My stomach clenched. Rip wasn’t wrong, but those kinds of ideas would mean trouble ahead. For Rip, for Amelia if she got involved—which everyone knew she would if nothing else but to be in the middle of every fight—and for the town in general. I briefly thought about telling Rip about Amelia’s suspicions, but for Amelia’s safety, I’d sit tight on that knowledge for a little bit.
Rip’s epic life push would stir up some shit.
And that shit was sure to hit the fan.
8
Amelia
I teetered on the verge of explosion. Or was it implosion?
The semantics didn’t matter. What mattered was the juicy bit of information I had in my hand. I had to share it with someone before it blew out of my mouth in the form of gossip. And because no one else knew about this little investigation I was engaged in, that someone would be Titus.
If I could find him.
The guest room that had sustained the tree damage was put together perfectly. In fact it looked better now than it had before the storm, thanks to Titus’s high standard of work. Wayne was a lucky bastard Titus had felt sorry for me. I shut the door behind me and hustled down the hall to find Titus. He wouldn’t have left without saying goodbye, would he? By the time I’d hit the lobby with no sign of him, I began to think he had.
Crystal, the front desk girl I’d hired just last month, wasn’t at the front. I found her, nose pressed to the window in the back, where we kept snacks out for the guests at all hours of the day.
“What’s going on?” I asked, approaching her.
She jumped back and tried to wipe the face mark off the window with her sleeve. Her cheeks were bright red, which made me even more curious.
“Oh, nothing. Gotta get back to the front desk.” She hustled around me and fled to the front. The poor girl would have to toughen up if she would survive working at a hotel. We saw a lot of weird shit around here, so to be bothered by something going on outside was not a good start.
I stepped closer to the window, seeing our overflow dirt parking lot. And then my gaze slid left where I saw Titus standing by a huge pile of wood and drywall that he’d ripped out of the guest room. His T-shirt was off and there was a healthy dose of sweat dripping down his torso. He twisted off the cap to a water bottle and chugged the whole thing, his Adam’s apple working to hypnotize me. Holy shit. When was the last time I’d seen him without a shirt?
Because that? That specimen with six-pack abs and a chest you could bounce quarters off of wasn’t the Titus I remembered. He’d always been lanky, which made sense, given his extraordinary height. And he’d always had muscles because he was athletic in school and his job required strength. But holy wow. What the hell had happened over the last year?
My nose hit the cold glass and I jumped back, rubbing it as I pondered the changes in Titus when I hadn’t been looking. The steady hum in my gut also gave me pause. Was that...lust?
My brain screamed at me to walk away and quit staring at him, but my body was having nothing of it. We were gonna pull up a goddamn chair and stay for the show for as long as the show lasted. Better yet, why not go out there and see it up close?
Good judgement had always been a weak spot in my character, but I never shamed myself for it. I went with impulses, so what? Sometimes they worked out great. Other times, not so much. But the way I figured it, you never got some excitement in your life unless you made the leap. And right now, I wanted some excitement in the form of a half-naked Titus. I’d worry about what it all meant later. Much later.
“Yo, T!” I hollered as soon as I turned the corner outside and stepped off the blacktop onto the dirt.
Titus swiped the sweat from his forehead with his bulging bicep. His face lit up in an easy smile when he saw me. “Hey, Lia. Almost done here.”
I sauntered over, not looking where I was going. “Yeah, I see that.”
There was a bead of sweat sliding down right between his pecs. A fascinating journey of bumps and valleys.
A throat clearing had me looking up. Titus had a playful look in his eye, his mouth tugging into a smile. “Are you eye fucking me right now, Amelia Waldo?”
Shit. I guess I was, but he didn’t have to call me out like that. “Are you kidding me? You can’t walk around half-naked and then blame a girl for looking. If I was half-naked, wouldn’t you be looking at me?”
Titus took a giant step forward and flicked the collar of my shirt. He didn’t even touch me, but I could feel it all the way to the tips of my toes.
“Fuck, yeah, I would. I’d ogle you until my eyes bled.” His gaze flicked down the length of my body and suddenly I needed to practice my Kegels.
“Are we actually doing this? We’re flirting? You and me?” I whispered it, afraid to say it too loud. Like the volume of my voice would make it something real I couldn’t take back.
Titus shrugged slow and lazy, his eyes heating further. That finger still toyed with my shirt. If he didn’t stop, I might melt into a puddle at his feet.
“I don’t see why we shouldn’t. You’re hot, I’m hot. Kind of makes sense to flirt.”
I smirked. “Wow. Nice ego you got there.” I studied him seriously. “You don’t worry about harming our friendship?”
Titus’s eyelids slid down and I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. He had to be a
