Page 29 of Cody

I swung my gaze to him. “Yeah. Had a great time.”

“We can tell,” Cramer snorted, puffing away.

All three of them looked past me as I sat with my back to the women and Max. It didn’t take a genius to know who they were looking at.

“Fuck all of you,” I snarled, reaching for the cigar King held out to me. I bit off the end, spit it out to the side of me, and lit it.

“You must be losing your charm.”

I glared at King through the haze of smoke.

“Crashed and burned twice in one day. First Evelyn, now Alina.”

A frown furrowed my brows in response to his words. The scowl on my face obviously had given King the wrong impression. My situation with each woman was quite different. “Just to be clear, I broke shit off with Evelyn. And we’re not talking about Alina.”

I wasn’t going to talk about her, but I sure as hell was going to think about her and that date she had coming up with Max. Max was easy-going and the most patient one of us in the group. In spite of his background, he didn’t jump into shit without working things out ahead of time, as if he had an internal check list that he followed. I knew if I had even hinted that I wanted Alina, he would mark her off his list and step back.

I was tempted to, but doing something like that wasn’t me, and it wouldn’t be fair to Alina. Max had dated other women I’d been involved with. Hell, he might have even slept with them, but I didn’t care. We didn’t compare notes. If he’d shown interest in having something more with a woman I was sleeping with, I would have shown him the same respect and stepped back.

“Are you boys okay over there? Need anything?”

“Need my woman over here on my lap!” King called back with loud humor in his tone.

“Sitting on your lap is what got me into this predicament.” Everyone laughed when Mia stood up and rubbed her hands over her rounded belly.

“Yeah, but you have clothes on this time,” he smirked. “And I can’t knock you up while you’re still growing my son.”

As they joked back and forth it gave me the opportunity to look over my shoulder. I frowned when I noticed that Alina wasn’t there. Had she left? Maybe she’d gone in to use the bathroom to clean up the mess I’d made of her pussy.

That thought put a grin on my face.

Chapter 15

Alina

I parked in the lot next to where my new coffee shop was going in and went inside. Max was going to meet me there before dinner. The date that I’d dangled in front of Cody the day of the cookout was actually a business dinner. At the cookout we’d got to talking, and Max had offered to help me with some of the work that needed to be done at the coffee shop. I was excited to get started.

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