Page 9 of Body Check

I don’t even hesitate to cut her off with a lifted hand. Give Holly the chance, and she’ll talk my head off for the next ten hours straight. Only now I can’t invent creative ways to shut her up. Can’t swallow her words with a hot kiss that’ll make her legs quiver and her lids fall shut as she sinks into my frame.She doesn’t belong to you anymore.Yeah, as if I could ever forget.

“I’m takin’ a guess—you didn’t eat lunch today?”

She squirms at that, fingers plucking fruitlessly at her pretty pink dress. “I was busy.”

“You’re always busy.” I gesture to the stool next to mine. “What do the Italians say again?Mangia?”

Cringing at my horrid pronunciation, she mutters, “Something like that.”

Holly’s short and the stool is tall, and I don’t bother to hide a grin when she tries to primly hop up—and subsequently bounces right off. The hem of her dress reveals a strip of smooth skin that I stare at a little too long. Flashing me an accusatory glance, she yanks on the fabric and hauls herself up for a second try. She succeeds, just barely, hands fluttering around her dress to hide the goods away from the likes of me.

When her blue eyes find my face, I purposely cast my gaze down to her ass. “You’re the very picture of grace, Holls.”

Nostrils flaring, she snags the knife off my plate and the fork from hers and proceeds to cut into the dry chicken. Sans ketchup. Bless her heart.

She pops the bite into her mouth, not an inkling of dread underlining her expression. I steel my shoulders and bide my time by taking a pull from my water bottle. Count down the seconds in my head like a ticking time bomb until she realizes she made a grave error in ignoring the peace offering that came in the form of Heinz ketchup.

One . . .

Two . . .

A gurgling sound rumbles in her throat as utensils clatter to the granite. Hands lifting to her collarbone, she coughs like she’s just inhaled her very first cigarette.

“Holy cr—”

She barely gets the words out before erupting into a coughing fit so volatile I’m surprised the windows don’t rattle.

Because I’m a gentleman, I uncap my water bottle and silently hand it over. Then I make a point tos-l-o-w-l-yswirl my next piece of chicken through a puddle of BBQ sauce. Her color high, she eyes me like she’s seconds away from stealing my fork and stabbing me with the tines.

I smile, just a little. “I promise that it wasn’t my plan to avoid talking aboutGetting Puckedby killin’ you.”

Droplets of water glisten on her lips when she gulps down another fistful of water. “You can be such a jerk,” she mutters.

At one point in time, she thought my jokes and dry humor were hilarious. We clearly aren’t those same people anymore, and so I shake off the ashes of our failed marriage from my heart and hunker down to business.

It’s what she came here for, after all.

Propping an elbow on the kitchen island, I angle my body to face her completely. “You’re really that pissed off that I did you a solid?”

“Did me asolid?” She shoves the plate away and spins her stool so that we’re eye-to-eye. Or, as much as we can ever be eye-to-eye, considering I dwarf her by a foot and some change. Shaking her head, she snorts out her disbelief. “You didn’t do me a solid, Jackson. You practically blackmailed Sports 24/7 into hiring me!”

“I wouldn’t use the word ‘blackmail.’”

Her blond brows arch high. “No? What word would you use then?Browbeat?”

I lean my weight into the hand on my thigh so that we are, in fact, eye-to-eye. Her nose is inches from mine when I counter, “Negotiate works.”

This close, I can see that her pupils are dilated. Anger, not lust. Her cheeks are tinged the same hue as her pink dress.

“Negotiateimplies that you gave them a choice in the matter. But you didn’t give them that choice—either they hired me or you walked out.”

If I’d known Holly would freak out over this, I would have kept my damn mouth shut.And this is why you can’t be friends with your exes. Nothing good ever comes of it.

I move my hand from my thigh to my knee. Edge a smidge closer to her because I’ve never been one to avoid using my size to press my case. “They could have let me walk. They could have opted for another team, but they didn’t. Sports 24/7 wants me—”

“God, your ego knows no bounds, does it?”

“—and to have me, they had to have you, too.”

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