“I’ll follow you.”
His face lit up, and my damn heart started to race in response.
Calm down in there. He isn’t inviting you to a romantic dinner. He only wants you to help with his nieces. Put on a diaper, not take off your clothes.
The entire drive to Caine’s house, I tried to reason with my heart. Talk it down from the perch of excitement his invitation had pushed it out onto. But there was no reasoning with it. My head knew the truth, yet my heart didn’t really seem to give a shit.
Rachel
A gigantic black lab ran full-speed to greet me and almost bowled me over. I kneeled to say hello. “Hi, big guy. You’re so cute. What’s your name?”
Caine answered. “That’s Murphy.” He attempted a stern voice. “Down, boy.” The dog completely ignored him and attempted to burrow into my body.
I scratched behind Murphy’s ears while he went crazy sniffing me. “He listens to you well.”
“That’s your fault. He’s never going to listen with the way you smell.”
“The way I smell?” I wasn’t quite sure how to take that.
“A dog’s sense of smell is 1,000 times greater than a human’s.”
“And what, exactly, do I smell like?”
Caine walked over to where the dog was still mauling me and gave his collar a firm tug. “Come on, Murph. Give her a break, buddy.”
Eventually, the dog backed off enough for me to stand. Caine leaned in and took an exaggerated whiff of my neck with his eyes closed. “Summer. You always smell like summer.” Then he stepped back and winked. “My favorite season.”
And there went my damn pulse again. The talk I’d given myself in the car on the way over went out the window. Caine chuckled, probably at the expression on my face.
“Come on in. I’ll give Murph a treat to distract him from how good you smell.”
I followed Caine and quickly forgot everything else once I got a look at his place.
Totally not what I expected.
Caine’s apartment was incredible. I’d assumed it would be nice, but not this nice. The girls had run down the hall to get a video they wanted to watch the minute we walked in, and I looked around in awe. His living room was bigger than my entire apartment. Not to mention, he had a foyer. A foyer in Manhattan? That entryway alone had to be worth five hundred bucks a month. Caine noticed my expression. “My great grandfather started an investment company. Every subsequent generation of the West family grew the fortune he’d made by another zero. Except me. But I did inherit twenty-five percent of the company from my grandfather. It pays slightly better dividends than a teacher’s salary.”
“Uhh…slightly? I’d say. You have a view of the damn park.” I walked to the wall of glass. “This place is amazing.”
When I turned back, Caine was standing in the kitchen, which was open to the living room, and staring at me.
“Thank you for coming today,” he said.
“I owed you one, remember?”
“You would have come whether you owed me one, or I owed you ten.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because that’s the kind of person you are.”
The girls came running back to the living room with a backpack. They jumped up and down. “Can we play tea?” they asked us.
“I guess she’s having that opposite effect from the Benadryl,” Caine grumbled.
“Sure. I love tea,” I said.
Alley unzipped the backpack, lifted it by the bottom, and dumped the entire contents onto Caine’s couch. It looked like she had enough ceramic teacups and saucers for a party of twenty.
The girls started to set the coffee table, and I walked to Caine’s stainless steel kitchen. “Do you have herbal tea?”
“I think so.”
It was amusing to see him sit on the floor and sip tea out of a little cup. Watching the way the girls interacted with him, I could tell he spent a fair amount of time with them, even if he was inept at changing a diaper.
“I take it this isn’t your first time playing tea?”
“I’m forced to play it twice a month when I go to my sister’s for dinner.”
“Do the girls live here in the city?”
“No. They live up in Chappaqua. That’s where I grew up. My sister stayed there to be near my mom.”
“I lived in Westchester growing up, too. Pleasantville.”
“You go to Pleasantville High School?”
“Umm…no. I moved to the city long before I got to high school.”
During our two cups of tea, I loved watching Caine jump at the commands of a four year old. “Lift your pinky when you hold your teacup, Uncle Caine. You’re slurping. The spoon goes on the saucer, not the table.”
Finally, it seemed the girls had mellowed out a bit. Lizzy was actually yawning.
“You tired, Lizzy?” Caine asked.
She yawned again in response.
He stood and lifted the sleepy girl into his arms. “Come on. How about you lie down, and I’ll put the TV on for you?”
“Can I sleep in your bed?”
“Sure. Come on.” Lizzy leaned from Caine’s arms, reaching out to me. “Can you come put me to sleep, too, Rachel?”
I looked to Caine, and he shrugged. “Sure, let’s make it a party.”
Of course he was being sarcastic, but the girls didn’t catch it and were excited anyway. The four of us walked down the hall to his bedroom.
An unexpected blush rose on my cheeks as we entered the room. Caine’s bed was huge, definitely a king size. The four-post, carved-mahogany frame made it look even larger. It was also extremely high off the ground. The masculine feel of it really seemed to fit him. I could easily imagine him sleeping naked in it. Face down. With that tight ass I wanted to bite so badly peeking out from underneath a sheet.
I hadn’t even realized I’d stopped in the doorway of the room, lost in my thoughts as I stared at the bed, until Caine spoke.
“You can come in. I won’t bite.”
Bite. That did it. That’s all it took for the light blush on my face to heat to what I’m sure was a lovely shade of crimson. Caine took one look at me and a wicked grin beamed from his handsome face. He set Lizzy down, helped Alley up onto the bed, and walked back to the door, where I was still standing, twisting my watch back and forth on my wrist.
His hot breath tickled my neck as he whispered, “I know what you’re thinking.”
My entire body tingled from only his breath touching my skin. I could only imagine what would happen if his hands were on me. Oh, God. Now I’m thinking of him, in that bed, with his hands on me. I swallowed and took a deep breath, only to find Caine’s scent still lingering as he walked back to the bed. Why couldn’t he at least smell bad?
He fiddled with the TV in his bedroom, connecting wires to a DVR.
“I take it you don’t watch movies in bed very often?”
“Pretty much the only time this thing turns on is when these two are here.”
Conversation about TV and little girls was good—I was starting to feel calmer.
“I can’t fall asleep without watching TV for a while,” I told him. “I guess you’re one of those people who falls asleep the second your head hits the pillow?”