Page 10 of The Red Zone
“Look in the back near the cereal boxes.”
I scanned the area, only to come up short once again. “I still can’t find them.”
“Men are useless… all of them,” Mae muttered, barging into the tiny space to take over browsing the shelves. Before I could move out of the way, she planted herself in front of me, dropping to her knees to pick up a few of the boxes on the bottom shelf.
“Is that—nope—those are Hawaiian rolls,” she mumbled to herself in a hushed tone.
As she continued to sift through the shelves, my ears perked up at the sound of the pantry door closing to my right… and it was immediately followed by the lock latching from the outside.
Damn it, Scarlett.
Had Lea been with us tonight, I wouldn’t have been slightly surprised by her pulling something like this. The girl was single-handedly responsible for getting Scarlett and Abel together in the first place, so I wouldn’t put it past her to try to work her magic to convince Mae and I to reconcile our issues.
But Scar? Not a chance.
If I was a betting man, she was the last person I would’ve put my money on to play matchmaker. How was she going to match people together when she had no idea Abel was plain as day in love with her before they started dating?
Mae twisted around, looking up at me with widened eyes as her mouth formed into the perfect O shape. Closing my eyelids, I ran both hands through my hair with a groan.
I did not have the energy to deal with this right now, but I guess I didn’t really have a choice, did I?
Dropping my hands to my sides, I opened my eyes to see Mae still on her knees with her mouth open, gaze fixed on the door in shock. Ever so slowly, she raked her line of sight across the small space until our eyes met.
Well, seeing Mae on her knees with wide eyes and an open mouth wasn’t exactly something I planned on seeing in this lifetime. Even more shocking was the fact that I wasn’t mad about it. Not one fucking bit.
Alright, alright.
Nope.
My gaze flickered to the ceiling. I would not allow my dirty mind to get the best of me right now.
When I peered back down at her seconds later, she was still making the same face.
Alright, I lied.
Now I was definitely thinking about her plump pink lips wrapped around my cock. Another minute of her looking at me like that and I was going to start thinking she was on the same wavelength.
“Can you back up so I can get your boner out of my face?” she snarled.
“I do not have a…” I mumbled, looking down at my zipper.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Reaching over her shoulder, I quickly grabbed a box of minute rice to cover myself despite the fact that she’d already gotten a front-row seat to my body’s betrayal.
Last time I got an unexpected hard on was four years ago during a press conference, when a bombshell sports reporter questioned me about a series of false tabloids which alleged to me throwing weekly orgies with the team’s cheerleaders. Needless to say, when I went to stand up after the interview was over, the photographers and reporters got a killer picture for their headline.
Could you blame a guy, though? Sitting around talking about orgies for ten minutes was hard enough—no pun intended—but tack on the gorgeous reporter interrogating me… asking me for intimate details about my sex life? I was fucked from the start.
The rumors grew tenfold overnight and it took months and thousands of dollars to scrub the internet of those images and videos. Seeing as they hadn’t resurfaced in about eighteen months, I think it was safe to conclude it was water under the bridge at this point.
“Are you really going to finish that sentence?”
“I’d rather not,” I muttered lowly.
With a small laugh, Mae pushed up off her thighs and shot over to bang her fists against the door. “Scarlett, open the door right now!”
A few seconds of dead silence passed from the opposite side of the door before Mae began pounding again.
