Page 12 of Lines We Cross
Jase nodded sagely. “Sure, I get that all the time. It gets tiring beating them off with a stick.”
There was a beat of silence and then we all cracked up, the levity of the situation bringing a celebratory feel to the night.
It felt good to be back with my brothers.
5
Skylar
I tried to push Max out of my thoughts for the last forty-eight hours.
Unsuccessfully.
He was like a parasite, worming his way into my consciousness when I most certainly didn’t want him there. Why focus on a parasite when you had a warm and cozy grizzly bear to go out to dinner with on Saturday night? Okay, that was going a bit too far with a bad analogy. Jay wasn’t exactly a grizzly bear on the scale of wildlife awesomeness. More like a slug who thought he was a butterfly.
I scraped my hair off my neck and into a bun on top of my head, nearly pulling it out at the roots with how aggressively I tied it up. I needed to stop comparing the two men and face reality. Max might have the physique of the statue of David had he had a Gold’s Gym membership back in the day, but he was also a jerk. Plain and simple. Fell for him once, wasn’t doing that again.
Jay was lovely. Jay was nice. Jay was… Well, he was available and one hundred percent assured not to break my heart. Perfect.
The bell above the door let out a terrible racket. I hustled out of my postage stamp office and turned the corner to see Max with a big, loopy grin on his face.
Yeah, he looked good all right.
Gym shorts, gray fitted athletic T-shirt, hands on his hips, and muscles popping everywhere. Add in the smile and he was deadly.
“Morning, Gingersnap,” he crowed.
I frowned. “What’s got you so fired up this morning? And don’t call me Gingersnap.”
His grin only intensified, the wattage almost shorting out my brain.
“Didn’t you notice? My brace is off.” He pointed at his leg and my gaze traveled down, enjoying the journey despite my best intentions.
I tilted my head to the side, unwilling to get too excited just yet. He’d had major surgery and the recovery would be difficult and long.
“Been icing it?”
His head nodded. “Yep.”
“Been stretching?”
“Twice a day, PT Goddess.”
My eyebrows almost met in the middle of my forehead. “Don’t call me that either.” I spun around and walked into the main part of the clinic, over to the raised table. Maybe some inflicted pain in the form of stretching would shut him up. “Come on. We got work to do.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him hustle over, his limp slightly less today. That was a good sign, but I didn’t want him getting his hopes up too soon. He needed to work hard every single day for weeks on end to even have a hope of coming back from that injury.
He hopped up on the platform with more enthusiasm than two days ago. In fact, he’d been downright grumpy the first day, which had suited me just fine. I was perennially grumpy. Hadn’t always been that way, but I didn’t give myself the time to dissect all that. The smile on his face seemed a permanent fixture today, a complete reversal in a short period of time.
“What’s got you acting like a ray of sunshine, huh?” I asked while placing the heating pad around his knee. His left leg had much less of a tan than the other. If we were still kids, and on speaking terms, I’d tease him about being so pasty white. As it was, we were virtual strangers.
He shrugged, the edges of his lips still pointing up. “My knee is less painful, I’ve got a pretty woman working on it, and my brothers are back in town.”
I looked up at his face sharply. The news of the crew being back in town was enough to stifle my complaints about the pretty woman comment.
“Brothers?”
Max nodded, the highlights in his hair flashing under the lights in the clinic. Women paid good money for that blend of light blond hair woven into the dark. I was sure Max got his the old-fashioned way, being out on the baseball field every day. The smile intensified to the point I almost started smiling back.
