With his eyes shut, I glare at his torso. At those broad shoulders and ripped abs. And I try not to remember his answers to my Leopard Leap questions.
Long and hard. Pushing his body. No breaks. Doesn’t stop until the other side’s finished.
He’d been deliberately obtuse. Needling me with sly innuendos, as if I didn’t know what he was doing.
I stick my head in the cabinet before he opens his eyes and catches me staring. There’s an older travel mug stashed on the top shelf, but it’s just out of reach. I stand on the balls of my feet, my fingers skirting the mug’s edge.
Warmth spreads along my back just as the same hand that had taken my original cup grabs the second one.
I jump. Spencer’s right behind me. And when I move, my back collides with his front. Heat radiates from him, seeping through my dress. Goosebumps raise over my arms, and I want to sink back into it, into the unyielding wall of muscle and warmth…
Until I inch back too far, and something incredibly more rigid presses into my butt. Is that—
I spin around, flattening myself against the counter instead. “What are you doing?”
Is that my voice, so high and shaky?
“Helping,” he grits, teeth clenched.
I don’t like this. Not one bit. I’d been preoccupied with armoring myself against him, it hadn’t occurred to me he’d be entirely defenseless. With hair standing up on one side of his head, blanket creases on his skin, scowl nowhere to be seen. He blinks, bleary-eyed, and for once, he doesn’t look like a bully. Just a handsome man, grouchy from being woken, standing with the hardest body I’d ever seen in my kitchen, wrapping meaty hands around my mug, and taking another drink from my coffee.
I’ve heard that baritone before. Husky and deep. Rumbling in a low, pleasured tone until he couldn’t hold back any longer. Talking to me about long and hard and not stopping…
I push him out of my way with my elbow—no way am I putting a hand on him in this agitated state. He moves, and I head back up the stairs to Rylie’s room. Sort through her things—piles of clothes and discarded art supplies, but nowhere near the disaster zone that is Natalie’s mess of crafting materials, cluttered accessories, and glitter on every surface—until I find a shirt.
Spencer stands where I left him, sipping coffee. He catches the shirt I toss him in one hand, holds it up, and tells me, “Fuck no.”
I hadn’t looked at it. I saw it was large and discernibly masculine, so it must be Levi’s. When Spencer shows me, I almost laugh. Though the shirt’s mostly black, there’s a print on the front of three cats yowling at the moon. And now I recall Rylie buying it for Levi for the holidays.
“Too bad,” I say, hiding my grin by preparing another cup of coffee. “It’s all I could find. Unless you want your puke-stained shirt back.” It’s probably in the wash, though that’s no guarantee it’s clean.
I’m being needlessly immature. Levi’s left other clothes here, I’m sure. And Natalie has a collection of Morris’s jerseys somewhere in her wasteland of a bedroom.
But an admittedly large part of me relishes with impish glee when he sighs, sets down my mug, and draws the shirt over his head. My spiteful bubble pops, however, when I see the material hugging his taut form. Levi’s big, but Spencer’s bigger, and he fills out that shirt until the seams stretch.
“Bathroom’s there,” I point to the half-bath hidden on the other side of the fridge. “Go get ready.”
“For what?”
“Class.” Because our biology lecture starts soon, and it’s on the other side of campus.
“Not going,” he says.
“Well, I am,” I say. “So you get the choice of walking back to your house in the cold with a hangover, or driving to class with me.”
He glares over the rim of my mug, his glower letting me know he doesn’t find either option appealing. He sets the mug down and heads for the bathroom.
I tap my nails on my cup, focusing on my date tonight. With a cute guy that shares my interests. I run through questions I’ll ask Nolan Prescott’s daughter in our meeting later today. Categorize newspaper assignments by due date. Count basic numbers.
Anything to keep my mind from wandering into that bathroom. Down the dark, debauched path of imagining Spencer’s hand gripping his morning erection…
He finishes in the bathroom, and I chug down coffee, scalding my tongue and not tasting a drop. When he steps back into the kitchen, I pick up my car keys from the basket on the counter and ask, “Third question. What’s your pre-game ritual?”
A moment, and he figures out I’m continuing our Leopard Leap interview. I have three more questions he needs to answer before we can be done with each other, aside from our mutual friends and shared biology course.
He’s quiet, fetching his coffee and pondering the question as I herd him to the front door. There, we put on boots and coats and winter gear, and I ignore very, very fixedly how domestic we’re being when I pass him one of Natalie’s sequin-speckled beanies. He rolls his eyes, then pulls it on without complaint.
Then he says, “Fucking.”
Lovely.
“You’re not even putting effort into hiding it this time,” I accuse.
“You didn’t put much effort into finding me a shirt.”
Well, he—No. He’s got me there. Touché.
I resist pouting at his contrariness and lock the door behind us. When we’re in my car, I roll down the passenger window an inch.
There’s that scowl. “It’s twenty degrees out.”
“And you smell like a distillery.”
He growls something under his breath. Something that sounds suspiciously like a word used to describe a female dog.
And that, that right there is what I need to free myself from the temporary insanity his shirtlessness and natural male bodily reaction caused me to spiral into. Because whatever fleeting fantasy I’d had about Spencer, it’s just that.
