“Great. Can you leave me alone now? I just need ten minutes to get my head on right, okay? Leave me to my wretchedness.”
Steven didn’t look remotely sympathetic to my plight. His eyes narrowed like my misery was a personal affront. “For fuck’s sake, Chloe,” he growled. He thrust the pig leash at me. “Don’t let Stevie eat anything.”
I tipped my head back to look at him as his words trudged through my pickled brain. “Stevie…the pig?”
“No, I talk about myself in third person now,” he deadpanned before swinging open the glass door and striding inside.
Leaving me with the leash and a lot of questions.
“What,” I asked of the pig, “is going on here?”
Junior did not answer. He—I discreetly peeked—shewas too busy staring longingly through the glass door like a loyal dog waiting for its master’s return.
A moment later Steven reappeared, placed an iced mocha and hot coffee on the table in front of me without a single word, and went back inside. Junior tugged at the leash like she meant to follow him.
“Listen, honey.” I pulled her closer and tied the leash to my chair. Hopefully her love wouldn’t drag my seat out from under me. “That man in there? He’s no good. Sure, he’s nice to look at, but underneath the brown eyes and hard muscles is a steaming pile of hot garbage. He’s not a good person.”
Junior sat back on her haunches like she intended to be here a while.
I stabbed my straw through the lid, flinching at the horrific squeak of plastic rubbing against plastic, and took a long gulp of my iced mocha. Maybe it was the placebo effect, but my uterus instantly unclenched at the hit of chocolate and caffeine.
The squeak got Junior’s attention and she looked at me. I swore her little piggy eyes lingered pointedly on the iced mocha delivering pain relief, courtesy of Steven McAllister.
“Okay, yes, he brought me coffee, and presumably he’s getting my lunch, too. And yes, he did save you from being a coyote’s dinner—although technically, that was me. His shoulders were too broad.”
I frowned, because there it was again, the image branded on the back of my eyelids that had plagued me relentlessly since that rainy night three weeks ago. Steven shirtless, tanned skin slick with rain, nipples peaked and muscles taut from cold, looking like he had stepped out of a cowboy calendar. It was a cosmic injustice that Steven McAllister, asshole extraordinaire, was packaged up like a Wrangler wet dream.
“Sometimes bad people do good things. There’s a lot of gray in people.”
I frowned again as I fiddled with my straw. There was no reason for Steven to help me. Hell, there’d been no reason for him to save Junior. Actually, there’d been plenty of reasons for him to walk away. The rain. The mud. The pig that definitely didn’t want his help. And still, he’d stayed. Even when saving Junior had clearly been impossible, he’d kept trying.
And that was why I hadn’t left him there. Well, that and I’d also felt bad for Junior.
“My point is that an iced mocha and a six-pack abdomen do not make up for everything else. Do you know what he did, Junior? He purposefully spooked a horse my best friend was riding. She was bucked off into a fence. Bruised her ribs and a whole lot of other body parts. And do you know why? Because she turned him down. That’s the kind of guy he is.” I looked up to see Steven shouldering his way through the door and finished on a hurried whisper, “So maybe love him a little less, okay?”
Junior ignored my advice. She trotted right over to Steven and gave him an affectionate headbutt on the knee as he set the tray of food in front of me.
“There you go, princess,” he said, with an extra dollop of sarcasm onprincess. He dumped a bowl of salad on the ground and gave Junior a pat on her flank. “There you go, honey.” No sarcasm at all.
“Thank you,” I grumbled begrudgingly. I had to force the words out. Not because of the nickname—that didn’t bother me at all. I hated feeling sick and tended to be insufferable when I had so much as a sniffle. A hangover was even worse because I did it to myself. I deserved the nickname. I was being pathetic, and I knew it.
But why was he being soniceabout it?
And it was a weird kind of nice, too. Because on the surface, Steven was always nice. He had manners. He knew how to hold a door and all that. But underneath that charming veneer was an absolute jackass who thought the world owed him something, like he had done humanity—and especially women—a huge favor merely by gracing us with his presence.
Now that dichotomy was reversed, and it was making my head spin. He was glaring and grumbling, but he was also bringing me food?
It had to be a trap.
I side-eyed him suspiciously as I popped a piece of bacon in my mouth. “You seriously named Junior after yourself?” I asked.
“You named her Steve Junior, not me.” Steven narrowed his eyes at me over his coffee. “And she’s not Steve Junior anymore. She’s Stevie Nicks. It seemed fitting, since she’s a Fleetwood Mac fan.”
“Stevie the Pig…is a fan…of Fleetwood Mac.” I needed a moment to digest this information. “How would you even discover such a thing?”
He lifted a shoulder. “The usual way.”
“The usual way? As in, you were going for your Sunday drive, windows down, radio on, and she started singing along?”
