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When he smiled, laugh lines crinkled up that she hadn’t even noticed were there. His cheeks creased. His teeth gleamed, white and even. He had a dimple on one side, and kind eyes, and a beautiful, beautiful mouth.
He wasn’t a rock at all. He was a man.
A very hot man.
She’d known that already, but she kept forgetting, and he kept bludgeoning her over the head with it when she least expected.
Flustered, Katie returned to her reading. It took her a while to find the groove again, but the last section was riveting.
The last page was astonishing.
“Let me make sure I have this right,” she said finally, setting the report aside and meeting Sean’s steady gaze. “What you came here to tell me is, basically, two things: (a) Judah Pratt is gay, and (b) someone is kind of sort of threatening to kill him.”
He nodded.
She smiled.
“You’re going to think I’m a terrible person for saying this,” she told him. “But that is such a relief.”
Chapter Twelve
Sean raised his coffee cup to his lips, which made it difficult for Katie to decide if it was her imagination or if he was indeed struggling not to smile again.
A deeply dismaying thought occurred to her. “You didn’t know, did you? Tell me you didn’t know he was gay the whole time, because if you knew and let me make a complete ass of myself, I’ll have to disembowel you.”
Sean choked on his coffee, set the mug down, and wiped off his mouth with the back of his hand. There was no mistaking his expression anymore. He was definitely smiling. As she watched, the smile kept getting wider.
“You think this is funny?”
He shook his head and covered his mouth with his palm.
“It’s not funny,” she insisted.
Though it was, maybe, just a little bit. A new dress, new lingerie, and all that effort to sleep with a gay guy. You either had to laugh or cry. There was no real middle ground.
“He doesn’t look gay!” she said, and Sean’s shoulders began to shake. His cheeks went pink, and his eyes were so warm, so lively and compelling, she gave up and started egging him on. “Come to think of it, though, he smells gay. I think he had pomade in his hair.”
Sean tipped over sideways on the couch, overtaken by silent laughter, and the sight of him there—that deep dimple peeking out from beside his fingers, his infectious amusement—all of it filled Katie with a clean sort of pleasure that lit her up and made her smile back at him without reserve.
Who was this guy, and what had he done with Granite Man? He was … bright, somehow, brighter than she’d known he could be. She hadn’t thought Sean Owens capable of smiling, much less laughing until he collapsed on Caleb’s couch, but he was. How could she help but like him for it?
So she sat there and watched him, grinning through her bewilderment, until eventually she remembered that when she smiled big like this, her snaggletooth showed and she looked—according to an offhand comment Levi had once made—as if she’d been lobotomized. She dialed back the smile to a more attractive wattage, and the act reminded her of Judah for some reason, and of the (b) point in Sean’s report. Then she didn’t feel quite so much like smiling.
“I shouldn’t make fun of him,” she said. “Not if some psycho’s threatening to murder him.”
Sean pushed himself up and wiped his damp eyes with the hem of his T-shirt, giving her a glimpse of flat stomach that she would have given back if she could only figure out how. That thin line of golden hair disappearing into his jeans … she shouldn’t have seen that. It wasn’t something she could manage to un-see.
“I don’t know,” Sean said. “I get the impression he d-deserves it.”
“To be killed?” she asked, still marginally dazed. Sean and Judah hadn’t exactly hit it off, but surely Sean’s wishing Judah dead was a tad extreme.
“To be m-mocked,” he said. “For wearing hair p-product.”
Katie gave him half a smile, relieved. “Ah. Because real men don’t.”
“Exactly,” Sean said, his dimple making a brief, flirtatious reappearance. “It’s on the b-books. One of the Man Laws.”
“Last time I checked, though, it wasn’t a killing offense.”
