Page 33 of Hard to Lose

My fingers touch my lips and my head spins. I’m here in the house of a man I’ve known less than forty-eight hours . . . and yet I feel like I’ve known him my whole life.

CHAPTER TEN

Gunner

I sag against the wall on the gymnasium floor. What a fucking day. It didn’t help that I got very little sleep, but it was a fucking day nonetheless.

“So you going to tell me who put that pep in your step today?”

I look up to Ellie. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Oh, but I do, because all day long my mind kept drifting back to last night and this morning. To Chase and her laughter and the sex—Jesus Christ, the sex was incredible. But it was more than that. It was . . . just her. The ease I had in talking to her. The laughter. The conversation. This morning. The way she didn’t look at me like I was crazy or even worse, with pity, because of my scars.

So yes, I’ve been distracted today. Distracted by thoughts of a woman that shouldn’t give me pause because she was supposed to be just that—a distraction from my troubled sleep and craving a little fun.

Distracted, because I want to see her again, taste her again, when it’s been less than eight hours since I left her in my house with those bee-stung lips and huge blue eyes.

“You don’t know what I’m talking about?” Ellie snorts. “I hear your words, Gunny, but that grin tells me otherwise.”

“That noticeable, huh?”

“Kind of.” She laughs as she sinks to the floor beside me. “And she is?”

“No one. Someone.” Everything. “I don’t know what the hell she is but she sure as shit knocked me on my ass.”

“Typically, being knocked on your ass isn’t a good thing.”

“No, I mean it in all the best ways possible.”

“Humph. That’s a good thing, then?” she asks.

“It is.”

“Are you going to see her again?”

I look over to my counterpart. Her dark hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail and her gold hoops are bigger than the ears she hangs them from. Her smile is knowing and her dark brown eyes searching as they study me and wait for an answer.

“I don’t know.” That’s a lie. I know damn well I want to.

“Well, how did you leave it?”

I chuckle and thoughts of Chase, and that naked, warm body of hers, fill my mind. Close behind are her words about taking care of herself while I was in the shower, and her admission that I was better than her own hand. What man doesn’t want to hear that?

“Do I even want to know the shit that you’re thinking about right now?” she asks in her motherly tone she uses with the little girls she mentors here at The Center when they step out of line.

“Probably not.”

“So?” She raises her eyebrows. “How did you part ways?”

“I left to come to work after one hell of a goodbye kiss.”

“Okay, okay,” she says and nods dramatically. “Now we’re getting somewhere. So she spent the night. Your place or hers?”

“Does it really matter? There was a bed.” I laugh.

“It matters.”

“Mine.”