What he did know, was that he’d been unable to do anything about it. Once the UFC found out from Butch that Reid was up in Reno getting special training and therapy for his injury, they’d set up press conferences and publicity signings, and he’d had no option but to do them. It was part of his contract.
It’d been damn hard to focus, though, knowing that while he was answering the same questions he’d answered dozens of times, Lucie was being ogled by that surgeon. Maybe even groped if he’d had the chance. Shit, he hadn’t thought of that before. Had Mann kissed her already? Then again, it didn’t really matter. She was getting ready to leave on a date with the guy even as he lay there, so she was as good as kissed by the end of the night.
Reid’s hand tightened on the beer bottle and his jaw clenched.
A bang and clatter came from the bathroom down the hallway. “Shit!”
He turned his head in the direction of the commotion. “Everything okay in there?”
“Yeah,” she said dejectedly. “I just knocked my knee on the vanity and put a run in my pantyhose, and it’s my only pair.”
“You want me to run you to the drugstore down the street?” Then maybe he’d accidentally take a wrong turn on the way back making her late and Mann would think she stood him up and lose interest due to his fragile ego.
“No, that’s okay, there’s no time. I’ll just go without.”
Go without? The guy would have access to her bare legs. All it would take is a brush of his hand under the table linen and he’d be able to do all sorts of creative things even though they were in public. He’d know; he’d done it plenty of times when he got bored during required dinners with the upper echelon of the fighting world.
“Why don’t you just wear a pantsuit?”
He heard the clacking of heels on the wooden floor and then she rounded the corner where he could see her. Immediately his mouth began to salivate like the ripest strawberry he’d ever seen dangled right in front of his face. That’s what she reminded him of.
Bright red from boobs to butt, she was striking in a simple cocktail dress. Spaghetti straps so small as to practically be nonexistent, a neckline that dipped into the space between her breasts, and a hem that flirted around her thighs, mere inches from the curves of her butt.
She’d curled her hair into large ringlets that gave her a smoking just-been-tumbled look and her makeup was noticeable, but subtle, with the exception of the matching red lipstick.
Affection between them right before she went on a date with another guy seemed all kinds of wrong and he’d figured it was better to avoid it than analyze it, so he’d planned on keeping things platonic for the evening.
But the image of those juicy lips wrapped around a certain part of his anatomy bombed an RPG-sized hole right through the Appropriate Dam he’d constructed in his brain.
“I don’t own a pantsuit, Reid. You never picked one out for me to try on.”
Of course he didn’t. What guy wanted to see a girl in an ugly-ass pantsuit? His eye had been drawn to every single tiny dress he could find. What a fucking moron he was.
“Doesn’t this look okay? Is it too much?” she asked while trying to get a good look at herself by twisting her body in all sorts of directions. Just then her intercom buzzed, sounding like an air horn in the otherwise quiet apartment. “Oh, God, I’m so nervous. I can’t do this. I’m going to tell him I can’t go. Claim I have food poisoning or a spontaneous case of pancreatitis.”
He was so close to agreeing with her. So goddamn close. But in the end, he couldn’t do it. Just because he was experiencing some strange and juvenile bout of jealousy over her didn’t mean he had the right to sabotage her impending happiness with Dr. Perfect Dimples.
Kicking his inner caveman back into his cave, he stood and crossed to her. “Here,” he said, handing her the bottle. “Drink some of this and relax. You’re not canceling the date and wasting all this effort I’ve put into being your fairy godmother.”
She placed a hand over her stomach as though trying to quiet the butterflies inside while the other accepted the beer and polished it off in less than five seconds. So much for his one beer.
Handing him the empty, she said, “Thanks, I needed to hear that.”
“Because you like picturing me with wings and a magic wand?” he said with a smirk.
She laughed, looking more at ease every second. “No, you dumb jock, because I needed the encouragement to actually go through with this.”
Encouragement? Reid sobered and studied her face, trying to see if there was something—anything—he might be missing. The buzzer rang again and even though it sounded identical to the first time, he swore the man’s impatience from two floors below somehow changed the pitch.
Aggravated at the interruption he took the two strides to the door, depressed the intercom button and barked, “We hear you, hold on,” before returning to her.