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Luna came up on his other side and patted him on the shoulder, offering comfort since his wife was currently bent over, laughing hysterically at her husband’s dramatics. “Of course you are, studs. Here, drink this. It’ll make it all better.”
Sam took the wine cooler she offered without looking at it and slugged some back.
“Damn,” he grunted a second later. “That’s good stuff. Got any more of these?”
Luna gave me a triumphant look. “Sure do, big guy. Follow me.”
As she led him to the cooler, I burst into laughter right alongside Monica.
Chapter Fifteen
Sawyer
“Oh my God,”Luna groaned dramatically from where she was splayed out across the sofa, limbs akimbo, one arm and leg hanging off the edge. “I’m never having kids. Never ever ever.”
The party was officially over. Renee had been bathed—twice to get rid of all that sand—and was passed out in her bed in much the same position as Luna, having experienced a major sugar crash about an hour earlier. Everyone but Trent and Luna had headed home, the former helping me to clean up the disaster left behind from the party, while the latter continued making sounds I’d expect to hear from a bag of wet cats, lamenting all the million reasons why she was never bearing children.
Trent grabbed another plastic cup from the table and tossed it into the garbage bag he was holding, looking through the sliding door toward the living room. “She okay?”
“She’ll be fine,” I assured him as I tore down some of the streamers and stuffed them in my bag.
Luna’s head shot up over the arm of the couch, her hair a bedraggled mess hanging in her eyes. “I amnotokay! I think I contracted some kind of virus from that walking petri dish that puked on me. You seriously need to consider moving Renee to a new daycare. I think half those kids had tuberculosis or something.”
“Randy didn’t spread anything to you. He only threw up because he ate too much candy.”
“So his mother said,” she grumbled sullenly. “We can’t really know for sure until I’m knocking on death’s door.”
She flopped back onto the couch. “She gets like this every year,” I told Trent. “She usually bounces back within a week or so.”
“Not this time!” she shouted from the living room.
Trent and I fell into silent laughter as we cleaned up the backyard before moving indoors. “I get the feeling Sam didn’t like me very much,” he said as he carried a load of crumb-covered trays over to the sink and turned on the hot water.
“Oh, that’s because he doesn’t.” Around the time the boy from Renee’s daycare class projectile puked all over Luna, I’d succumbed to the stresses of spending the majority of the day with eleventy-billion toddlers, and dove into her wine cooler stash. She was right. Once that film built up on my tongue, blocking the taste, they weren’t so bad. I wasn’t drunk, hell, I wasn’t even tipsy, but the combination of the alcohol and the pure, undiluted exhaustion had stripped me of my filter completely.
His head shot around, one brow arched, dimples on full display. “Don’t sugarcoat it or anything.”
I laughed, shaking my head as I snatched up my wine cooler and moved into the kitchen, hopping up on the counter just like I had last time, the time we’d kissed. Had to remember not to do that this time.
“Don’t take it personally. It’s not because of anything you did. Monica explained it to me, but I didn’t actually believe it until I saw it for myself today. He’s jealous. Sam’s used to being the town eye-candy. You showed up, and now he’s worried about being dethroned. I’m sure he’ll get over it eventually.”Like when you leave,I thought, suddenly overcome with a ridiculous wave of sadness.
One corner of his mouth hooked up in a crooked smirk. “Well it makes sense now why he challenged me to an arm wrestling competition.”
I choked on the drink I’d just taken, trying to clear my lungs of piña colada wine cooler as Trent pounded on my back. “You okay?”
“Yeah, sorry,” I wheezed, batting the tears from my eyes as I laughed. “I just didn’t know he’d done that.”
“Yeah. That, and he kept asking how much I could bench.”
I looked at him curiously. “How muchcanyou bench?”
He shot me a wink as he squirted soap into the hot water, creating suds before he got to washing. “Enough.”
Was that... flirting? It couldn’t have been. Trent had made it perfectly clear where we stood, so he couldn’t possibly have been flirting. So why the hell did it feel that way?
Clearing my throat, I ripped my gaze away from his smoky eyes and stared across the room at nothing as I gulped back more of the wine cooler. I had a feeling I was going to really regret drinking these come morning. The unique, intoxicating smell of his cologne was starting to make my head fuzzy. I needed to put some distance between us before I let myself get the wrong idea again. I wasn’t sure what it was about this man that muddled my brain so badly, but I couldn’t seem to find my footing.
Hopping off the counter, I moved around the bar and resumed my cleanup duties, stacking empty cups and plates and tossing them in the trash. “You know, you didn’t have to stay to help clean up.”
