It was the middle of the afternoon on a gorgeous sunny day, and I had about a thousand things I should be doing—mending the hole in the fence down by the clothesline, fixing my horrific paint job on Mini M’s house, calling my Dad and groveling for losing a party booking. There were also a million things I wanted to do but couldn’t, and all of them involved Lyssa.
She was going home soon, and she needed to. It would be better for her and better for me.
“Mike?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want to talk about the livestream or Bossi anymore.”
“Fair enough.”
“I did want to say …”
Her hesitation was shifty. I didn’t sit up, but I looked at her from the corner of my eye.
“Thank you. For inviting me here and letting me stay with you. And for … the thing in the tub.” Her cheeks were pink. “It meant a lot to me to finally do that. I wouldn’t have been able to without you.”
She was so fucking grateful it hurt my teeth.
I leaned back in my recliner. “No worries, mate.”
She recoiled with a blink. “Did you just call me mate?”
If she wanted to act like we were mates and all I was doing for her was a fucking favor, then: “Yeah, mate.”
“Well. Mate. Is that something you want to do again? Would you like to do other things? If we did it again, you could … you know, too.”
Yes—no.
Hell yeah—absolutely fucking not.
I want that more than I want air—it’s a terrible idea.
I couldn’t land on one answer. So, like a caveman, I grunted.
“What?”
I cast my mind around for an escape. My brain was screaming at me to pull the ripcord on the parachute I wasn’t wearing.
“Dunno,” I said eventually. “I’m not really a make plans kind of guy.”
“Bullshit.”
I pushed the footrest of the recliner down. “Sorry?”
“I said bullshit. You want to brush me off because you think you can’t be limited to one girl, never mind that I never asked you to be exclusive with me, Mike, I just wanted to do some more things that end in mutual orgasms”—I swallowed a grunt—“and now you’re being a jerk about it. That’s fine. You can be a jerk if you want. But I call bullshit on your no plans, good-time guy facade.” She jabbed a finger at me. “You’re a very intelligent man, Mike Holliday. You can do anything you put your mind to. I know you’re working hard on your funding pitch for your business, even if you don’t like talking about it. And if you think somehow that fooling around with me would be too much of a distraction for you, I promise you, it wouldn’t be.”
She was climbing off the sofa now, and I didn’t have time to move before she was looming over me, clutching my hand.
“I’m so fucking excited for your pitch. I’ll help. Or if you want me to back off and support you silently, because I don’t know anything about ‘farms’ ”—she made air quotes with her fingers, like farms weren’t real—“and I’m too eccentric for people here? Then I can do that too.”
I eyed her.
She corrected, “Okay, I probably can’t be silent. But I won’t interfere.”
Her earnest expression made me confess. “Lyss, I’m just really nervous about it. Fucking Hodges—you know the guy I milk for, Hodges?” She nodded and it seemed like the obvious thing to pull her onto my lap then, so I did. “Hodges is on the panel. That man gets my back up like no one else.”
She was warm and soft and it felt right holding her in my lap like this. She reached up and twisted a rogue mo’ hair back into place, nodding like I should keep talking.
