Casual Affair (Timid Souls Book 2) (5 page)

“It got you to come over to me, didn’t it?”

He raised an eyebrow back at me, challenging me, which
dammit
…I kind of loved. I admired a man who could give as well as he could receive. Not that I hadn’t already known that. Our night together three weeks ago was enough evidence of it.

“Touché,” I conceded, smiling at him. I looked at both of their mugs and asked, “So, what are we drinkin’ tonight?”

“Just Yuengling,” Zane replied. “I’ve found it to be one of my favorite American beers.”

“You know that it’s the oldest brewery in the country, right?” I asked.

Zane looked at me with a curious expression, like he was equal parts impressed and fascinated with me. That look made me gulp, actually gulp, with the emotion it had behind it.

“No. I didn’t know that,” he responded quietly.

Needing to wipe that too-serious look off his face, I changed the subject. “Care to make things a little interesting, boys?”

“Oh, I love a good wager,” was Mike’s response as he sat forward in his chair, putting his elbows on the table.

“I bet that I can chug one of those mugs down faster than either one of you. If I win, both of you have to take a shot of my choosin’. If I lose, I’ll do a shot that you choose.”

They both looked at each other with perplexed expressions and then exploded into laughter. I rolled my eyes, used to this, expecting it even.

“You think you can beat
both
of us in a chugging contest?” Mike asked through his laughter.

I just smiled and nodded. “Yes.”

“Both of us?” This from Zane. “I’m sorry, luv, but I don’t even want to take you up on that.”

I looked over at him and put my hands on my hips.
Sassy Bea is coming out to play
. “And why not?”

Zane’s smile disappeared fast and instead formed a worried grin. He looked almost scared that I was going to go all dramatic on him, accuse him of being a sexist, and throw his mug of beer in his face. I think he even angled the arm holding it a few inches away from me. I wanted to laugh at the whole thing because to think that I could actually intimidate a man like Zane gave me great pleasure.

“I just…” Zane faltered with his words. “Look at you,” he said, gesturing down to my body. “Where would you put it all?”

“I have talents that you aren’t aware of,” I replied, lowering my voice suggestively. I could tell the innuendo had an effect on him when he swallowed slowly and his pupils dilated slightly. “You big, strong men aren’t afraid of losin’ to a little girl like me are you?”

Again, they both looked at each other, but this time with nervous expressions. “No,” they said in unison.

I nodded, satisfied. “Then, I’ll get the beers.”

Yeah, I won.

When they both realized they were going to lose, they had actually stopped drinking their beers just to watch my last few gulps with wide open mouths. I laughed at their stunned faces, waiting for their questions.

“How in the bloody hell did that just happen?” Zane asked.

He apparently felt it necessary to give my body another once over, I guess to make sure that I didn’t have a tube of beer running out of me somewhere. Whatever the reason for his perusal, I could feel everywhere his eyes touched my body, sending shivers down my spine.

I shrugged. “Fast metabolism and a lot of house parties in college.”

I left them still sitting there speechless and went to retrieve the shots I decided on from the bar. When I put them down in front of them, Mike asked in a wary voice, “What is it?”

“Oh, you probably don’t want to know until after.”

Zane shook his head and blew out a breath, preparing himself. “A deal is a deal.” He held out his shot glass to Mike, clinking them together. “To God and country.”

They tipped their heads back and swallowed down the disgusting liquid. I shuddered just thinking about what they were drinking because I very well knew what was in that. Their coughing fits lasted a good two minutes, their throats and stomachs rejecting the substance. I knew it probably wasn’t nice to laugh but I couldn’t help it.

“Not your cup of tea?” I mocked in my best British accent.

Zane let out a “bollocks!” as he tried to catch his breath at the same time that Mike shouted out a “bloody Christ!” before chasing the shot with the rest of his beer.

“By God, woman. What was that?” Zane asked before he chugged down half the glass of water that was sitting on the table.

“Gorilla Puke.”

Their heads whipped around to me. It was Mike who asked, “Do we even want to know what that is?”

I tried for a sweet smile but it probably came out looking more evil than anything else. “Bacardi rum and Wild Turkey bourbon whiskey. Stuff is lethal. But you both took it like champs.”

“Oh, this isn’t over,” Zane said in that deep, grating voice. My lady bits were responding in kind to hearing that sound. “This means war.”

##

Bea

A week had passed since the night at the bar with Zane. He and Mike had challenged me to a game of darts and then shuffleboard after the chugging incident, my guess was to avenge their wounded male pride.

And I kicked their asses.

It was a good thing my competitive nature didn’t allow me to lose often because otherwise I would have been calling Uber to get home. It was also a good thing that Zane had stopped drinking so he could drive Mike and himself home because his roommate had been well past the hammered phase. I laughed my head off when Mike started doing his impressions of us “Yanks.” His American accent was the worst thing I’d ever heard.

But the craziest part of all?

I had an amazingly fun time.

