Page 22 of Bad Boy in Her Bed

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Birch hiked hisjeans over his hips and tossed his towel over his bedroom door as he grabbed a shirt.“Grey?I’m heading out for a bit.If you can pick up those spark plugs, I’ll be back to help you change them before dinner.”

His brother merely grunted in reply from his room.

With his phone, wallet, and keys accounted for, he locked up the house and jogged to his truck, his mind racing until he began the drive to her hotel and had a moment to sort his thoughts out.

Jocelyn had to be mistaken.He’d been meticulous in organizing the paperwork he brought to Trevor Drayson’s and knew for a fact that there were no receipts for the tattoo guns they purchased three years ago.

She probably didn’t know enough about the tattoo business to know what she was looking at in the invoices and receipts.So if him being there to answer questions would keep his ass off the Epson PD’s radar, he needed to do it.And do it without getting distracted by the woman who would be sitting there with him.

His heart was still pounding in his chest from her call.Her number showing up on his phone had given him a double hit of adrenaline as he lay in bed, moving the chess pieces in his head.

The logical part of him knew it was a business call.

The other part?That side needed to be put right back where it was before Jocelyn Fucking Carter had walked into Serpent’s Tongue Ink.

He parked in the back lot and walked around to the lobby, hoping to stay invisible as he beelined to the elevators and ducked inside as the doors slid shut.Jocelyn stood in her doorway, flinging his mind right back to the night he picked her up for their movie date.

It felt like it was years ago, not days.

“I’m glad you came,” she said, stepping aside to let him in.“Lunch should be here in a few minutes.”

“You kind of caught me off guard when you called.”Keeping his eyes off the faint outline of her bra beneath the fitted striped button-down shirt she had on, he looked to the makeshift office she’d established on the dining table.“I wasn’t expecting to hear from anyone until charges came down.”

He felt her hand graze his arm and he tensed as she slipped in front of him, forcing him to see her.

“It’s not my job to have it out for anyone,” she said softly, tucking her hair behind her ear.“Even if you weren’t you, and we…even if we didn’t know each other, my job is to explain the numbers.You can help me do that.”

He shoved his hands into his back pockets to avoid reaching out to her, to stop himself from wrapping his arms around her and letting her warmth melt away his tension.

But that ship had sailed back on Trevor Drayson’s veranda.

There was a knock on the door and she answered, returning with a small cart.“We might as well get started.”

He waited until she sat before he followed suit, pulling up a chair on the other side of the cart.“So how are your legs feeling today?”

“I’m dying,” she said without a smile.“Everything hurts and I’m dying.”

Opening one of the trays, he passed the mustard-free burger to her and took the other for himself.“Good.Because my quads are so sore I’m one fast move away from sobbing.Have I ever mentioned I don’t like running?”

The nervousness in her gunmetal eyes disappeared and she handed him a bottle of water.“You didn’t have to.You run like a man achieving a goal, not a runner chasing a high.”

“That obvious, hey?”

“Only to those of us daft enough to get our thrills on the track.So, what amazing thing did I yank you away from?”

Taking a long sip of water, he shrugged.“Lying in bed contemplating and deliberating.”

“At one in the afternoon?”

“I have a lot to contemplate and deliberate.”

She sat back in her chair and tilted her head, her blond hair falling over her shoulder.“I have a feeling you’ve always had a lot to contemplate and deliberate.”Shifting gears, she picked up her burger again.“When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

Taking a bite of the fresh-cut fries, he chewed, thinking about the question he hadn’t been asked since he was in second grade.“An archaeologist.Except I didn’t know the proper name, so I told my teacher I wanted to be a dirt digger.”The memory, one of the few positive ones he had from school, made him smile.“Mrs.Fleming obviously misunderstood what I meant, so for the rest of the year she bombarded me with books about bulldozers and excavators and pumped me up to live my dream.She even went out of her way to find videos of them when I was done my schoolwork.And since I didn’t want to disappoint her, I never corrected her.Even though I actually hated those big, noisy trucks.”

Jocelyn grinned.“You were probably such a little charmer as a kid.I bet teachers absolutely doted on you.”

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