Page 133 of Boyfriend of the Hour
“Good morning,” I said, with what I hoped was a very sleepy, slightly confused smile. Not a been-turned-on-for-the-last-fifteen-minutes smile. More of a what-just-happened? smile.
Though if anyone could stay asleep through a kiss like that, she was probably dead.
Nathan’s face was bright red as he looked at everything in the room but me. “Uh, hello. Yes, um, good morning.”
I propped my head up on one hand. “Sleep all right?”
Nathan nodded and shoved his glasses up his nose. “All right. Sure.”
Liar. I only knew that because it had taken me a full ninety minutes of staring at the ceiling to drift off, fully conscious of the two hundred or so pounds of absurdly good-smelling man next to me. And Nathan had been spinning like an egg beater the whole night, as though he absolutely could not get comfortable with me next to him.
I smiled wider. He blinked like an owl, like he was waiting for me to do something. Scream, maybe?
Or invite him back to bed?
I almost did it. God knew I wanted to.
“I’m, um, going to make some coffee,” he said. “Would you like some?”
I nodded. “Please.”
His gaze drifted over me. I was still clad in his T-shirt and my underwear, though in his flurry to escape the bed, the duvet had been pulled off one of my legs.
He managed to drag his eyes back to my face. “There’s, um, a, uh, robe of mine you can borrow in the closet. Because of Carrick.”
Again, I nodded. I’d have to sneak some things in here later today. Hopefully, Carrick had errands to run.
Five minutes later, I was up and swimming in Nathan’s bathrobe, an absurdly cozy cashmere thing that made me want to curl up like a cat in a window sill and look through a fashion magazine.
I padded down the hall toward the kitchen but stopped just outside when I heard Carrick’s voice.
“I gotta say, well done, brother. Well fucking done.”
I frowned and clutched the collar of Nathan’s robe close. I knew I didn’t like Carrick.
There was a pause while Nathan ground the espresso beans. “What exactly are you congratulating me for?”
“Just, you know, good for you. It’s about time you moved on.”
Moved on from who?
Her, my subconscious told me. There was only one person it could be. His college sweetheart, the one who’d broken his heart. At least in my imagination, that’s what she did.
I listened to the familiar sounds of Nathan working his espresso machine. “I didn’t need to ‘move on’ from Julietta. We were never even a little bit serious. It’s not a big loss or anything.”
Okay, so nother. One of the flings, then. Someone more recent, apparently.
I didn’t ask why that made me want to claw her eyes out.
On the other side of the wall, Carrick just chuckled. “Nothing sticks to you, just like Teflon, eh? Better way to be, even if she was a supermodel. Still, not a bad piece of ass for my shut-in brother.”
Again, I scowled. He made Nathan sound like a creepy hermit, but he wasn’t that at all. He was shy, was all. A little reserved. He didn’t deserve to be treated like a weirdo for it.
“Anyway, this one’s a nice little rebound, but did you really need to give her a room to get some pussy?” Carrick went on. “Based on her stuff, she probably would have settled for five hundred bucks and a smack on the ass. I think that bed frame is older than Mom. Squeakier too.”
I winced. Asshole. But more importantly, apparently, our pretend game wasn’t working so well. Even spending the night in Nathan’s room hadn’t convinced his brother that we were actually a serious couple.
“Don’t talk about Joni that way,” Nathan said, his tone sharpening in a way I hadn’t heard before. “It’s not like that.”
