a finger in the air. “First of all, I don’t prance anywhere. Secondly…” I trailed off.
Damn, she had a point.
“She’s always made you happy, Hudson. And I did see a few sparks between you over dinner this weekend, so I’m even less surprised to hear this now. I wish you could have kept it in your pants until Cal owed me a hundred bucks. But it’s a small price to pay to know you won’t be going off the deep end in a few years with a midlife crisis, bringing home a nineteen-year-old model who doesn’t speak English.”
I chuckled and scratched the back of my head. “I’ll still probably invest in hair plugs and a sports car.”
She shrugged. “Now those I can deal with. But anyway… I don’t really think there’s much to discuss with Alexis. But maybe the next time the grandparents have Jack for a night, the four of us can go out to dinner. Mark really seemed to like you two.”
“Yeah. Sure,” I mumbled.
“Anything else?”
That was Lauren: direct and to the point. Not arguing or mincing words. She was happy for me.
“No, that about covers it.”
“Okay. Let me know when you two decide to tell him. I’m dying to hear how the whole ‘I’m dating your aunt’ conversation goes down.”
“Probably similar to the ‘I’m dating a grampa’ conversation you had with him.”
“Hey!” She swatted at my arm and I narrowly avoided her wrath.
I laughed. “All right, well, I need to go kick Cal in the dick for being a nasty motherfucker who bet that his best friend would sleep with his sister. But you have a good weekend, Lauren.”
She shot me a wink. “You too, Hud.”
The real reason I had to go to Cal’s house was I’d had a crew there all afternoon cleaning up and putting the finishing touches on the pool, and since they were doing this as a favor to me above and beyond their normal hours, I was paying them all in cash. I usually met them back at the office, but that would take time I did not care to spend driving around town when I could be spending it with Lex.
Giving Cal absolute hell for betting on me and Lex with Lauren was really just a bonus.
I must have looked like a punch-drunk fool grinning ear to ear the whole way to Cal’s. It was strange. You’d think the minute I got her clothes off would have been the moment things with me and Lex finally felt real. Now that Lauren knew, it felt like we’d taken it to the next level. And holy shit if that wasn’t a high I never wanted to come down from.
It’d been a while since I’d been smitten with a woman. And honestly, even on the brief occasion over the years that I’d met someone, it had been short lived. Probably because the woman I was supposed to be with had been sitting across the booth from me every Thursday night for years.
She was the image in my mind as I hopped out of my truck in front of Cal’s, and as I rounded his house and saw the pool already half full, I couldn’t wait to see her in a bikini, giving her brother shit for ever being against it.
“Get in there, you sonofabitch,” Cal cursed as he kicked an inflatable unicorn into what appeared to be a new all-weather pool shed.
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
Over his shoulder, he glared at me. “I’ll tell you something you can kiss with yours.”
My hands went up in the air and I laughed at the poor guy. “I come in peace. I just wanted to see how the pool looked all finished up.”
Finally, he finagled the cartoonish raft into place and shoved the door shut with his shoulder. Turning, he cocked a suspicious eye at me and stood with his hands on his hips.
“What?” I asked, prepared for the never-ending wrath of Dr. Calvin Lawson, MD.
“Why do you look like that?”
I scanned down the front of myself. Boots. Jeans. Black Hud Construction T-shirt. I didn’t see anything strange. “Well, this is what a blue-collar man looks like, Cal. Not that you’d recognize it.”
“No, jackass. That smirk.” He took a seat on one of his new ultra-plush chaise lounges, and I plopped down into a club chair next to him while he examined me. “Let me guess. This will be fun. You plowed over a family of ducks on your way over. No. You conned your