Visions of wrapping that hair around my hand and pulling her head back as I’m burying myself into her from behind fill my head instantly. It’s one thing to push a woman out of your head when you wonder what someone feels and tastes like, but it’s almost impossible to do that when you know those truths from personal experience. Images from that night flash through my mind: her tits bouncing with each thrust, her lips parted with want, that small strawberry birthmark on her hip bone.
When Pauly clears his throat, the sound pulls me from my thoughts to realize I’m blatantly staring at Beaux. I turn my head toward him to find his eyebrows raised and tongue tucked in his cheek. “Must be a pain in the ass to look at that sight all day.”
And fuck, I can deny it all I want, but Pauly will think I’m full of shit and assume more, so I might as well tell partial truths. “It’s brutal, I tell you,” I say as he groans when she positions herself perfectly in his line of sight across the table for a shot.
“I mean the lengths you go to for your job, Nanny Tanny…” His voice fades off as we turn our heads to watch her maneuver around the table.
I choke on my sip of water. There’s no way I heard him correctly. “What did you just say?”
“Nanny. Babysitting…” He shrugs. “Nanny Tanny.”
“Dude, that’s so wrong.” I laugh.
“You can be all kinds of wrong because I bet with a body like that, she’d fix it with all of her kinds of right. Man, I’d tap that in a heartbeat.” He’s all talk, but I laugh with him anyway. “On our next supply run, you should probably stock up on lube… Wouldn’t want you getting calluses unnecessarily now, would we?”
I just shake my head and laugh, grateful for the camaraderie but not willing to go into detail about how complicated the situation already is between the two of us. “Perfect in theory, my friend, but I don’t quite trust her yet.” And of course now I have his interest piqued. I should have kept my mouth shut.
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t understand why she came here telling everyone she was freelance when she had the job. Why not just tell the truth?” I hope my quick thinking pays off and Pauly doesn’t sniff out my lie. What was I supposed to tell him? Oh I slept with her and she didn’t tell me she was my new partner, but she denies that she knew?
He nods his head as he mulls over my comment. “Yeah but you weren’t here yet. Wouldn’t you have been pissed if you showed up and she was buddy-buddy with everyone and used your name as a way to get in with everybody?”
“You’ve got a point there,” I murmur, hoping the resignation in my tone helps bring the topic to a close.
“But you’re still going to tell me you don’t like her, right?”
He knows me too well. When I glance over to the pool table, Beaux’s chalking up her cue stick, but her eyes are on me. Her ears must be burning over the discussion I’m having. She stares for a moment, brow furrowed, but the minute she realizes I’ve caught her staring, she looks away.
“It’s not that I don’t like her per se, but it’s the babysitting job Rafe’s assigned to me that I hate. Since when does he get to judge if I’m okay or not?”
“So long as you do your job, it shouldn’t matter.”
“Mmm-hmm.” I take another drink of my coffee. The scalding liquid burns a path down my throat at the same time my phone buzzes on the table in front of me. In a move so practiced it looks natural, I slide my cell off the table and rest it on my thigh just below the line of sight.
I comment to Pauly about something random, keep the conversation going so that he forgets the little vibration my phone gave, while at the same time it feels like an ember burning a hole in my goddamn leg. If there’s a lead sitting here and I react, he’ll know and want me to share it. We may be friends, but all’s fair in friendship and getting the first wind of a breaking story.