SLOW PLAY (7-Stud Club #4) - Christie Ridgway Page 0,83
or she could and never looked back.”
He studied her. “Which means you, as the youngest, was alone at the end.”
At the beginning and in the middle too. But they’d all had to raise themselves with only Gwen as a stabilizing figure. “I’m okay.” She had been, anyway, until Tad Kersley.
“Sure you are,” Ren murmured, his gaze not leaving her face.
His steady regard lifted chill bumps on the surface of her skin. She suppressed a shiver and tried to think of something to drop into the awkward silence developing between them. Her tongue darted out to wet her lips.
Ren exploded into motion. “I’ve gotta get into a shower.”
Cilla drew back. “Oh, sure. And I can make you some breakfast before you leave.”
“Leave?” Ren paused in the process of scooping up his discarded clothes.
“You know.” She made a vague gesture. “I’m here. I’ll keep an eye on the compound.”
“All alone? It’s pretty isolated.”
It was better than sharing that isolation with him. Cilla wasn’t up for dealing with the way he made her tingle all over. Even if she was only just looking, her sexuality was already messed up enough without having to brush up against Ren-tosterone on a daily basis too. “Really, I’m good.”
He was looking at her again, in that intense fashion of his. One hand absently traced over the bare skin covering his ribs, re-drawing her attention to all his masculine bone and muscle. God, he was gorgeous, she thought, her own flesh turning hot and her breath catching once again in her throat.
“Yeah,” he agreed softly. “I can tell you’re good.”
Not if he could read her mind. Not if he could know how his sexy body and his beautiful green eyes made her hyper-aware of every erogenous zone between her head and her heels. “So then…”
“We’ll talk about it after I shower.”
Her palms went damp in desperation. “Really, Ren—”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Look.” She grasped at straws. “It’s not seemly.”
“What?” he asked, clearly puzzled.
Did rock royalty even comprehend such a word? Cilla waved her hand. “Even if you stay at Bean’s house, your old house—”
“If I stay, I’m staying here.”
“Well, I’m staying here.” She had to spell it out for him? “So, you know…you can’t. Two single people, one a man, one a woman, sharing close quarters…”
A smile split his face. “So that’s not ‘seemly’,” he said, shaking his head. “Priss—”
“Cilla.”
His smile didn’t dim. “C’mon. ‘Two single people’? Surely we’re more like…like…”
Oh, don’t go there, she thought on an inner groan. I’ve enough doubts about myself and my attractiveness to the male sex without you saying what I think you’re about to say. But then, of course, he did.
“…brother and sister.”
Ren exited Gwen’s small, canary-colored cottage that dripped with gingerbread trim and strolled into the morning sunshine, its warmth immediately starting to dry his shower-damp hair. Narrowing his eyes against the California-brightness, he sucked in a breath and tried shaking off the strangeness of the morning.
Jet lag was seriously screwing with him, he decided. Usually a few hours of sleep would clear his mind. But today, he’d opened his eyes and things had gone from weird—an unexpected woman in his bed—to weirder.
Priscilla Maddox’s mouth had turned his normal morning wood to a rod of aching steel.
Shit.
Shoving that thought from his head, he turned in a circle, taking in the pool and tennis court in the distance as well as the three homes where he and the other rock royalty had grown up. At seventy-five yards away, Bean’s place was closest. Western-styled, with a shake-shingle exterior and a front door sporting a steer skull, it looked the same as when Ren had lived there. Beyond it was where Mad Dog Maddox had built a rock-faced castle-type abode, with a Rapunzel tower which Ren remembered had been a particular refuge for little Priscilla. The third member of the band, Hop Hopkins, had a severe glass-and-chrome two-story home where Beck, Walsh, and Reed had grown up.
His mind snagging on the missing member of that family, Ren pulled his phone from his jeans pocket and pressed a speed dial number.
“Yo,” a male voice answered. “Isn’t it like the middle of the night wherever you are?”
“I thought when you went home everything was supposed to seem smaller,” Ren said to his half-brother Payne, by way of answering. “It’s all so…so.” So sun-drenched. So lush. So bright with flowers and birds and colors.
The arresting blue of Cilla’s eyes.
There was a small silence. “Are you telling me you’re at the compound?”