Page 15 of The Love Shack

Working up a very real frown, she said, “You don’t scare me at all.”Such a lie.In many ways, he terrified her.

“The memories do, then.”

Her lungs compressed, and she gasped for air.How dare he say such a thing?

“Relax. I can feel how your muscles are knotted.” He had the audacity to step behind her so he could rub both shoulders.

Oh God, it felt like heaven—but at the same time, she was ready to jump out of her skin from unfamiliar sensations. “This is obscene,” she whispered.

“Do you want me to stop?”

He’d asked that way too close to her ear, and now her ear was tingling, too. Very distracting.

“Should I take your silence to mean you’re at a loss for words?”

It was better than her saying a lot of things she didn’t want to say. “Maybe.”

“How does it feel?”

Like I’m going to melt.“Good.”

“There ya go.”

She heard the smile in his tone, as if she’d pleased him with the admission. It took a lot of effort not to let her head drop back. “I’m sorry Cheese stole your shorts.”

“Where did you get the name Cheese?”

She mulled that over, then decided,Why not?“So, I have a super-susceptible appetite.” An understatement, actually. “Someone mentions food, or I see a snack in an ad, maybe on a commercial, and I want it.” Not entirely accurate. “Icraveit.”

“Pretty sure that’s the point of advertisements.”

Definitely for people like her. “On the day I found Cheese, I’d seen a commercial with a ham-and-cheese sandwich.” Good grief, the man had magic fingers. For a second there, she forgot what she was saying while she concentrated on holding back a groan.

“So you wanted a sandwich?”

Right. She had to keep up her end of this convo or he’d probably stop. “I had ham, bread, lettuce, mayo, even a tomato.”

He leaned down near her ear again. “But no cheese?”

Okay, yeah, time to call a halt before he seduced her just by breathing in her ear. Reluctantly, she stepped away, then turned to face him, trying to act like none of it had happened, or at least that she hadn’t reacted quite so strongly to his hands. “I had to make a grocery run, but on the way, it started raining. Not a soft, drizzly rain, but a raging downpour. Buckets of rain, you know? The kind where the wipers can’t keep up.”

“I know what you mean.” Hands on his hips, he listened, appearing engrossed in the story.

Shirtless.

He looked engrossedshirtless, and it should be illegal for a man to look like him, especially in front of a woman like her, meaning a woman who did not want to notice a man’s body.

“So,” she said, trying to regroup and not stare at his chest. Or his pecs. Or that downy line of hair on his abdomen... Oh crap. She was looking!

She snapped her attention up so fast, her eyes ached. “I had to slow down, right?” Saying it quickly helped to distract her, so she zoomed through the rest of the story. “Then I pulled over to the side of the road. I figured I’d wait it out. A lot of other cars were doing the same. I was just sitting there, listening to the rain pound on the hood and wondering if I was nuts for still wanting that damn cheese, when bam! A cat landed against the windshield.”

Lawson straightened with a scowl. “What do you mean, she landed?”

“It almost startled a scream out of me! One second I was lost in the fury of the storm, and then—cat! Not just any cat, either. No, Cheese was a pushy little thing. She stared in at me and I saw her mouth constantly opening with really demanding meows. I couldn’t hear her, not with all the other noise, but I rolled down my window, and do you know what she did?”

Shaking his head, Lawson asked, “What?”

“She jumped off the hood, and before I could open the door to try to get her, she jumped in the window. Into my lap.Soakingwet. For real, her fur was like a sponge. And the stinker just kept rubbing against me. All over me. I thought maybe she was cold, but I didn’t have anything to wrap her in.”

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