The slider opened and Joey’s head popped out. “Sean, you got drafted for Monopoly and they’re going to start cheating if you don’t get in here and take your turn.”
Since he’d rather go directly to jail and not pass go then listen to Lisa try to explain Emma Shaw to Aunt Mary anymore, he gave the women a whaddya-gonna-do shrug and followed Joey to the family room. He was late to the game, so he got stuck being the stupid thimble, but he just grinned and pulled up some floor next to the oversized coffee table.
He then proceeded to have his ass handed to him by his cousins’ kids, who had the real-estate instincts of Donald Trump and the sportsmanship of John McEnroe facing off against a line judge. A guy’s attention couldn’t wander to a mass of dark curls and pleading brown eyes for a few minutes without hotels popping up all over the damn place. One moment of distraction, remembering the way his body had responded to hers, and he found himself promising Bobby a trip to Dairy Queen in exchange for the loan of a fistful of paper money.
He didn’t fare any better at Scattergories, though he did come up with “landscaper” when the letter was L and the category was occupations. Stephanie smoked them all, managing to find alliterative adjectives to go with her answers. Prissy Professor. For an F fruit, she came up with fresh figs. Sean’s was blank.
After the scores were tallied, he scratched down a few adjectives for his profession pick. Lovely landscaper. Lush landscaper. Or maybe…lusty landscaper?
“The grown-ups are breaking out the cards for some five-card stud,” Kevin told him. “We don’t take checks.”
Shit. At the rate he was going, he’d be bankrupt by the third hand.
Chapter Two
A cleaning service, Emma thought as she attacked another nest of rapidly procreating dust bunnies with the vacuum wand. That’s what she wanted the birthday fairy to bring her.
Actually, she really wanted Sean Kowalski for her birthday, but he’d scratched himself off her wish list, leaving her with nothing to do but take out her frustrations on the dark, dust-bunny-breeding recesses of her house. No. Her grandmother’s house.
Should she tell Gram over the phone that she and Sean had broken up, or wait until she got there?
It was a question she’d been asking herself since leaving his apartment the day before, but she still didn’t have an answer. Gram would be heartbroken for her. And she’d want to fix it, which she couldn’t do from one thousand, five hundred and thirty-one miles away.
Her phone vibrated in her back pocket, so she slapped the off button on the vacuum and tugged the phone free. A picture she’d taken of Lisa at Old Orchard Beach the previous summer filled the screen and she seriously considered hitting the ignore button. Lisa never called her in the morning because Emma was usually working and, as far as she knew, didn’t know she’d rescheduled some appointment to free up time to obsess about the house before Gram arrived. That meant something was going on and she had a gut feeling that something was Sean Kowalski.
After a bracing deep breath that didn’t do much to brace her, she hit the talk button. “Hey, Lisa.”
“Did you seriously ask Sean to move in with you?”
Emma groaned and sank onto the couch. “I really did.”
“Did he shut the door in your face?”
“No, he was very polite and careful not to make any sudden moves.”
“I think the phrase he used was ‘batshit crazy’.”
Ouch.
“But hot,” Lisa said. “‘Tall, hot and batshit crazy’ was his exact description.”
The hot part made her feel a little better, but in remembering his expression, she didn’t think hot meant hot enough to overcome the batshit crazy part. “I guess I’ll wait until Gram gets here to tell her my fiancé and I called it quits.”
“That sucks. If you say it just happened, she’ll wonder why you’re not broken up about it. But if it happened long enough ago so you’re over it, she’ll be upset you didn’t tell her.”
“Last week, when she said she was looking forward to meeting him, I said he felt the same way.” She needed something hard to beat her head against. “How did I get myself into this?”
“Your mouth’s quicker than your brain.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“So what did you think of him?” Lisa asked, her voice dropping down into the let’s dish range.
It should have been an easy question to answer since she’d been thinking about him pretty much nonstop—except for when she was obsessing about Gram—since she left his apartment yesterday. “I don’t know. Tall, hot and, unfortunately for me, not batshit crazy. But it’s not like I haven’t seen his face before.”