Page 376 of Love Bites

I picked a leaf out of my hair and turned around. “Long enough that I have to pee.”

He spun on his heel to give me privacy. I walked over to Naya’s phone and stuffed it in my pocket, then limped toward the car and grabbed my shoe.

“I’m not sure what kind of girl you think I am, Austin, but I’m not going to pee in a graveyard.”

“I seem to remember you having no problem reliving yourself behind a church.” Austin looked away, no doubt to hide his smile.

“Hey, you said you’d never bring that up again. That was supposed to go to the grave.”

Then I looked around at where we were and snorted.

The back of my arm burned and my joints were stiff. Austin jogged up beside me and pulled a piece of bark from my hair.

“What were you doing out here?” he asked.

“Making sure I didn’t leave a mess behind.”

“I cleaned that up,” Austin replied matter-of-factly.

I broke my stride and studied his thick brows that framed the clearest eyes I’d ever seen. “Why did you let me drive home drunk? I could have been killed.”

He folded his arms and I stole a glimpse of his tats. They disappeared beneath the sleeves of his shirt.

“I didn’t. You think I’d let you drive off in that condition?” He huffed with irritation and shook his head. “I didn’t want to rifle through your purse to find out where you lived, so I left you in front of your mom’s house.”

“How did you get back home?”

“Meet foot one and foot two,” he said, pointing down at his shoes. “Let’s go somewhere with air conditioning.”

“I have to do laundry. You get one rinse and spin to tell your story and then I have errands to run.”

Without another word, we got in our separate cars and he followed me to the Laundromat. Austin said he’d join me in a minute and took off toward a convenience store across the street where I sometimes grabbed a hot dog and soda. The laundry bags weighed a ton, but the handles at the top allowed me to drag them across the polished floor. I put in the first load and pumped a few coins into the washer.

Minutes passed and I hopped up on one of the machines to read a magazine.

“Let me see your arm,” Austin said, coming up on my left. He held a bottle of peroxide in one hand and a box of bandages in the other.

“Huh?” I spun my left arm around but couldn’t see anything.

“Your arm is bleeding, Sherlock. Lift it up and let me have a look.” He set the supplies down and raised my left arm over my head. That’s when I could see the scrape on my upper arm. It was deep and pretty gnarly-looking.

“So, are you going to tell me your life story, or are you stalling again?” I prodded.

“Christ,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

He shook his head. “I forgot to buy cotton balls.” He set the brown bottle of peroxide on the washer.

Before I could make a suggestion, Austin peeled off his shirt, wadded it into a ball, and doused it with peroxide.

I was pretty sure I would never buy another cotton ball again if this was the alternative solution.

Austin brushed my long hair away from my shoulder and eased between my legs. While he dabbed at my cut with his T-shirt, I got a bird’s-eye view of his torso. He smelled musky and everything about his body was different from the man I remembered. Not bulgy steroid-looking arms like Beckett, but solid. Then there was that sexy six-pack down below, and I tried not to look because I felt Austin watching me out of the corner of his eye. I lifted my gaze and focused on his tattoos instead.

Nope, that wasn’t helping either.

They weren’t so much on his bicep as they were on his shoulders, with tribal patterns sharpening down his upper arms and branching onto part of his chest. The last time I’d seen him, he was twenty-three and leaner. Austin was always tough by nature, just not in stature. He had always been the guy you didn’t want to mess with, and his nose was slightly crooked from one of his many fights.

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