“You the girlfriend?” Ford asked between soft wheezes.
She hesitantly nodded as Raiden tugged on his boots. Hopping on one foot, he jumped over the threshold. “Let’s go. I’ll explain things later. Oh, you wanna come to the crawfish boil tomorrow?” he asked as he shut the front door behind him.
Kat stared at the white wood, her brows slowly inching closer and closer together. “Crawfish boil? Who’s cooking a crawfish boil?” she muttered.
“Ford is. I doubt the local market’s got crawfish, but he can still put together a mean seafood boil,” I answered.
Slowly, as if moving through heavy sludge, she turned her head back toward Ford and me. Narrowing her eyes, she studied the man who somehow had another two cookies in his hand. He froze mid-bite, catching sight of her steely gaze. “You? You’re going to put together this seafood boil? Something that I’ve only ever heard about but never experienced because we’re not from fucking Louisiana,” she stated, her voice rising in volume with every word she spoke.
“He is. Born and raised on the fucking bayou, Kat,” I replied and pushed off the counter.
“You don’t have an accent,” she cautiously said, staring at Ford.
“Ask him to say water or boil.” I wiggled my brows at him as he once again raised his middle finger at me.
“I left home at eighteen and haven’t been back since. My accent comes out when I get angry, or say shit like Bernie’s trying to get me to say, or when I’m around others with the same accent, but otherwise, I’ve spent nearly as much time away from home as I did there. You adapt,” Ford replied and shoved the rest of the cookie in his mouth.
“You’re from Louisiana. As in the bayou itself,” Kat stated again.
He nodded. “My parents are from there. Grandparents. Great-grandparents. Even my great-great-grandparents. Shit, half the swamp has been in my family since people started living in the fucking bayou, I swear.”
“You’ve seen an alligator in the wild then,” she asked, her eyes widening in excitement. Sparkles danced across her ocean irises, and I couldn’t help the admiring smile that lifted upon her lips. She really was beautiful.
Desire ripped through me. Ill-timed and ignited by what? The simplicity of her fascination over learning something new? The way her eyes looked in this light? Whatever started the flames at this moment, they were unexpected, yet I happily added fuel to the fire.
Arousal coursed thick within my blood as everything in my body roared as hot as her feistiness. There was little I could do to tame what began to stiffen between my legs, and I shifted my body to hopefully mask the evidence of that fuzzy static roaring hot in my stomach.
“Seen one? Darling, I fucking helped raise gators, I swear. Hunted them. Eaten them. My mawmaw makes the best gator gumbo, I’ll tell you,” Ford replied, his eyes rolling back into his head as if he could taste the food at this moment.
“Haven’t had that in fourteen, nah fifteen, years though,” he added with a heavy sigh.
A giggle slipped past her lips. “I heard the accent there,” she whispered.
“See? Don’t you want some of your mawmaw’s gumbo again?” I pressed, making sure to pronounce ‘mawmaw’ the way he did.
Ford rolled his eyes and slid down from the counter. “Nice try. But even that’s not gonna work, Bernie,” he said and walked around the island, stopping beside Kat.
Tipping his head her way, he gave her a simple smile. “Nice to meet you. You should come tomorrow, especially if that means I get to watch you chew Bernie out. But I’m gonna head to the store and see what they got so y’all can fuck without an audience.”
Her eyes widened, and she stiffened, freezing as if made out of stone. “So—So we can what?” she squeaked, staring at Ford as he adjusted his ball cap and walked to the front door.
A chuckle left his chest as I inhaled deeply. “Raiden may be young and innocent, but I’d recognize that look you keep giving Bernie a thousand miles away. Plus, he’s got sweatpants on that really isn’t hiding much.” Ford tossed his head in my direction and then pulled open the door. “You two aren’t fooling anyone.”
And he slipped outside without leaving a chance for either Kat or myself to protest him.
With a quick glance down, I shoved my hands back into my pockets and attempted to adjust myself.
“Fucking shithead,” I muttered as Kat’s eyes slowly slid to me without a single other muscle in her body moving.
Chapter 22
KAT
My cheeks burned. Everything in me urged me to look again. I thought I’d been subtle when I first noticed Bernie shifting uncomfortably and caught onto why he was, but apparently not. His friend had seen my reaction, and here we were, suddenly alone, and my mind seemed to have forgotten why I was upset at him in the first place.
“I didn’t choose to get a fucking boner, okay? You just…” Bernie grumbled, his eyes looking at everything but me.
“Don’t turn all bashful on me now,” I replied, shocking myself with the little bit of flirtatious sweetness in my tone.