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“Jules, I’ve seen you with the Cheerio hair accessories and that Manchester United shirt so ragged you should burn it. Sometimes you look like you just fell out of bed and your hair hasn’t seen a brush in forever. All it does is remind me that your focus is your kid and that you’re the most unselfish person I’ve ever met. Seeing you, the real you, turns me on big time. So don’t tell me how I feel.”
She swallowed, absorbing into her bloodstream what taste she could savor from his lips and those heart-stopping words. Holding onto that taste for dear life.
“Okay.”
Those flinty blue eyes, more navy than blue now, drilled into her. Unavoidably, she licked her lips to taste him again, drawing a flare of arousal in his eyes and a heated growl. A very erotic sound.
This is actually happening.“Think about what I said.” Maybe not.
“What you said,” she whispered, when really she wanted to scream at him,Kiss meagain,because thinking was so not what she wanted to do right now.
He uncurled her clawed hands from his shoulders—she had been gripping him tight enough to bruise—and removed himself from her barnacle grip.
“You’re right to be worried. There’s a lot on the line here so we shouldn’t do anything rash, but you need to know that I want nothing more than to get all up in your business, Juliet Kilroy. Let’s sleep on it and give it some consideration, okay?”
She nodded.
He smiled.
Oh, mercy, that smile was like a hot lick to her mouth. She had seen that weapon in action. Worse, she had seen the consequences. Understanding his appeal had never been difficult—Good God, the man was sex-in-motion—but in this moment, she finally got why his rejection of her last year was the best thing to ever happen to her. If she were to wake up to that smile, even once, she would be finished.
“Sweet dreams, Jules.”
He may as well have said,Sweet dreams of me, Jules.Her response died in her mouth.
Just as well when all her brain power was dedicated to keeping herself (a) upright and (b) from begging him to stay and audition for the role of Jules’s Summer Fling. As he turned to leave, she caught the twitch of his lips. The man knew what she was thinking.
He was her friend after all.
Dazed, she watched as he pounded down the stairs to the rhythm of not just her heart, but something infinitely lower. The guy looked as good going as he did coming.
Unavoidably, her mind flew to the contents of her nightstand drawer and her battery situation.
“Everything all right?”
She jolted at the sound of Shane’s voice behind her. The door to the apartment he shared with Cara was a few feet down, but he couldn’t possibly have seen what just happened…how long ago was it now? She had no idea how much time had passed while she stared at the steps that took Tad away from her. Ten seconds? Ten minutes?
Binding her robe tighter around her overheated body, she turned to Shane. “Fine.” Tad had just kissed the stuffing out of her but otherwise, it was all cool.
At Shane’s bare feet, his cat Vegas—so named in celebration of the place and crazy circumstances surrounding Cara and Shane’s marry-cute—rubbed his owner’s legs.
“On walkabout with Vegas?”
Taking the utterance of his name as an invitation, the scrawny, mottled gray bundle of fur moseyed on over to Jules’s door and snaked by into her apartment. Since she’d moved in, the cat had scratched at her door at least three times a day trying to get inside his old digs.
Shane let him walk about the hallway, trying to wean him off his reliance on his old environment. Spoiled rotten, he was, which didn’t bode well for the kids.
“Do you mind if he takes a gander?” Shane asked, resigned but indulgent. Vegas was already padding about in Jules’s living room, sniffing the living room rug and rubbing against the side of the sofa.
Shane leaned against the door frame, casually handsome in sweats and a tee.
Although not related by blood, they had become close since he’d come into their lives about a year back. He and Jack shared a father; Jules and Jack shared a mother.
His lips scrunched in a grimace. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“When you were pregnant with Evan, did you get, you know, um…”
