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She disappeared for a second as I searched my contacts for her number and returned to view while answering.
“You have my attention,” I said, uncomfortable with how I could see her inside her lit-up room. She’d yet to swap her clothes for pajamas, at least.
“I never drink this much. And it’s been forever since a man has touched me, so I’m horny. Then I felt rejected. I was a brat. I’m sorry,” she rambled.
I set my forearm flat against the window pane and let go of a rumbly growl of frustration.
Had she forgotten about our conversation in my bedroom earlier? She’d been sober then, spelling out how long it’d been since a man had touched her and how badly she needed to get laid.
“Your honesty is going to get someone hurt,” I admitted, my tone a touch too gruff.
“Oh yeah. How so?”
Because I want to cut off every hand that’s ever touched you. And that was crazy. Especially since one of those hands belonged to my brother.
“I suggest you turn your ass around and go to bed, Natalia,” I said, going with a slightly safer response than the truth. “And I don’t want you drunk dialing anyone. Or tripping over a shoe.” Like I did earlier.
She remained quiet. But she didn’t need to talk to torture me. Because she was busy walking her fingers down the buttons of her blouse, popping them open one by one while holding the phone to her ear with her shoulder.
She freed the last button, and I was relieved to see she had a white tank top underneath. And God willing, a bra since she’d been at work.
“Go to bed, please,” I grated out, hoping she wouldn’t notice my tone of voice had me sounding Fifty Shades of Fucked. Probably not what that movie was called, but yeah, my dick was hard. In desperate need of stroking. But I was in my mother’s house, and I wasn’t sixteen, so that felt all kinds of wrong.
“Like I said, I called because I’m horny.” She cursed. “Sorry. I meant I called because I’m sorry.”
I straightened, lowering my arm from the window. “I’m two seconds away from breaching your property to tuck your ass into bed myself. I don’t need you calling some dude after we hang up. Or deciding to go streaking beneath the moonlight. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen you this way, so I have no idea what to expect.”
“Breach my house, huh?” She chuckled.
“You don’t think I can?”
“Oh, I’m sure you can.” She set her palm on the glass. “But do you want to risk getting caught in my bedroom? My very Italian father would lose his mind. It doesn’t matter that I’m thirty-two.”
I smiled. How could I not? She was so damn adorable.
But when she began working the Rabbit Beach blue blouse free from her left arm with one hand, I was worried she was going to lose her balance and trip and fall. And then I would need to breach her property and risk a lecture by Mr. Romano if he caught me in her room.
“Well, if you don’t want me becoming target practice for your old man, then do me a favor and go to bed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sir? I lowered my hand to my crotch to adjust my pants.
“But only if you tell me a bedtime story. You do that, and I’ll be a good girl. No tripping. No streaking. No drunk dialing bad boys.”
I clenched my hand at the idea of some “bad boy” going near her. Not on my watch.
“Bedtime story?” I did my best to shake the tension from my arm and open my palm before I spoke again. “I only have war stories for you, sweetheart. I’ll just give you nightmares.”
“Twenty years in the Navy,” she whispered. “We missed so much of each other’s lives while you were gone.”
I backed up a step from the window at her words and the tender, sad tone of her voice. My chest didn’t feel right.
“I know far less about you than you know about me,” she went on, catching me off guard a bit. “The man you’ve become in the twenty years since you left . . .”
I set a palm to my heart and moved the heel of my hand in circles, trying to free the pain growing there.
“You take your coffee black. And your favorite color is—”
