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“I promised you lunch, apparently.” Technically, Granny’s the one who promised you because she’s a hacking master. She hacked my freaking phone and saw that I texted you to see if you made it home okay last night. Granny. Meddling. Crazy. Crime fighting, world-saving, my own ass saving Granny. “I’d say there’s a good chance that what I just told you put you off of it, though.”
“Uh, nope. If you want lunch, I’m down. Or not. I’m okay since I had pie with my mom this morning. But I could eat. If you want to eat.”
“God, no. I mean, I already had lunch. Sorry, the second part is probably a more appropriate response.”
Cass. This woman. This woman is something else entirely. She’s standing there studying me like I didn’t just tell her more than I’ve ever told anyone, basically the whole freaking truth, which is unheard of for me. I just didn’t tell her the parts about what went down after Granny. I told her about all the parts before I was even Lennox, which is a name I chose for myself. That was part of Granny’s thing. We all needed new names to keep ourselves safe, but also because we weren’t where we came from, and we got to decide where we were going.
That’s right. Granny one told me the same thing I told Cass last night.
Cass’s brows pull down, and holy moly, sweet, tart, crisp, sugar-sprinkled cherry pies, I want to take my thumb and smooth that wrinkle out of her brow like smoothing a crisp, freshly dried sheet. Yeah, I really like doing laundry. Nothing wrong with a little laundry. It’s a good way to pass the time, and it’s very therapeutic. Plus, who doesn’t like the scent of freshly cleaned fabrics?
“Coffee then?”
“You want to have coffee with me after all this?”
She grins, stands on her tiptoes, and grasps my shoulders in a foothold as her body, with all her sensual curves, cozy warmth, and lush womanliness, brushes up against me, turning me from kind of only semi-hard to full-on raging. Now I’m back to having a sword in my pants that I could go full-on video games blaze of glory with. Then, incredibly enough, her lips press against mine, soft and lush and so freaking kissable.
I let myself revel in the kiss, cherishing every single second of it. It’s a kiss that says you just told me the worst, and I know there’s more, and it’s probably worse than you could even express, obviously, since I’ve seen the evidence. I know you can’t tell me everything, and that’s okay. We all have our secrets, and I’m going nowhere.
She kisses me sweetly, just a brush of her lips against mine after that scalding, soul-shattering, mind-blowing, breath-obliterating, heart-pumping kiss.
“Are we getting that coffee?” Can I see you again? Could we have a semi-proper date? Or I’d be okay with just hanging out too. Do you want to roll the dice and see if a piano falls on you, or possibly a satellite coming out of orbit, or an alien spaceship, or maybe just pigeon poo? Her eyes ask all of that and more.
Coffee isn’t just coffee.
I didn’t think I wanted coffee in my life. I thought I was doing okay without coffee. That I could live without the kick of caffeine, but this coffee isn’t like any coffee I’ve ever had before, and now I’m a little bit…
“We’re getting that coffee.”
Hooked.
CHAPTER 8
Cass
“Oh my god, how did you get my address?” I’m standing at my condo’s front door, and I’m shocked to see Lennox there, especially because he’s holding the cake I sent to the pawnshop—a triple-layer strawberry shortcake specialty, compliments of one of the best bakeries in the city—and the card that I dropped off to go with it before they couriered it over.
He braces the cake in one arm and holds the card in the other. “Smiles are contagious,” he reads off the front of the card, then opens it with a nifty move of his fingers and finishes with the words inside. “When you’re around them, you catch happiness.” He pauses, and his lovely green eyes sweep away from the card and land on my face.
I swear the look on his face is so simmering that I could orgasm on the spot. I can practically feel my clit pounding in my mom jeans. I’m wearing my oldest pair of jeans, a black ribbed cotton tank top, and a big headband wrapped around my messy bun because I was doing one of my least favorite tasks, which was cleaning my oven. I do it at least once a year, whether it needs it or not. Spoiler alert: It always needs it. I’m a messy baker and an even messier cook.
“You sent me a cake. And a card. But it’s not my birthday.”
