casey says hi. Luc does too.
And okay, that sounded like he was being cute, so he added, Real Luc. Who hates London. I just texted him. He misses you.
Luc hadn’t said precisely that, but the subtext had been there for sure.
Dave still didn’t answer—he was probably already asleep—so Rio set his phone to Do Not Disturb.
It was time to climb into this bed and attempt to get some sleep, inches away from the woman of his sweaty, teenaged dreams. Except, no. Way to be insulting to both of them, Rosetti.
Casey wasn’t Dana.
She was better than Dana—better than any fictional woman he could’ve ever imagined. She was real, she was honest, she was impressive as hell.
She was, without a doubt, the woman of his grown-up, more mature, been a SEAL-and-seen-the-real-world-for-years dreams. She wanted to know what he thought, how he felt, where he’d been. She wanted to get to know him.
And he was the deceitful, lying-ass son-of-a-bitch who was soon to be pretending to sleep in this bed beside her.
Chapter Ten
This was weird.
“We don’t really need my suitcase on the bed between us, do we?” Casey called to Luc as he finished brushing his teeth in the bathroom. She’d already snuggled into her side of the bed, deep under the covers. She’d purposely kept the heat off in the room. These desert nights could be deliciously cold.
“I... guess not.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced. But he didn’t push. In fact, he made a joke. “If I grab you in the night, just tell me you’re not Dave.”
He came out of the bathroom to stash his dirty laundry in a separate zipped pocket of his bag—wearing only a pair of boxers.
Holy crap. Holy, holy crap. His dark, tousled hair had fallen into his face, and his impressive array of genuine, Navy SEAL muscles rippled in his arms and chest as he pushed it out of his eyes.
So Casey responded with her own terrible joke: “If you grab me in the night, feel free to pretend I’m Dave.”
But oh, yikes, the look he shot her was cryptic. It was hard to say whether he was full-on horrified or merely surprised that she would tease about that. He did his weird laugh—he had a very fake laughter-like sound that he made when he was disconcerted or self-conscious. And he said, “Yeah, well, no, um...”
He turned out the light before getting into his side of the bed, so the complete blackness of a hotel room with room-darkening curtains surrounded her as she felt the mattress sag under his added weight. The sheets and blankets pulled a little, and she tried to make sure she wasn’t hogging.
“You okay?” she spoke into the void.
“Yeah, I’m good, thanks,” his voice came back. “Hey, do you mind if I...?”
She felt him shift, felt something moving and realized he’d taken one of the many pillows and pushed it down, underneath the covers, between them.
“I shall call the pillow Dave,” she sang, giggling a little, because the words popped into her head to the tune of that song from Godspell about naming the pebble “dare,” and it just fit so perfectly.
“That went so far over my head,” Luc said, “it’s practically in orbit.”
“Seriously?” she said, laughing. “It’s a really famous Broadway showtune. I’m totally revoking your gay card.”
He sputtered. “Well, I’m revoking your ally card for... for... unlawful use of stupid stereotypes.”
