“Hang on.” I brush past her, being careful to avoid touching her again, and grab my briefcase from the couch, where I dropped it when I came in. “Here.”
I fish the keys out and toss them to her, and she snags them in a sweet, one-handed catch. I let out a low, appreciative whistle. “Nice move.”
“I learned from the best. Who do you think tossed the ball around with Jake when Dad was busy and you were at chess club? Or debate practice?”
“I wasn’t on the debate team. It was the academic decathlon.”
“Wow. You really were a nerd, weren’t you?” She flashes me another smile—this one more of a cheeky grin—that takes away any sting in her words.
“Were being the operative word,” I quip back. I might have been the king of the nerds back then, but I’m anything but now. At least, not on the outside. And from the way Brie’s eyes drank in my muscled pecs and washboard abs when I opened the door this morning—neither of which I had back in high school—she knows it, too.
“Fine. You’re hot. But I bet you’re still a geek deep down. You probably still play Dungeons and Dragons.”
Damn. I can’t hide anything from this girl.
“So does Joe Manganiello,” I say defensively. “AndPeoplemagazine named him one of the sexiest men alive.”
“You readPeoplemagazine?” Her cheeky grin gets impossibly cheekier. “I pegged you as more of aSmithsoniankind of guy. Or maybeWired.”
“Only in the supermarket checkout line. They don’t carryWiredorSmithsonianthere.”
With a smoky, past-her-bedtime laugh that shoots laser beams of lust right to my groin, she says good-night—again—and heads down the hall to her bedroom. I take care of the rest of the dishes, put the leftover lasagna in the fridge, and head to my own room to take a cold shower, watch an episode ofMindhunteron Netflix, and read one of the short stories in Ted Chiang’sExhalationuntil I finally pass out myself.
I’m not sure how many hours—or minutes—I’m out before I’m awakened by the sound of someone in the hallway outside my bedroom door, then banging around in my kitchen. It takes me a second to remember that I’ve got a house guest, but when I do I move the cats off my chest, throw on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt—yeah, I sleep in the buff—and go check on her. Brie’s making a hell of a lot of noise. Which means she’s either the clumsiest sleepwalker on the planet or she’s looking for something. Either way, I can’t leave her to fend for herself.
But when I find her, I’m starting to think I should have stayed in bed. She’s wearing even less than she was the last time I saw her—some kind of frilly sleep shorts and yet another tank top, this one in an almost see-through pale pink with “Let Me Sleep” emblazoned across her perky tits. The shorts are short enough on their own, but they’re made even shorter by the fact that she’s on her tiptoes, reaching for something on the top shelf of one of my ridiculously priced, hand-painted custom cabinets, making the shorts slide further up her smooth, shapely thighs.
I clear my throat to subtly let her know she’s not alone. She jumps anyway, almost dropping the glass she’s barely managed to snag from the cabinet.
“Holy crap.” She puts her free hand over her heart. “You scared me half to death.”
“I’m sorry. That wasn’t my intention.”
“Then what did you intend, sneaking up on a girl in the middle of the night?”
“One, I wasn’t sneaking. Hence the throat clearing. Two, you were making enough noise to wake the dead. It sounded like you were trashing the place. I had to protect my investment.”
She holds up the glass. “If you kept your glassware on the bottom shelf, where normal-sized people could reach without practically killing themselves, I wouldn’t have to wake the dead to get a damn drink of water.”
“I’m normal sized.” I’m tall, but it’s not like I’m Andre the Giant.
“For a guy, maybe. But I’m a vertically challenged chick.”
She looks average height to me, but I’m not going to argue with a pissed off woman in the middle of the night. “Feel free to rearrange things so you can reach them.”
“I was planning on it.” She sets the glass down on the counter and starts right in on the rearranging, swapping a few of the glasses on the top shelf for some of the mugs on the bottom one, leaving both shelves with a few of each. “What did your ex do when she had dry mouth at two a.m.? Suffer? Drink out of a coffee cup?”
I don’t have a clue. And I don’t want to talk about Giselle. Not with temptation staring me in the face in the form of my best friend’s off-limits little sister, wearing next to goddamn nothing. She’s clearly not going anywhere, so it’s up to me to put some space between us before I do something I’ll regret in the morning. Or not regret. I’m not sure which would be worse.
“Is there anything else you need?” I ask even as I’m already backing away.
“I think I can handle it from here.”
She goes on tiptoe to move another mug to the top shelf, but just as I think she’s got it up there safely, it slips from her grasp and falls to the tile floor, shattering into a tiny shards that scatter all around her pretty, pink-tipped toes.
“Shit,” she squeaks, the word coming out on a kind of high-pitched bark, like a fox.
She bends to start picking up the pieces, but I hold out a hand, stopping her. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
