Page 15 of Suddenly Dating
She was still standing there, dripping all over the floors. And then she had the audacity to smile at him as if she’d won an arm wrestling contest.
Harry stomped onward.
In the smaller master, he threw his bags on the bed, sat on the end of it, and dragged his fingers through his hair. This was a disaster. Ridiculous! There had to be a way out of it. He needed some time to think about what to do with her, and decided that thinking would best be done in the pool, with a beer. Or five.
All he had to do was find his “caretaker-looking” things and his swim trunks. Jesus.
Six
Through the window of the master bedroom, Lola watched Zach’s friend dive into the pool, then come up, breaking the surface like a dolphin and shaking his head to sling the water out of his hair.
Good God, but that man was good-looking. Intimidatingly handsome. He was all muscled shoulders and arms, and hello, thoselegs.Lola felt a little warm. Warm as in acutely aware of her shortcomings compared to a man like him, and yet still turned on beyond what was even reasonable. She moved away from the window and marched to the bathroom.
“Okay,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. She noticed the new freckles, thanks to her forgetting to apply sunscreen; the frizzy hair, thanks to forgetting to apply product; the swimming suit top that should have been retired five years ago. “This can’t happen. Thiscannothappen.” How was she supposed to write a book with a guy like that hanging around? She was having a hard enough time as it was. Funny, but the words did not magically flow from her fingertips in her little patch of paradise as she had expected them to. She’d stared at a blank page all afternoon. Speaking of which—she just realized she’d left her laptop on the dining room table, along with a notebook full of her ideas. She’d chosen the table over the office because of the spectacular lake view and the fact that the doors actually slid open so that it was like she was sitting outside when she wasn’t. Ingenious.
First things first, she had to change and do something about her hair. She looked around at the clothes strewn all over the master bedroom—jeans and skirts, T-shirts and linen sweaters. She suddenly remembered the neat stack of clothing she’d moved. Boxer shorts folded into squares. T-shirts folded in the way clothing stores stacked them for display. Two pairs of cargo pants, identical. Honestly? She thought someone had either forgotten their purchases from one of the trendy little stores on Main Street, or the caretaker’s mother had brought his laundry to him. Who folded their clothes like that?
Lola tiptoed back to the window, and peeked out. He was floating on his back now. On the side of the pool, there were two beer bottles. That explained all the beer in the fridge in the garage, which she had assumed had been left after a party.
Nope, this was not going to work. She was going to have to think of something to get him out of here. Contagious disease? No. She didn’t really want him to associateickwith her. Structural damage to the house? That one had potential.
She headed to the bath to think about it.
She lingered in the ginormous tub, floating amid a million bubbles, stewing about this sudden derailment of what was going to be a perfect summer and finding no immediate solution. Eventually, Lola had to get out of the tub—she was hungry as she was wont to be, and she was shriveling up. She’d had leftover lasagna for lunch. Maybe she should have saved that. She began a mental catalog of items in the Sub-Zero fridge. She had the ingredients for moussaka with the leftover eggplant she’d bought at the farmer’s market yesterday. She had some red wine. She had ingredients for a salad.
Lola used some of the lotion she’d bought at the little perfumery, donned her bathrobe, and padded out to the closet to have a look at her things. She was generally a yoga pants and T-shirt kind of girl, but today she looked at the few dresses she’d brought. She chose a vintage red one that cinched at her waist and had a little chain of white strawberries marching across the hem. She conditioned her shoulder-length hair and combed it out. And, for the first time in days, she dabbed on a little blush and mascara.
As Lola came out of the master bedroom, she heard a lot of banging around in the kitchen. She rounded the corner and saw Handsome Harry hard at work, his arms in the sink up to his elbows. He’d pulled his hair into a little tail at his nape and he wasn’t wearing a shirt, but he’d wrapped a towel around his waist and over his swim trunks.
Lola had to take a moment—he had the body of an athlete. Hard and firm and sexy, and geez, she sort of wished he’d put on a shirt.
Now, he was shoving dishes into the dishwasher, where he’d managed to arrange the bowls she’d used to cook in a tight line on the bottom rack. She was lucky to get three bowls in the bottom rack—he’d put in six with room to spare.
“Umm... what are you doing?” she asked.
His head came up and his gaze flicked over her, lingering for a split second on the strawberries. “I am cleaning up this mess,” he said crisply. “I’m a little curious—how did you get tomato sauce on the cabinet doors?” He pointed to a spray of it across one of the upper cabinet doors.
Like she was supposed to remember how that had happened. “You don’t need to do that. I’ll clean it up.”
He held her gaze as he picked up a wet rag, lifted his arm and connected with the cabinet at the very spot of the sauce, wiping it away without even looking.
Ooh, a little kitchen-shaming, huh? Lola walked up to him, and without looking, groped around for his hand until she found it, then took the rag and yanked it free. “I wasn’t exactly expecting company.”
“Neither was I.”
His eyes, Lola noticed, were the color of the silver leaf maples up and down Juneberry Road. Silvery green. “Will you please move?” she asked. “You are blocking my way to the dishwasher.”
He didn’t move. He stared down at her, his gaze zeroing in on her eyes. “I’m not into dirty kitchens,” he said.
“Great. I’ll make a note of that,” she said, and squeezed past him, her breast brushing against his chest, which, for the record, was as firm as it looked. She reached into the sink for a plate and stuffed it into the dishwasher.
Her roommate relinquished control and stepped away as she stuck another plate in the rack. “You can get more in if you have some order,” he pointed out.
“Thanks. I’ll be sure to add that notation under the one about how you like your kitchens.” She heard him mutter under his breath but ignored him and finished loading the dishwasher, shoving in utensils and dishes beside his neat stack. When she’d finished, she turned around—but he’d left the kitchen.
Well that was interesting. Lola had never known a man—or anyone, for that matter—to get their nose out of joint over loading the dishwasher, but she wasn’t going to spend any time thinking about him pouting on the other side of the house.
She went to the gourmet fridge with the wine cooler built into one panel—sofancy—and began to pull out the things she would need for her dish. A half hour later she had the moussaka in the oven, a healthy glass of wine at her elbow, and was tossing a salad when her surprise roommate reappeared in the living area. His hair was wet and tucked back behind his ears. He was wearing a clean T-shirt that fit tightly across his chest tucked into jeans that rode low on his hips. He walked up to the bar that separated the chef’s kitchen from the living area, braced his hands against it, and looked around at the mixing bowls and variousaccoutrementLola had pulled from the cabinets.
