Damn it. Unbidden, my gaze shifts to the window, and to the annex. There’s a low light on in the living space, but I can’t see Bhodi, and it’s just as well. I don’t want Sab to see my face if I catch a glimpse of him. I don’t have time for that shit in my life, I have a full day’s work to catch up on.
“He’s a nurse,” I answer Sab’s question before he reaches through the screen and shakes me. “Works a lot. Hardly home.”
“Is he the hot dude from yesterday?”
“What hot dude?” I frown at the last line of script I completed last night. It’s a fucking mess. “I don’t know any hot dudes.”
Sab sees through my bullshit, but he runs out of time tointerrogate me. It’s bedtime for his kid and my brother’s a good dad. It’s why he’s in Manchester, living in a town he hates with a missus who only cares about herself, but that’s a story for another day.
He ends the call. I let out a slow breath. Relief, but it’s laced with something else—probably the loneliness I admitted to Bhodi earlier when I’ve spent the last six years denying it to Sab. I have friends and I love my job, but this house…it echoes at night, and it gets to me when I spend too much time alone.
Eventually, I figure out I slept most of the day, and I spend the rest of the evening working, standing at my desk, pouring tea and sugar down my throat to stave off the drowsiness from the cute little pills the hospital gave me.
It’s a pattern that continues for the rest of the week. I become nocturnal until I get sick of the dark, and the stomach ache the pills leave in their wake.
Monday morning, I chuck them away and take Rudy for an early walk. He chases a cow. I chase him. Then I carry the little bastard the rest of the way home, because my life is ruled by my tyrannical dog, and if nothing else, his hooliganism distracts me from wondering where Bhodi is. Where he’sbeenall week for his car to be gone every time I’ve glanced out of the window.
It’s what you wanted, isn’t it? A lodger you never see?
Heh. That was before—when the lodgers I’d imagined were a world away from the blond bombshell Bhodi Jones has turned out to be.
Bhodi Jones.
Merde.
Even his name is hot.
That amazing thought completes as I come up on my house. It’s still early, winter sun hazing through the trees, frostglittering on the pavements. The street I live on is pretty as fuck, save the godawful noise rattling from the ancient Golf I’ve been looking out for all week.
He’s home.
My heart has no right to skip a beat. But for whatever reason I don’t want to contemplate too hard, it does anyway. And maybe, tucked to my chest, Rudy feels it, and that’s why he squirms like a motherfucker, barking loud enough to pop my eardrums.
How Bhodi hears over the racket of his fucked engine, I have no idea. And I’m even less certain if the smile he sends my way as he exits the car is for me. I mean, no one has ever smiled at me like this. Or maybe they have. Maybe it’s an ordinary smile and the warmth in my belly is from the Naproxen I’ve been slamming all week.
Either way, it affects me—heaffects me, and I’m grateful to my bandit dog for providing an unholy distraction.
I lean over the gate and deposit Rudy in the enclosed front garden. He throws himself at the low wall, desperate to get to the busted fence, but he’s shit out of luck. For once I’m one step ahead of him and he’s stuck where he is for however long I get to be in Bhodi’s company. To lose myself in the low laugh he sends my way, and the smile still lighting his face.
He’s so hot.
My first thought’s a given. My next, not so much.
He’s tired.
I can see it in his eyes. They’re still dazzling as fuck, but I can’t pretend he doesn’t look like someone who’s just worked all night. “Long shift?”
Bhodi ventures close enough to peer over the gate at Rudy. “Aren’t they all?”
“You don’t like your job?”
“I love my job. My new boss, not so much.”
“Why’s that?”
Bhodi reaches down to scratch Rudy’s ears. I take a breath to warn him he might lose a finger, but Rudy chooses that moment to show me that Bhodi’s one of the rare people he likes, and I feel that. Pretty sure my dog isn’t hooked on the arch of Bhodi’s pale neck, though. Or the flex in his shoulders as he straightens without answering my question. “You look better.”
“Better than what?”
