The Player Next Door - Kathy Lyons Page 0,23

her hair, letting the straight blond hair drop around her shoulders. God she was beautiful and he wanted her more than he wanted his next breath.

Meanwhile, she pressed her head against his shoulder. Her breath was warm where it cascaded over his chest and he wrapped her tight in his arms.

“Tori—” he groaned.

“Will you wait here? Just for five minutes?”

What could he say to that? Of course he’d wait. He was dying to know what she’d do next.

Chapter Six

Tori spit out the toothpaste, rinsed her mouth, and then took a good long look at herself in the mirror. She absently noted that her cheeks were flushed, and her hair was a mess. But rather than focus on those trivialities, she stared into her own eyes and did something she absolutely hated to do: she thought about what she was about to do.

As a rule, she hated weighing pros and cons, thinking her actions through, and all that ponderous head stuff. Her mind was better suited to philosophy and comparative religions. Ask her to describe the different myths attached to the Egyptian god Set, and she could recite them from memory. Ask her to plan her next week, and she was hopeless.

Ask her to decide exactly what she wanted to do with her next door neighbor, and she broke out into a cold sweat. But not thinking about her relationships is how she’d ended up with Edward for so many years. It was time to change that pattern. Besides, she got the feeling that Mike was worth the extra work.

So she thought.

She thought about the way his eyes crinkled when he laughed. And that he laughed often with her. She thought about running her hands down his entire ripped torso—front and back—and seeing if she could name every single muscle as it popped under her fingers. She thought about how very big he was, and yet she didn’t feel dwarfed or stifled around him. If anything, he was too careful—physically—with her and she found that really sweet.

She tried to think of the cons, and frankly there was one really big one. He was a sports god and she was clueless. Worse, she thought what he did for a living was shortsighted. Who picked such an unstable career? Forget being too old by age forty. One twisted ankle—or a torn rotator cuff—and he was out of work for the rest of his life. It was nuts, and by extension that made him nuts.

And yet…she still liked him. She still wanted him. She still—

“Tori? You okay in there?”

“Um. Yeah. Just a second.” She hurriedly flushed the toilet then rinsed her hands, splashing water on her face as an extra boost. It was what she always did when she started thinking in the bathroom and took too long.

A quick brush through her hair and she opened the bathroom door to see him leaning against the wall right outside the door, a look of wariness in his eyes. He scanned her from head to toe and then opened his mouth to say something. She didn’t give him the chance.

“I want a rebound boyfriend.”

He blinked at her, his gaze turning laser sharp. And he didn’t say a damned thing. Which was really uncomfortable.

So rather than face his weird expression, her mind skittered away to something irrelevant. “Wait. That’s a basketball reference, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said slowly. “It is.”

Nothing more. Damn, this was harder than she thought. Most men usually didn’t require so much thought on her part. They needed little prompting to fill the conversation, but he actually listened to her which required her to say intelligent things or explain herself. That was harder than it should be, but she gave it a shot anyway.

“I’ve decided I want a boyfriend to help me get over Edward.”

“Do you need help getting over Edward?”

She swallowed. No, not really. “Maybe,” she hedged. “Maybe I need to experience other men.”

“That would require more than one man. And not a boyfriend, which implies a commitment. Or at least exclusivity.”

Good point. “I’ve tried sleeping around. It wasn’t nearly as fun as it sounds.”

His eyebrows rose at that even as he relaxed backward against the wall. “That’s something we have in common then,” he said in the way she sometimes said things that weren’t on point, but filled the silence while she thought of something else to say.

And yet she was pretty curious about that. “So you’ve slept around?” Then she winced. Of course he slept around. All she had to do was