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She swats my words away.'Yeah, but I was standing pretty far, and he was out there for just a minute. You got to stare at that wall of inked muscles way longer.'
I giggle, covering my mouth with my hands, feeling my cheeks going up in flames.‘Oh, stop it, you! The only reason why I got to stare that long is that I was getting scolded.'
She shrugs.‘And while you were at it, you could have rattled him a bit more, and maybe he would have dropped that towel entirely?! Just saying…'
I roll my eyes.'Penny, you can't mean that!'
'What?! I'm forty, not dead, and, jerk or not, that guy is prime eye-candy.'
I say nothing but can't say she's wrong. He may have acted like a rude asshat, but he sure looked handsome, even as pissed off as he was. Very handsome.
I laugh, shaking my head, trying to clear it from these bothersome thoughts just as Penny stands up from the little table we've been hogging in the break room.
'Gotta go, girl. Keep your chin up, okay? And if you ever run into that asshole again and he's rude to you, remember you can sic Mr. FBI on him.'
'Yeah, I'll do that, and then next time you see me out and about without a security detail, I'll be in my thirties. If I'm lucky.’
Penny smiles at me, but we both know I'm not really kidding. My brother's middle name should be 'Over-Protective Hard-ass’. If I were to tell him some big guy shouted at me, he would probably contemplate murder.
I will be telling him I met a rock star tonight, though. Just to see if he knows this Mr. Gabriel… but the one I share will be a PG-13, very much edited version of our little run-in.
A little voice in my head is impertinent enough to want to ask why I would care if Jared knows this dude or not.
Why would I want to know more about him?
I don't have an answer, and I'm not in any hurry to go find one.
I see Big Grumpy in my mind again, wet hair cascading over his forbidding eyes, large body heaving, teeny-tiny towel that might as well have not been there for the little coverage it provided, and I sigh like a schoolgirl.
I squeeze my thighs together at the thought of all those menacing tattoos running up and down his shoulders, the sides of his neck, and his arms all the way down to his wrists. I flush a bit at the memory. I had no idea wrists could be sexy, but I guess he showed me.
I think of the way those smoldering, sea-foam-colored eyes glared down at me, and then about how they fired up with something else entirely when he stopped screaming, something different, something hot that made me run out of there like a scared little girl.
God, I feel so stupid. Sure, it was a bad situation, definitely awkward, and I hate that panic brought tears to my eyes in such a way, but why am I still thinking about any of this?
About him?
Big, attractive, and a bit dangerous.
Not a good combination for someone like me.
Not that it matters. I frown to myself. Not that I wish itwouldmatter.
My stubborn brain still goes back to that suite, though. I can't seem to control the direction of my thoughts today.
It seemed to me almost like he had regretted bellowing at me at the end of ourencounter.I didn't spend too long studying him, but I did see a change there right before I ran.
I can't be sure I can trust what I saw, though. I was too panicky at the time, and everything happened pretty fast.
Still, facial micro-expressions analysis is pretty much the center of my studies right now, so I can't discount what I perceived, even if it was a matter of seconds.
But maybe he just realized he was blowing things out of proportion with that little scene he made, and he simply wished toappearapologetic at the end.
Normally, I'm fairly good at spotting liars —it's all in the body language— but I was pretty agitated in there, so I can't be sure.
What I know is that people lie. All the time. And hearing-people seem to do that even more when they deal with me for some reason. They believe they have some sort of advantage over me, and they never seem too remorseful to use said advantage to fuck me over.
I've seen it happen so many times. Too many to count.
