Uh-oh.
Before I could fight back the Barlow Bitch Pull it popped out of my mouth. “In his bed.”
Eek!
Red alert! Red alert! Scary air hitting danger zone! Evacuate the premises immediately!
Then Luke growled in a voice so low, I barely heard him, “You’ve got to be f**kin’ shittin’ me.”
“Luke, it was no big deal. He wasn’t there,” I decided to go back to breezy.
I was standing a few feet in front of him, between him and the garbage can.
He leaned in but kept his seat. I leaned back. I did this mainly because his intensity was kind of scaring me.
“You wanna call Zano right now? Ask him, shoe’s on the other foot, he f**ked you three times, you fell asleep with his c**k inside you, how he would feel about you takin’ a nap in my bed?”
It was then I saw his point.
Then again, if it was Ren f**king me, he would have been f**king me. Not some fill in until he sorted out his feelings for another woman.
On that thought, I lost interest in my Milano and threw it back in the bag. I put the bag on the counter and sifted my fingers through my hair, leaving my hands on top of my head. Then my eyes moved back to Luke.
He was holding his body perfectly still and I got the impression he was doing that so he wouldn’t strangle me.
Time to defuse the situation. I controlled the Barlow Bitch Pull and took a deep breath.
“Luke,” I said softly. “Give me a break. It’s not like, in my life, I’ve ever been in this situation. I’ve no f**king idea what I’m doing.”
“What you do is, you let me sort it out for you. That’s why you came to the f**kin’ office in the first goddamn place,” he snapped, no less angry for my soft voice.
I dropped my hands and looked at him direct in the eyes. “That’s not the situation I’m talking about,” I said, voice still soft.
“Give me a clue.”
Nope, no less angry. I looked away, closed my eyes tight and licked my lips.
Could I do this? No, I couldn’t do it. Still, I did it so I guess I could do it.
I looked back at him and on another deep breath, I admitted, “You know, Luke. You know that most of the time I couldn’t get a guy to look at me. Much less a hot guy. Now I have four. Four, all after I’d sworn off men. I don’t know what to do.” My voice went ultra quiet, barely even a whisper, even so there was an accusation to it. “You know. You, of all people, know.”
That’s when his body unstuck. Before I knew what he was about, he leaned forward, his arm snagging me around my waist, and he pulled me around the garbage bin and to him, between his legs, our torsos tight together. His other arm closed around my upper back, pinning me against him.
“I’ll tell you what to do. You come to me when you gotta sort shit out. I’ll take care of you. You come to me when you need somethin’. I’ll take care of it. I’ll also tell you what not to do. You don’t have dinner with another man. You don’t sleep in his bed, I don’t care that he’s not in it with you. You don’t leave me standin’ on the sidewalk while you take off with a guy who, days earlier, kidnapped you and threatened to blow your f**kin’ head off. You don’t –”
“Okay I get it,” I broke in quietly.
His arms tightened and he gave me a mini-shake. “You better get it, Ava. I’m not goin’ through the last six hours again.”
I looked at the piles of stuff on the bar. I had left him several, now there was only one. I had come home and he was sitting, sorting through it and eating a cookie.
I looked back at him, confused. “Organizing your paperwork?” I asked.
He stared at me a second as if three identical noses had just popped out on my face then his head dropped back. I could almost hear him asking for patience from the divine. His chin came back down so he could look at me.
“I mean worryin’ where the f**k you were and if you were okay considerin’ the last look I had of you, you had tears in your eyes.”
Oh. That.