Page 27 of Flagrant Foul
My path is clear now. It stretches out in a straight, paved road from my feet to my future. Mae’s words find me again and again, clanking off mirror and glass. As I replay them, they change. They stop being her words and become mine.
My mantra.
My quest.
I’m going to seduce him.
I’m going to seduce Sev Delorean.
With that decided, I roll over, reaching for my phone and waking the screen. Numbers blink at me brightly enough to force me to squint. Four twenty-eight a.m. Good. Almost morning. Perfect. Only a couple more hours until the sun comes up and I can get this show on the road.
13
Teddy “T-Dog” O’Reilly
TosayI’mslowedup might be the greatest underexaggeration of all time. My eyes are dry. My mouth tastes disgusting, and I can barely put one foot in front of the other. The only thing spurring me through the fog of sleep, or lack thereof, is the smell of coffee wafting toward me.
Sev turns to face me as I stagger into the kitchen. He leans against the counter, not quite sitting on it, but hitching a leg up to rest a butt cheek on it. His hair is loose. Messy and tangled, though it somehow still manages to look professionally styled. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of sleep pants with the drawstring tied in a bow.
Ugh.
Fuck.
It’s too early for this level of hotness.
His T-shirt and pants are pristine. Neatly pressed without a rumple in sight. There’s no way he slept inthem last night. No, he slept naked and put them on when he woke up this morning. He probably walked naked to his closet to get them out.
Bare feet on the floor.
My closet. My floor.
The cotton stands out against his skin. Crisp white offsetting an olive-gold glow that makes saliva pool under my tongue.
“Coffee?” he offers.
“Please,” I croak, forgetting to remove excess layers of gratitude.
His eyes skid down my face and come to a halt near my mouth. “Bad night?”
“’Bout average.”
He takes a mug from the wall-hung unit above the coffee maker, slots it in place on the drip tray, and hits the button that makes the machine sound like a rocket trying to take off. I palm my dick while he has his back to me, pinning the rapidly thickening head under my waistband and covering it with my T-shirt, hoping he won’t notice my boner when he turns around again.
As coffee splutters into my mug in a frothy stream, Sev pulls a hair tie from his left wrist and transfers it to his right before reaching up with both hands. The movement is fluid, something he’s done so many timesthat he no longer has to think about it. Long fingers comb through inky black hair, carding it and pulling it back to the nape of his neck. For good measure, he runs his fingers through it again. From his temples all the way back. The same again, but this time over his crown. He finds errant locks and gets them under control before securing them with his hair tie.
The hair tie is black. Not thick and not especially thin. Nondescript, other than the fact that it belongs to Sev.
He twists it once and folds his hair into a bun, releasing the band with a barely audible flick.
Despite his efforts, it’s imperfect. Tiny whorls of hair have escaped confinement and curl on his neck and near his temples.
I hate how much I love it.
He pads to the fridge, opens it, and gets the milk out. He takes six steps on the way there, five on the way back. He smiles pleasantly as he moves the mug from the tray onto the counter and opens the milk. He pours a dash of milk into my coffee, just how I like it, but underestimates how full the carton is. He must, as he uses a little too much force and overpours. Milk spills over his hand, down the mug, and a little splashes onto the counter.
I watch, unmoving. Stock still as creamy liquid forms a thin stream, pooling on the counter once it’s run overhis knuckles. For an insane second, I almost lose control and offer to help clean him up. With my tongue.
That thought rattles something loose. Something worse.
