Crazy Stupid Bromance (Bromance Book Club #3) - Lyssa Kay Adams Page 0,44
off the freeway at the exit that would take her to his house, a two-story Craftsman that looked modest on the outside but was completely remodeled and modernized on the inside. Noah had installed solar panels along the roof, all new electricity and energy-efficiency stuff, and a bunch of other things he’d tried to explain to her once but she didn’t and would never understand.
Floodlights illuminated the shadowed driveway when she pulled in. She’d barely turned the car off before the front door opened. Noah came out barefoot in a pair of jeans and a faded MIT sweatshirt. Every emotion she’d been smothering for the two-hour drive returned in a flood as she slid out of her car.
“Hey,” he said, jogging down his porch steps. “I’ve been trying to reach you. Is your phone dead? What happened?”
Alexis shut her door, met him halfway on the sidewalk, and threw her arms around his waist. He immediately wrapped her tightly in his arms and held her against his chest. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
Alexis pressed her cheek to his warm breastbone, the sound of his heartbeat a reassuring cadence.
“Talk to me,” he said against her hair.
“He . . . He threw me out.”
Noah’s arms stiffened. “He what?”
Alexis pulled away from him and looked up. “He told me to leave. He doesn’t want me or my kidney.”
Noah’s face hardened into something that should have been intimidating but was instead thrilling in its protectiveness. “I should have been with you.”
“I’m glad you weren’t. It was too humiliating.”
Noah took her hand and pulled her up the sidewalk. “Come inside.”
“What were you doing?” she asked, following him back up the porch steps. “Am I interrupting anything?”
“Just my panicked pacing because you weren’t texting me back. I thought you’d gotten in a car accident.”
She laughed quietly, but he turned around at the front door.
“I’m not kidding. I was about ten minutes away from calling hospitals along the freeway.”
“I’m sorry. I . . . I was—”
“It’s okay. I’m just glad you’re here.”
He held open the door for her to walk in first. His house was warm and smelled like pizza. Her stomach growled instinctively.
“When was the last time you ate something?”
“I don’t know.”
He nodded toward the kitchen as he shut the door. “There’s some left. I didn’t order any meat in case you wanted some.”
The gesture brought a flurry of butterflies to her stomach and made her heart do the thud-thud thing again. “Thank you.”
“What did I tell you about thanking me too much?”
“Would you rather I take you for granted?”
“I’d rather you get it through your head that I’m here for you, no matter what.”
Alexis toed off her flats and left them by the front door. His house was a standard layout for a Craftsman style. The entryway opened into a long hallway with rooms on either side and a staircase off to the right. There were three bedrooms upstairs, one of which he used as a home office.
The hallway ended in the kitchen, which led to a small dining area where she’d shared countless dinners with him over the past year. The brown place mats she’d crocheted for him during a brief attempt at the craft were piled in the center of the table, unused and mostly unusable. But he’d kept them anyway.
“Sit,” he said, nodding toward the table. “You want something to drink?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
He stuck a couple of slices of pizza in the microwave and then pulled two pumpkin ales from the fridge. The sleeves of his T-shirt stretched over the bulge of his biceps as he twisted the top off each bottle. Heat raced up her neck as her mind immediately returned to the image of him without a shirt.
She scarfed down the soggy reheated pizza as she filled him in on what had happened. With every new revelation, his expression alternated between rage and sympathy.
“I should have listened to you,” she said.
Noah lowered his bottle to the table. “Don’t do that.”
“But you were right.”
“I could have just as easily been wrong. You had to see it for yourself.”
“You’re a better judge of character than me.”
“No, I’m not. I’m a cynical asshole who thinks everyone has an agenda, and you’re a goddamned ray of sunshine who automatically assumes the best intentions.”
Alexis laughed. “A goddamned ray of sunshine?”
He gave her a half-hearted smile. “All this wedding stuff is starting to rub off on me.”
“Anyway,” she breathed, leaning back in her chair. “I guess that’s that. I get to keep my organs, after all.”