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“I’m not. Fucker would’ve gotten it from me if you hadn’t stepped in.” He gently pressed the peas to his eye and leaned back on the couch. “How’s the nose?”
“Hurts, but I’ll be fine. I don’t think it’s broken. I’ve definitely had worse.”
“You have?”
“Oh yeah. I was a lot of trouble growing up. Got into more than my share of fights. It was why I started playing rugby when I was in school. Had to ‘get the aggression out’ somehow, you know?”
“For me, it was playing guitar.”
“That too. I dunno. I had a lot of big dark feelings swirling around. Something about playing rugby and not thinking about anything else helped me compartmentalize.” I thought back to all the instances my emotions had got the better of me over the years. This was the first time in a very long time I’d slipped up.
“I get that. I feel the same when I’m on the back of a horse. They can feel your emotions. Did you know that? So if you’re stressed or scared, they know. Riding clears my mind. Keeps me grounded.”
I wanted to say something stupid like, and you look fucking hot doing it, but I stopped myself. It wouldn’t do any good to keep blurring the lines between us.
“Why’d you step in?” he asked, shifting on the couch and wincing a little.
“I wasn’t going to let him talk to you like that. Are you kidding?”
“You didn’t have to come to my rescue.”
“I wanted to. You didn’t deserve that.”
The look on his face was like a knife twisting in my heart. Had no one ever stood up for him?
“You know that, right? That you’re worth being defended?”
He wouldn’t meet my gaze, but his breath hitched. “You should do yourself a favor and ice your nose too. It might not be broken, but it looks bad.”
I stood and went into the kitchen, snagging another bag of frozen peas as well as two beers. “Either you’ve got a real thing for peas, or you get into a lot of fights.”
Handing him the beer, I fought my need to give him an appraising once over. I went to twist off the cap on the bottle and frowned as I realized these required a bottle opener. “Bugger,” I muttered. “One sec, I forgot the opener.”
“I’ve got it,” he said, lifting his shirt and undoing his belt. I swallowed past the lump in my throat as he used his belt buckle to pop the top.
Why was that so sexy? He did the same to my beer, and I took the distraction of a long pull from the bottle for what it was, a way to tear my focus from his tight abs and that trail of dark hair leading down into his jeans.
“Sit down, Jamie.”
I grabbed my guitar off the stand and used it to play double duty. Job one: cover my unwanted erection. Job two: give me something to do besides look at him.
Strumming across the strings, I checked to see if the instrument was in tune, then began lazily picking out a melody, playing with something that’d been building in my brain the last few days.
“Who was the last person you wanted that you couldn’t have?” Killian asked out of the blue.
‘You’ was on the tip of my tongue, but that would defeat the purpose of everything I’d done tonight. It would break down the wall I built up and put me right back at his feet.
“Trust me, I’ve been there, just like you were with your bandmate.”
“So, do you want to keep drinking or do you want to play?”
“Both?”
He nodded and got up gingerly, heading into the kitchen. To my surprise, he brought me a shot of whiskey and another beer chaser before snagging his own guitar.
“Are you meant to be working tomorrow?”
He shook his head. “No. My brothers have put me on a forced leave of absence until I get this single recorded. Someone”—he shot me a glare—“told them exactly what would happen if we didn’t get this done.”
