Page 3 of The Spice Play

Oh my god, Nelly, stop staring, stop staring, stop?—

“Yes, sorry, I, uh, I think I left my oven on at home,” I blurted, grabbing my purse from the bartop and frantically searching the inside for my wallet. I just needed to put my card away, check where my Uber was, and get the hell out of there before I did something absolutely absurd like stay and try to talk to this man. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”

Apparently, the death grip I thought I had on my bag wasn’t nearly tight enough, and the dark brown leather satchel tumbled to the ground, knocking the flap open and spilling the contents.

Allof thecontents.

My wallet, my keys, my stupid handfuls of change, my business cards.

When I was seven, back when the world was easy, and I was still full of questions, my mom and I played soccer with these little makeshift cones as a goal in our front yard. She always wanted to be the goalie since I had so much more energy. I remembered a day in the middle of the Georgia summer heat, the weather so humid it made my hair start to curl. It felt like I was breathing in water at the bottom of a pool. I had kicked the ball a little too hard, and it bounced straight out of the storm drain and into the road. I’d run for it despite Mom’s shouts not to, and the moment I’d grabbed the ball, I came to the horrifying realization that a truck about four times my size was barreling straight toward me.

And I froze.

The truck had gone around me in the end, but Mom had spent the next few days talking non-stop on the phone to her friends about how her daughter hadn’t ended up with the fight response or the flight response.

No, I got thefreezeresponse, and I’d never been able to kick it. And right there, in the middle of the emptying bar with one of the most attractive men I’d ever spoken to in my life staring at me, I froze as I stared down at the curved, deep purple silicone with fuckingair pulse technology. It made me want to throw myself off of the Jackson Street bridge onto the solid, hot tarmac beneath it. It made me wish that the truck hadn’t swerved when I was seven.

The damn thing had the audacity to gurgle violently from the lack of suction. Something must have pressed against the power button as it tumbled out.

Every millisecond that passed felt like an hour felt like the world had tilted on its axis and I was slipping intofrigid waters like the passengers on the Titanic. I couldn’t move, couldn’tbreathe, could only feel my cheeks heat and heat and heat?—

A set of strong fingers wrapped around the silicone and held the top button to shut it off, and I wanted to fucking die.

It didn’t even have a power symbol. I couldn’t let my brain run wild with what that meant, with the idea that he’d held one before, used it, knew it well enough to know the buttons…

Jesus, I was hitting new lows tonight after the Morris bullshit.

“I-I’m…”

Trying to get words out was fucking pointless, but as I squatted down to take it from his hands, he was already down beside me, already shoving it into the opening of my purse. “It’s fine,” he said, but there was a lilt to his voice, an air of amusement that sent a shiver down my spine.

He started grabbing the rest of my things before I could stop him. “I’ve, uh, I’ve got hand sanitizer in here somewhere?—”

He laughed, his nose crinkling as I forced myself to look at his face. “Well, I mean, if it wasusedrecently, then yes, please.”

“It…it was clean,” I choked, my hand absentmindedly searching for the little container at the bottom of my bag as he held my wallet with an absurd amount of patience. With one knee on the ground and the other bent, his jeansstrained, and I had to force myself not to let my eyes drift. “I haven’t, uh, used it…recently…”

The Jackson Street bridge was on my way home. I could so,soeasily convince my Uber driver to let me off there and let me endit all.

He sucked his teeth for a moment and deposited my wallet back into my back, holding out an empty palm for a dollop of Purell. But it was the words he spoke and the way his lips tilted up at one side that made every hair on my body stand on end, made my pulse skyrocket, and made the cogs in my brain come to a screeching halt.

“Maybe we should fix that.”

Chapter 2

Sebastian

Well, I couldn’t take that back now.

I wasn’t sure what it was about the woman who was on her knees before me on the sticky wooden floor of Smokey’s Bar on a Tuesday night. I was four beers deep, sure, but it wasn’t like I couldn’t handle my alcohol and needed to call it. I was barely on the border of tipsy.

Maybe it was the way she’d clearly been rattled when her eyes hit me — I hadn’t quite clocked if that was just from my physique or if she recognized me. Maybe it was the clear panic and the way her cheeks darkened against her tanned skin, hiding the smattering of freckles across her nose. Maybe it was the fact that she fit my type to a T, with rich brown hair and streaks of blonde running through it, with her not-quite-green and not-quite-brown eyes that seemed to soak up the light and reflect it back at me.

Or maybe I was just exceptionally needy tonight because none of my teammates had wanted to join me for a drink and I wanted to make the most of my free night off while my son, Matty, was being taken care of by my sister.

“You…you can’t be serious,” she said, nervous laughter making the words bounce as they fell from her lips. Slowly, she lifted herself from the floor, her loose-fitting jeans and black tee slipping across her body and back into place, and for just a second, I wanted to put my hand on her shoulder and push her back down.

Somehow, I resisted my base instincts.

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