I hadn’t realized how much I missed just being able to casually hang out with a guy. Especially a guy that I had to admit I was kind of in to. I was normally so preoccupied with trying to be sexy and seductive around men so I could get them into bed.

But that night at the bar had been comfortable and easy. No pressure, no expectations because let’s face it, Zane and I had already had sex so we knew there wouldn’t be any surprises in that area. And I was even more taken aback that he hadn’t made a single move toward me. I mean, there was some heavy flirting and majorly hot eye contact. But he hadn’t asked me to come home with him and hadn’t kissed me goodnight or anything. Not that I had expected him to or even wanted him to.

Did I?

It made me question whether or not Zane would even consider sleeping with me again. But when he’d told me at the end of the night while trying to wrestle Mike into his car that he would “talk to me soon,” I had to think that he at least wanted to see me again.

And I had to decide whether that was something I wanted, too.

I was at our office, getting ready to leave for the day, as I mulled over these thoughts. Our office served as part office and part show room where we showcased a small sample of our work for potential clients. I had been hauling and rearranging furniture for most of the day, changing some of the displays in the show room for our last rotation before the fall season began.

Felicity had been handling client meetings today while I covered the office. We employed two full-time associates, but one had to take off because her son had surgery today and the other one was out of town for a funeral. So, I got stuck doing most of the heavy lifting by myself, and although my body was exhausted, I was also strangely energized. I preferred that type of physical exercise, the kind that I could feel in every muscle of my body. It made me feel like I was getting the most effective workout.

I was starting to lock up the building when my cell phone rang. Of course, my idiotic heart leapt in my chest with the thought—
hope?
—that it might be Zane.

Not quite.

The person’s name on the screen still brought a smile to my face, though. “Hi, Daddy.”

“Hey, Sweet Bea,” his raspy voice said over the line. The nickname he’d had for me since I was about six, his own take on “sweet pea,” always put me in a good mood. “How you doin’?”

If people thought my accent was thick, my father had thirty more years of deep southern exposure going for him, so every word out of his mouth oozed with that heavy twang. It was the most comforting sound in the world to me.

“I’m good. How are you? How’s Mama?” I propped the phone on my shoulder while I locked the front office door and headed for my car that was parked in the small parking lot behind the building.

“She’s doin’ just fine. You know her, always got some charity somethin’ or other to run, so she’s stayin’ busy.” I could picture him sitting in the wingback chair of his office, kicking back after a long day and getting ready to fire up his trusty cigar.

I missed him.

It was a well-known fact in our family that I was a daddy’s girl and Felicity had been born a mama’s girl. They both loved us equally, of course, but I was exactly like Daddy and Felicity had most of Mama’s qualities. I had always been the more athletic daughter, wanting to play any and every sport the schools could throw at me—volleyball, basketball, softball, soccer, tennis, track. You name it, I’ve done it. And Felicity had been devoted solely to gymnastics and beauty pageants, exactly like Mama. She was their little blonde puffball of a girly-girl and I had been their tomboy. I became more girly over time, but I was still a tomboy at heart.

Once upon a time, I had almost been resentful of the close relationship that Felicity had with our mother, but I’d gotten over that in about two seconds. The whole dynamic worked for our family and I deeply cherished the bond I had with my father. He had done all of the things with me that I think he would have liked to have done with a son if he’d ever had one, and I learned a great deal from him.

“Been able to play much golf lately?”

“I’m hopin’ to get to play some this weekend if your mama will let me. She’s threatenin’ to hide my clubs from me if I don’t get my cholesterol down,” he grumbled.

I was opening my car door when he said that and paused. “How high has it been?”

Heart disease ran in his side of the family, and it was something that had always worried us with him. He wouldn’t take good enough care of himself without Mama’s help so our worry was justified.

He scoffed. “It’s fine. You know she worries over everything.”

“Daddy,” I chided as I got in my car and started the ignition, “you need to listen to her. You know that’s how Papa’s problems started. It isn’t somethin’ you should ignore.”

He sighed the sigh of a tired man, well past his prime but not ready to leave us all yet. “I know, darlin’. I’m alright.”

I headed for our townhouse, distracted from the rush hour traffic thanks to our conversation. He asked how the business was going and told me about his and Mama’s recent vacation to Hilton Head. It was a good end to my day and start of my evening.

I had hung up with him by the time I walked through the front door. For some reason, I didn’t feel like going anywhere tonight. I wanted to get out of my uncomfortable work clothes and open a bottle of wine, and follow it by another. The last thing I wanted to do was put on a dress I couldn’t breathe in, heels that killed my feet, and go prowling the bars for another companion for the night. I just wasn’t down for that scene at the moment.

I’d actually been feeling like that a lot lately.

Weird.

But I was not about to analyze the possibilities of why I felt that way. That kind of freaked me out.

An hour later, Felicity breezed through the front door to find me sprawled out on our living room couch, three glasses into the bottle, and watching
Drop Dead Gorgeous
, a favorite of ours. She dropped her bag and purse on the floor and plopped down beside me, snatching the wine glass from my hand and taking two huge gulps. She didn’t usually drink very much, so I figured there was a reason for this and I couldn’t help but smile.

