“Oh, yes. It exists all right. How about a week from this Saturday at the Longhorn Bar? That’ll give you some time to get a sitter because I also want you to bring your friend Cassidy. I’ll bring Mila and Nicky.”
Mila was Roman’s wife and Nicky was married to Sophie’s other brother, Garrett. Eve knew them both and had even seen them around town, but she hadn’t had time to catch up with what was going on in their lives.
“A sitter?” Eve repeated.
Now Sophie chuckled. “Yeah, I know. You probably haven’t left him with a sitter other than Cassidy, but there are several good ones in town. I’ll text you a list, and if none of them are available, you can try Karlee’s cousin.”
Eve knew Karlee O’Malley, as well. She was Lucian’s assistant, but Eve didn’t remember the woman having a cousin, only Karlee’s brothers. There were three, maybe four of them.
“So, we’re on?” Sophie pressed.
“Sure.” But Eve thought there was a good chance she’d cancel. Aiden was almost certainly ready to stay with a sitter, but she wasn’t sure she was.
“How’s Lawson, by the way?” Sophie asked.
Eve didn’t think that was a casual question, and she certainly didn’t want to confess that it’d only been minutes since her last Lawson sighting. She glanced through the binoculars again to update the timing of that sighting, but Lawson was no longer in the yard.
“Uh, why do you ask?” Eve countered.
“Just wondering since you’re practically neighbors now. And I haven’t seen him in a while. He seems to be taking a lot of business trips lately. I think he’s trying to avoid Darby.”
“More likely he’s trying to avoid me.” Eve muttered that a little louder than planned. She hadn’t intended for Sophie to hear.
“No, definitely Darby,” Sophie argued. “A couple of weeks ago, I walked into his office at the ranch, and Lawson was holding a copy of one of those old tabloids with you on the cover. He was staring at it but put it away when I saw him.”
Lawson was more likely glaring at it rather than staring.
“And he was touching it,” Sophie added.
Eve did a mental double take. “He was doing what?”
“Touching it,” Sophie repeated. “It was hard to tell from the angle where I was standing, but it looked as if he was running his fingers over the picture of your face.”
Eve didn’t intend to read anything into that. He could have been brushing off crumbs he’d dropped there from his lunch. “Why’d he have a copy of a magazine like that, anyway?”
“Tate’s girlfriend, Arwen. Have you met Tate yet?”
“Yes. He’s Roman’s son. I saw them together in town the other day.”
“Well, Arwen is a fan of Demon High and has watched all the episodes. She got some magazines from eBay and left them there with him so he could ask you about signing them. Lawson didn’t mention anything about doing that?”
“It probably slipped his mind.” And she hoped he hadn’t tossed the girl’s magazines just so he wouldn’t have to see her to get the autographs. Just in case he’d done that, Eve would make sure to send her some signed copies.
Sophie huffed. “Not to worry. I’ll get them from Lawson and bring them to the Longhorn for our girls’ night out. See you then.”
Sophie obviously didn’t catch the “maybe” that Eve tossed out there before Sophie ended the call. It was a slim maybe, too, but she would at least look into getting a sitter in case there was some kind of emergency in the future.
She put her phone back in her pocket and had one final peek through the binoculars. Still no sign of Lawson, so Eve shifted them to the other side of his house where there was a grove of pecan trees.
And that’s when she saw the monster.
A hairy blob with giant eyeballs.
She let out a garbled scream and scurried back, bashing into the sofa. The collision off-balanced her, and she fell onto the cushions. She got up as fast as she could, taking out her phone again to call 911. But when she looked out the window, there was no monster.
Just Lawson.
His face was only a few inches from the glass. Without the magnification of the binocular lens, he no longer looked monstrous. Though he did look confused.
“Is everything okay?” Cassidy called out.
“Fine,” Eve managed to say, but there was no way she sounded fine. Her heart was somewhere in the vicinity of her toenails, and she was certain she was beet red from blushing.
Because Lawson had caught her spying.
Dreading what he might say about that, she went to the door and opened it. She didn’t have to wait long to see him since he was already on the porch.
“I didn’t want to knock or ring the bell in case the baby was sleeping, so when I spotted you in the window, I thought I’d get your attention,” he said. “Uh, are you all right?”
Eve repeated that lie of a response. “Fine.” And he had gotten her attention.
She definitely wasn’t fine though, but Lawson sure seemed to be. His face was a little misted with sweat. Not the kind that made you beet red from embarrassment, either. This was the sort of stuff added to underwear models’ chiseled faces for a photo shoot.
And speaking of underwear, she could see the top of his boxer shorts. That’s because he’d missed some of the bottom buttons on his shirt, and he hadn’t tucked it in. Since his jeans were low on his hips, she could see his stomach and belly button. Usually she didn’t consider navels to have any sexual appeal, but they apparently did on Lawson. Ditto for those boxers.
There’d been times when she had run her hand right down into his jeans to touch him. Times when her mouth had been in that general vicinity, too. She’d never managed to give him a successful blow job, mainly because she hadn’t known how, but she’d gotten pretty darn close back when they’d been seventeen.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she heard him repeat.
That’s when Eve realized she was staring at the front of his jeans. And it was when she realized, too, that Lawson had noticed where she was staring. Great. Now she’d embarrassed herself twice in under a minute.
“Uh, did you want something?” Eve asked.
Lawson tipped his head to his pocket where she could see his phone. “I’d put my phone on silent when I was...well, trying to catch a chicken. Don’t ask,” he quickly added. “But when I finally looked at the screen, I saw that you’d called me.”
Yes, that. At the time, it’d seemed like the right thing to do, but that was before she’d gotten all hot from her hand-in-his-pants memories. Eve wasn’t sure what she was going to say to him, and she soon realized not speaking wasn’t a big deal.
“Damn you,” he snarled.
Even though that didn’t sound like it was the start of something good, it was. Lawson slung his hand around the back of her neck, yanked her to him. And he did the last thing on earth that Eve expected.
He kissed her.
*
LAWSON DIDN’T HAVE to think about this. Plain and simple, it was a mistake. One that he seemed hell-bent on making, so he just decided to go with it so it’d be a mistake worth making.