Ididn’t find his arms flexing sexy. Absolutely not.
Oliver gave my coffee machine a thousand-yard stare like he hoped that glaring at it might be the only resource he needed to fix it. If I was the coffee machine, I had no doubt being on the receiving end of that stare would work.
STOP.
I mentally shook myself. This train would inevitably end up on the wrong tracks and collide in one devastating mess if I didn’t reel in my escalating libido. I was much better off sticking to facts. Oliver was attractive.Veryattractive—and he knew it. A man doesn’t spend the amount of time he does flicking his hair in that perfect quiff if he doesn’t think on some level he could be on People Magazines’ hottest man of the year. Which Oliver had been—twice in the last decade.
I only knew that because I had spent most of my evenings researching his career. The photo they’d chosen for the cover was underwear meltingly gorgeous. Standing in an off-white shirt, open at the collar, displaying just enough chest to be suggestive, Oliver stood in the middle of a pitch, a footballunder his arm as he gazed into the distance. Most people who stood like that would look utterly ridiculous… and yet, he pulled it off.
My perusal of the photo was entirely innocent.
The fact that I’d stored the photo in my phone and got it out late at night was neither here nor there.
My attraction to him seemed to have sprouted up from nowhere. Like a spider you see crawling around your flat, it surprised me to suddenly see Oliver creeping into my thoughts—even when we weren’t together.
It was purely because we’d been spending so much time together. I was sure of it. That’s the only reason this bizarre attraction to him had awoken in me. He’d been talking to me about his life, football, and on the good days, he’d talk about his family. Those conversations usually resulted in him shutting down halfway through a sentence and switching topics like a game show host. I never pushed. It might have been a lousy tactic since my job required me to know as much about him as possible. But my gut told me to wait whenever I wanted to delve into a subject. To let him talk, to let him share on his own.
It had been two weeks since I’d gone with my gut and taken him to the stadium. Two weeks of him coming over to my flat three times a week laden with coffee and pastries. Two weeks in which I had successfully avoided every member of my family. I could go months without hearing a word from either of my siblings, yet, in the last two weeks, I’d been bombarded with messages and attempted calls almost every day. Even my mother had been calling and texting more than usual.
I’d ignored them all, needing to pour all my attention to the book.
It all felt… uncomfortable.
Deciding that staring at it was doing nothing, Oliverunplugged the coffee machine, waited a moment and then plugged it back in, an adorable frown on his face.
No.Frowns weren’t adorable.Especiallynot his.
I leaned against the fridge, holding a can of Red Bull.
‘Did you seriously just try turning it off and on again?’
This caused his scowl to deepen, ‘Can I please buy you a new one? This is a health hazard. He poked at the machine, which didn’t take kindly to the abuse because it let out a loud hiss that made Oliver jump back in alarm.
‘I’ve warned you about insulting it.’ I held in a cackle as his eyes darted from me to the coffee machine.
’Seriously, one day it’ll explode. Can I please buy you a new one?’ He pressed his palms together in a prayer motion and lowered his eyes in a puppy dog expression that caused the lower half of my body to erupt in flutters. He’d been on at me for the past week about getting a new machine, but I’d adamantly refused, citing sentimentally.
‘Absolutely not. He’s a part of the family.’
‘So he’s the equivalent of the creepy uncle that tells racist jokes at Christmas?’
I tilted my head in thought. ‘More like the shy cousin who never talks and turns out to be a serial killer.’
Oliver choked back a laugh. ‘Ah, the things we put up with for family.’
I smiled as I took a sip. ‘Did you want a coffee, or was this merely a show of male pride?’
Oliver glared back at the machine. ‘Ididwant a coffee, but not if it’s going to cost me a limb to get it.’
Laughing, I put my drink down and shuffled over to the machine. ‘You just need to know how to work it.’ I pressed the on button, which predictably made the machine angry and start to hiss, but I slapped the top of it twice and shook the glass jug a couple of times until the hissing stopped and dark liquid began to trickle out of the spout.
I turned and pointed triumphantly at it. ‘See?’
He stared bewildered at me. ‘Like that’s the most normal way to make coffee in the morning.’
I shrugged. ‘We don’t all have luxury machines that cost thousands of dollars.’
He reared back at my comment, and for one horrible moment, my stomach sank.
