“That’s fine,” I muttered.

He found a bottle opener in a drawer, cracked mine open, and handed it over. He grabbed some fancy IPA beer for himself and popped the top on his as well.

“Always a bartender,” I commented, clinking the neck of my bottle to his.

“If the shoe fits,” was his response.

I took a sip of the beer and glanced around his house. The beer actually tasted really good. I didn’t even know I liked beer. I’d always thought I was a mixed drink kind of girl, but maybe that was more of my mother’s influence on my taste buds from the time I’d spent with her in New York.

The house was immaculately clean. Nothing out of place, not even a stray shoe or book. The entire kitchen sparkled. I lived with my bachelor brother. Except on Tuesdays, when the maid visited to do damage control, our place was a disaster. How did a guy like Rhett have such a clean house?

“So,” Rhett said, drawing my attention back to him. “What do you say we order a pizza and watch a movie…hell, maybe even snuggle a little? Make a night of this.”

“Snuggle?” I questioned. “Did you just say snuggle?”

“Yes, I did. I am a big snuggler. The biggest. You okay with that?”

For the first time since our little incident in the car, I felt myself relax. “I’m okay with that. But I’m pretty sure I got off in the car and you didn’t. I…um…” Well, so much for relaxing. Why the hell did I just say that? The words just came out. Bringing this up made me shy all over again. I was surprised I’d even had the courage to ask him at all, but I really wanted to know why we’d stopped when we did. “Don’t you need to…um, finish or something?”

He took a long pull of his beer. Those X-rated lips of his formed the perfect, smiley ‘O’ around the opening of his bottle. “Look at you, all worried about my wellbeing,” he joked before taking another drink. “No,” he said after a moment, turning rather serious. “I’m good.”

Taking my hand, he helped me hop down from the counter.

“Come with me. Let me show you my room.”

I followed him through his perfectly clean house, down a long, dark hallway, and into his room. I had no idea where the rest of this night would lead us. But I had a feeling pizza, a movie, and snuggling weren’t exactly the way he treated all his guests.

He was making an exception for me.

CHAPTER 6:

RHETT

Fuck snuggling. I was not a snuggler. Seriously, I would rather die than spend pointless time holding some stranger, while counting the seconds until we could either get to round two or I could just put my clothes on and go home. So when I suggested snuggling to this girl, there wasn’t a person in the room more surprised than myself. Another cardinal sin broken—or at least it would be, if we did actually snuggle later.

In my room, I gave my girl the grand tour. There wasn’t much space for all my junk. There was my bed, my guitars, my movies, some of my old baseball stuff, and a few piles of books, on the occasion that I did read. My room wasn’t God-awful messy, I’d actually straightened it earlier, but it was a disaster compared to the rest of the house. My roommate Noah had OCD and kept the shared spaces in our rental sparkling clean. Just his thing. Only…his thing kind of made me look bad when you compared my room to the rest of the house.

Green Eyes didn’t comment on the clutter. Nor did she comment on the guitars—which usually were the first thing girls questioned. Could I play? Was I in a band? Would I sing something for them? What was it about women and musicians? Females love that shit. If a guy could sing, that automatically made him more attractive. Yes, I was in a band. Yes, I could sing. It didn’t even matter that my band sucked. For the One-Night Stand Guy, being in a band only made me more mysterious and allusive.

Then there was my baseball stuff. For a split second she almost seemed interested. She ran her fingers over an old wooden bat from way back in the day. My short-lived glory days were long over. These days, I played softball—with old men and lesbians. Not that I didn’t love the softball team Noah, Ellie, and I were part of—but it wasn’t the same thing as playing for the Daredevils. Or, as I’d always dreamed of as a kid, playing for the Majors.

“What movie do you want to watch?” was her only question. She gestured toward my small stand in the corner.

I shrugged. “You pick.”

Her mouth opened like she had something more to say. She said nothing. Then she sat on the carpet, her knees tucked under her body with her beer in hand, as she started inspecting my collection. God, she was beautiful. Certainly too good for me and certainly someone who didn’t belong in my room. Her hair fell in these golden waves down her back, kind of fluffy from our time in the car. Her red dress hugged her hips—hips that I got an up close and personal view of—quite exquisitely. And the way she sipped her beer…she had my cock hard already (yeah, it hadn’t died down in the least) and it was growing painful now.

But the memory of her coming for me, in my car, that was pretty un-fucking-believable. Nothing had ever happened so easily, so fluidly, or felt so…damned…right. I was high off the feeling she’d given me. And, no, I hadn’t ‘finished,’ but that didn’t even matter.

My whole body shivered just thinking about it.

“I’m going to go take a quick shower while you’re deciding. Okay, sweetheart? I smell like the bar. I’ll be fast.”

“You don’t smell,” she muttered, not taking her eyes off the movies.

“Well, it feels that way. It always feels like work is still on me after leaving that place, like it sticks to my skin. So I need to wash it off,” I explained. “I’ll be fast,” I repeated, leaving her alone in my room before she had a chance to respond.

In the bathroom, I turned the water on burning hot and jumped under the stream with my beer still in my hand. I hardly ever drank—it just wasn’t my thing. But I sipped on the cold liquid, such a contrast to the scalding water that beat against my back, as I tried to collect my thoughts.

I liked this girl.

I didn’t know her. I didn’t even know her name. Nor did I know who that tattooed guy was who’d punched me in the face, called me as ‘nasty motherfucker,’ and made her leave the restaurant when he caught us kissing on the first day we met. He kind of worried me. And for all I knew, the only thing she really wanted out of tonight was sex. That was the only thing most girls wanted from me. But this voice inside my head kept screaming at me that she was the real fucking deal. This was the ‘whatever’ in my life that I had been waiting for and the reason everything else head been feeling lackluster lately. I couldn’t ignore that feeling. It kind of freaked me out, but I couldn’t ignore it. So I was going to explore the hell out of whatever this was I was feeling.

After soaping up my body twice and rinsing off, I stepped out of the shower, dried, and then knotted my towel around my waist. I’d forgotten to grab clothes to change into, so going back half naked to my room where I’d left her was my only choice.

I found her in my bed. On top of the covers. Remote in hand, flipping through the TV stations. The moment I entered the room, she sat up as if I’d caught her watching porn. She, obviously, wasn’t watching porn. The Food Network was on.

“Did you pick out a movie?” I asked.

She held up my copy of The Princess Bride. “Is this okay?”

“Works for me. But you’ve got to get out of my bed.”

“Why?”

“Just for a minute, please.”

Shooting me a confused glance, she scooted over to the edge and stood. “Did I do something wrong?” she questioned. “Rhett.” She poked a finger at my bare chest, still a little damp from the shower, and gave me a small smile. It wasn’t a hard jab, but a playful one. She’d taken off her shoes in the time I’d been gone. Before, she’d been closer to my height. Without them, I now had a few inches on her. But her green eyes challenged me like she was twice my size.