“Had a meeting with Gabe today, didn’t you?” I asked her.

Gabe Wexler was a millionaire and had recently become a client of ours. And Felicity was crushing on him…bad. In her defense, he was a downright beautiful man, so I completely understood the attraction. But he hadn’t asked her out yet and my sister was one of the shyest people on the planet.

If he didn’t make a move soon, I wasn’t sure that Felicity had the gumption to ask him out herself. She had just never had a lot of confidence when it came to men. That was another area we differed in.

“Yeah,” she mumbled, sounding disappointed and frustrated. “Nothin’ but polite handshakes and friendly smiles, like always.”

I felt for her, really. Not having a guy’s attention the way you wanted to sucked.

“Well, you know where I stand on the whole situation.”

She sighed and closed her eyes. “You know how hard it is for me to put myself out there like that. I always jumble my words and I sound like an idiot. I don’t want to embarrass myself with him, especially if he says no and then I’m stuck workin’ with him, knowin’ that he rejected me.”

I took the wine glass back from her and finished it off myself. “Hon, you’re thinkin’ way too much about this. It’s only a big deal if you make it a big deal. Besides, you said you thought he liked you too, right?”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t exactly wear his emotions on his sleeve. I could be readin’ his signals completely wrong.”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

She made some humming noise, effectively terminating the conversation and we turned our attention to the TV. I started quoting lines from the movie in that same northern accent the actors used—
“Hey, Amber. Did you get my smokes?”
—never failing to crack Felicity up.

She looked over at me when she finally caught her breath. “Not goin’ out tonight?”

I didn’t turn my head, just stared straight ahead at the television when I answered, “Nope. Not in the mood.”

I felt her stare remain on my profile and I sensed that she wanted to ask me more, the questions probably on the tip of her tongue. But she didn’t. She stayed quiet and eventually returned her attention to the hilarious murdering beauty queens on the television.

Thank God, too.

Because I wouldn’t have had any answers for her.

##

For the first time in a while, I actually slept in the next morning. I had been blessed with the ability to recover very quickly from a long night of drinking, even if I was nursing a pretty grueling hangover, and was usually up early every Saturday for my morning run.

This morning, though, I allowed myself to relax and enjoy a slower, steadier pace to the start of my day. Something I wasn’t very accustomed to.

But I was still going for my morning run. I needed the exercise to clear my head.

There was a craft convention downtown this afternoon that Felicity and I were going to go to together—we could often get new design ideas from the various vendors—but I had nothing planned for my morning. After telling my sister where I was going, I headed out the door and started along my usual route through the city.

It was a hot morning and I was already building up a good sweat within the first half mile. I was suddenly wishing that I had put on sunscreen because with my short spandex shorts and Dry-Fit tank top, a lot of my skin was exposed to the blistering morning sun. Since I normally ran at a much earlier time, the sun was never something I had to worry about.

I tried to keep my mind clear of everything that had been occupying it the night before when I was trying to fall asleep. Unfortunately, there was only one face that kept flashing through it. One voice that was ringing in my ears. One night that was so potent in my memory, it felt like it had happened yesterday.

No man was allowed to take up residence in my head for that long.

I was pissed at myself for it.

I had to evict him and fast.

Because this was such a different Saturday morning than I was used to, I decided to change my route a little and headed toward the park two blocks away. It had a decent track around its perimeter, so I figured I could go around it a few times before heading home.

When I entered the park, I noticed there was a large group of guys playing soccer in the big grassy area in the middle of the park. My interest was piqued, especially when I noticed they were divided up between shirts and skins.
Jackpot.

I certainly wouldn’t mind something to look at while I exercised. Maybe it would make up for my lack of male companionship last night. I started running along the path, bringing myself closer to the guys.

And then my world stopped.

Because I recognized one particular stubbled face among the panting, sweating bevy of men.

Zane Price.

And great Abraham Lincoln, he was on the skins team.

I was staring, quite obviously, at Zane’s bare chest, hardly believing what I was seeing. I mean, I had seen it that night we had sex but not in the daylight where his tanned skin glistened under the sun’s rays. And not while he was playing a sport that allowed me to ogle his bulging muscles, which were flexing and tightening with his exertion.

It was the hottest thing I had ever seen.

I hadn’t even realized that this park was only a few blocks away from his apartment. And let me just say that despite what the movies and books might tell you, it’s actually pretty hard to just randomly run into the one person you can’t quit thinking about, especially in a city this size. So, needless to say, I was sort of in a state of shock to be staring at the star of all of my most recent fantasies.

I had literally stopped on the path to watch the sight before me like a crazy stalker, which was of course the moment that Zane’s head whipped around in my direction and his eyes connected with mine. He squinted for only a second before realizing it was me and a huge smile broke out onto his face.

Why did he have to smile at me like that? Like he was genuinely happy to see me?

It wasn’t the first time he’d done it and I was quickly learning that I was never able to say no to him when he looked at me like that.