I busied myself in the kitchen, gathering the ingredients I needed, the work eventually sinking my arousal enough that I was able to make the first of three phone calls.
He answered after the third ring. “You’ve got Monny.”
I froze, stainless-steel mixing bowl in hand. “That’s not how you answer the phone, is it?”
A beat of silence.Oh, shit.
That was maybe not how you were supposed to talk to your… Liem’s father.
But then Monny Lott’s booming laugh crashed through my phone, and those doubts disappeared.
“What can I do for ya, kid?”
I put the bowl down on the counter, then took the phone off speaker and brought it to my ear to tell him my business, and after a little more back and forth and an update on how his two-week vacation from Ari’s was going—they’d opted for a staycation after Mardi Gras—I had the recipe instructions I needed from him committed to the inside of my notebook.
“Talk to ya later, Cody. Hope to see you and my youngest soon.”
“Same here, Monny. Thanks for everything, and please leave the rosebushes alone,” I replied, hoping he heard the sincerity behind the teasing.
My next phone call was longer, and by the time it was done, I had cookies in the oven, a bowl of biscuit dough ready to be shaped, and a feeling of extreme satisfaction.
Debbie Hand, the chairwoman of the BTB committee, was now on my side in the fight against inaccessible public stairs.
One phone call left, and I suddenly got nervous as fuck as I stared at Liem’s contact info. So nervous that sweat broke out on my neck, which reminded me that I should shower before he arrived, but not before taking a photo of the paint marks.
For posterity.
I’d gotten a kick out of walking around the drugstore while wearing them earlier.
Liem’s contact photo, the selfie he’d sent from the sand dunes, beckoned me, and I clicked his number.
“Hi.” That sweet voice filled my ear after one ring, so much excitement in just the one word. “Is it time?”
Fuck, his everything. The raw, unbridled enthusiasm. The way I knew he didn’t even consider masking his feelings did things to me, and for the second time today, I found myself sniffing back a barrage of emotions.
This was the man who painted me exactly as I was.
I cleared my throat before saying the thing that had been on my mind, in my heart, since I saw him through the window of the Locc.
“I’m ready, Liem.”
Thirty minutes later,fresh from a shower with a sheen of my stolen coconut lotion coating me and with a stomach filled with renewed nerves, I determined that nothing could have prepared me for the sight outside the bungalow’s front window.
Liem had texted and insisted I send him the address instead of picking him up.
I hadn’t questioned it.
Flinging open the door, I hurried down the steps just as Liem dismounted the two-wheeled, motorized vehicle, removed his dark-purple helmet, and shook out his hair.
My fists clenched as I came to a halt a few feet from him.
Just when I thought I had the upper hand. Just when I thought I’d prepared for every possibility, Liem fucking Lott rides in on a fuckingVespa,looking like the incarnation of a wet dream within a nightmare.
He tucked the helmet under his arm and ambled toward me, his cheeks rosy and hair windswept.
He looked deliriously happy.
“What do you think?” he asked as he reached me.
