Fangirl Down (Big Shots, #1)

“I didn’t bring a bathing suit with me, so I was just going to stick my feet in.” She reached out and rattled the gate leading into the pool area. “It’s closed. I had a hunch it would be, but I figured I’d take the walk, anyway.”

“Mmmm.” Wells slipped the room key out of his pocket and approached the locked gate, taking a moment to study the mechanism. He lifted the handle slightly, then slid his card down between the slot and the metal tab, popping it open. “ ‘Closed’ is a subjective term.”

Josephine blinked. “Hotel security might feel differently.”

“At this time of the morning, it’s one guy in a golf cart and he’s probably sleeping.” He tucked his tongue into the inside of his cheek. “Do you want to get wet or not?”

“Wow.” She pushed his shoulder. “Real nice.”

“I was talking to your feet.”

Lips twitching with mirth, she walked past Wells through the gate he held open, circling to a shadowed section of the pool and sitting down on the concrete edge. Wells watched her as he approached, enjoying the way she pulled her knees up to her chest, slipping off her sandals and setting them side by side. So neatly. She rolled her pajama pants up to her knees and tested the water with her big toe, before dropping both of them beneath the surface, sighing and tipping her head back, eyes drifting shut.

“Are you going to join me?” she asked.

Was that a real question? He’d only gone to the fitness center in the first place to prevent himself from waking her up too early. Just so he could be around her. And find out how she felt about last night. Right now, she was giving away absolutely nothing.

Watching her closely for signs of regret, Wells toed off his sneakers and peeled off his socks, tossing them into a heap in the middle of the walkway. He joined her on the ledge and sank his feet into the cool water. Taking advantage of the fact that her eyes were still closed, her head tipped back, he ran his attention down the front of her throat and literally felt his pupils expand. Did he have the freedom to lean over and sample that skin with his tongue or were they still figuring out when, where, and how it was okay to touch?

“I was going to come knock on your door,” Wells found himself saying, with little to no prompting from his brain. Now she was looking at him and he had no choice but to qualify that with more words. “I wanted to make sure you didn’t feel weird about what happened. Wanted to get on the same page before our tee time.”

She leaned back on her hands, considering him. Outwardly, she was the picture of nonchalance, but even in the moonlight, he could see a slight flush on her neck. “Do I seem weird about it?”

“No,” he said slowly. “Then again, you’re out wandering the grounds before dawn.”

She wet her lips, rolled her left shoulder. “All right, I’ll admit I was a little caught off guard by the way you left so fast.”

That admission made his pulse scatter like a bag of dropped Skittles. “I left so fast because I was caught off guard.”

“By what?”

“How good it was.” When relief showed up in her green eyes, his sweat turned clammy on his skin. Had his leaving her room so quickly caused her to feel insecure? “I don’t know, my brain just kind of switched off when we started kissing. It’s never done that before.”

Were her cheeks rosier now or was that a trick of the moonlight? She looked almost . . . pleased by the fact that he’d lost his ability to think when her mouth touched his. At least one of them was cool with it. He might as well have ridden a roller coaster backward. “What do you usually think about during sex?” she asked, finally.

Red flags waved in front of his face. “Josephine, this conversation isn’t happening.”

“No, I really want to know.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I’ll go first—”

“Josephine, don’t even think of saying another word.” His blood pressure was now somewhere in the clouds. “Fine. I guess I concentrate on . . . not saying anything that might lead the woman on, while still making sure everyone has a good time.” He tried to read her reaction to that and couldn’t. “I’ve never been an asshole to women, Josephine. I just don’t want to get stuck with one of them.”

She put a hand on her chest. “I knew deep down you were a hopeless romantic.”

“Hey, they probably didn’t want to get stuck with me, either.” He rubbed an impatient hand on his thigh, wondering how the hell he’d gone from squats to baring his soul in a matter of minutes. “What I’m saying is, I wasn’t worrying about leading you on. Or getting stuck with you. I might have been surprised enough by that to leave a little abruptly. Believe me, it wasn’t you.”

Josephine was quiet for so long, her feet moving side to side in the water, that he almost begged her to say something, but she finally said, “You left out the part where your hoodie was on backward—”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Her laughter danced over the surface of the water. The silence was okay after that, but it lasted only until she tipped her head toward the gate he’d jimmied open. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that wasn’t the first time you’ve picked a lock.”

“No. But it has been a while. Good to know I’ve still got it.”

“Where did you hone these skills?”

He started to explain, then stopped. “I’m saying a lot of things this morning that make me sound like bad news.”

“Don’t worry, I already knew you were bad news.” She smiled, letting him know she was kidding. Thank God. “I also . . . like you, anyway.” She lifted her blue toes out of the water, wiggling them in the moonlight. “Remember?”

Josephine liked him.

You already knew that. She let you come on her tits.

Right. Maybe every time she said it out loud—or gave him proof—it would make him feel like a hero? That was something to look forward to. Recently, he’d been looking forward to a lot of things. Reassured that he wasn’t making himself sound like a supervillain, Wells continued. “I didn’t just fall in with a bad crowd growing up, I started the bad crowd. Kids who had too much freedom. Most of us got attention only when we landed in trouble, so we made a lot of it.” He hesitated before telling her the next part. “On nights when my parents were using the house for a party, I used to break into my middle school to sleep in the gym. It was too loud at home. The party might end, but they’d fight after too much alcohol. I just . . . got really good at picking locks.”

Josephine slid a little closer, until their hips were touching. “I wish you didn’t have to do that. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” He rubbed a circle into her lower back, sort of entranced by the way their feet looked together in the water. “When I moved in with my uncle, I didn’t have to sleep at school anymore. But later, I got caught with a stolen bike and the family court judge gave me an ultimatum. Spend time in juvie or get a job. I took the second option, but I wasn’t about to let some judge teach me a lesson, so I started stealing the odd watch out of lockers, purely out of spite. Or maybe peeling a few hundred-dollar bills off a wad of them. That all stopped once Buck got ahold of me, but yeah . . . the pool gate wasn’t even a challenge.”

For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of their feet sluicing slowly through the water. “But you never totally stopped getting into trouble, did you? That fight a few weeks ago . . . and all the ones before that.”

Wells sighed. “Yeah. I guess it’s not something that has ever fully left me. The inner battle. I find that kind of comforting sometimes. Is that bad? I don’t ever want to be a man who backs down from a fight.”

“I think that’s okay. As long as you’re fighting for something worthwhile.”

Mentally, he jogged back through the last few punches he’d thrown. “Let’s say I’m sitting in a bar, minding my business, and some drunk stranger in a DraftKings hat starts calling me every name in the book for ruining his fantasy golf lineup. Then, let’s say he throws a very saucy chicken wing at me. Would it be worthwhile to break his nose?”