“She knows how I feel about someone her age drinking,” Eve went on.
Yes, and that might have been the reason Tessie had done it. Maybe this had been her way of getting back at her mom, or he could be just overthinking it. She could just have the wrong friends.
“God, what am I going to do?” Eve sobbed. “She’s barely talking to me.” She lifted her head off his shoulder, and Lawson saw she’d moved past the shock and gone back to being pissed off. “Well, she’ll talk to me because I’m going up to Austin to have it out with her.”
While Lawson thought that talking could be a good thing, he had to stop Eve from bolting for the door. “Best to think this through, and then if you still want to go, I’ll take you. We can even talk to her together if you want.”
That put a new emotion in her eyes. Not so much anger but something else. Regret, maybe. Yeah, he had plenty of that, too.
“Just take a deep breath,” he instructed. And he waited until she’d taken a couple of them. “If you go up there this mad, it’s only going to drive you two further apart. Plus, she’s in college, not exactly a kid.”
In fact, now that he thought about it, Tessie might not even be underage. Still, she had done something stupid. Getting drunk and then leaving to go God knew where with God knew who. She could have gotten in a car accident or been a victim of date rape.
Lawson put a stop to those thoughts because he was getting riled again. And he was thinking too much like a parent and not a “friend” of someone who was one—Eve. He took some deep breaths of his own before he continued.
“Because of what happened to Brett, we automatically think the worst in situations like this,” he went on. He tried to keep his voice level. “We’ve got that holding us back from drinking too much. At least it’s held me back.”
She nodded. “Yes, I just cry it out when things start to get to me. It’s hard to be drunk when you’re a mom.”
True. And Eve had adopted Tessie around the time she’d been of actual legal drinking age, so there probably hadn’t been a lot of opportunities for that sort of thing.
“Tessie was sort of your anchor,” he said.
She looked up at him, opened her mouth again and then closed it as if she’d changed her mind about what she had been about to say. “You didn’t have an anchor.”
That was true, as well. By the time Brett died, Lawson’s folks had long been divorced, and with both of them more in than out of Wrangler’s Creek, the housekeepers and Lucian had ended up raising him.
Which meant there wasn’t much raising going on.
It was the same for his brothers, Dylan and Reed. At least Lawson had had Garrett. Not exactly an anchor since they were close to the same age, but Garrett had kicked his butt when it needed kicking. Something he’d needed quite often.
“What am I going to do?” Eve repeated, still looking up at him.
“You’ll talk to Tessie once you’ve finished your cry.”
But she seemed to have already finished that. And he wasn’t entirely sure she was just talking about Tessie here. Judging from the look in her eyes, he was part of that million-dollar question, too.
Lawson knew it was a mistake for the long look she was giving him to continue. Especially since he was in the long-looking mode, too. However, he gathered up every ounce of willpower he had to make sure he didn’t kiss her. Apparently though, Eve hadn’t done any such gathering because she leaned in and kissed him.
It was a struggle, but he didn’t take hold of her and pull her to him. Didn’t deepen the kiss, either. He just sat there while she pressed her lips to his and while he felt that willpower burning to ash.
She lingered a little while with the kiss. Long enough for him to pick up her taste and scent. And plenty long enough for him to want a whole lot more.
“What are we doing?” she whispered when she eased back and met his gaze.
“To hell if I know.” He tipped his head to his desk. “See those reports and memo? They follow a thread of logic. Shit needs to be removed, so I assign the task and it gets done. All this kissing we’re doing isn’t logical.”
It did make sense though. Well, it did if he accepted lust as a sensible reason. Since they were no longer teenagers, that probably wasn’t an acceptable excuse.
That didn’t stop him.
Without any willpower to help him out, Lawson slid his hand around the back of her head and kissed her. And this time, there was indeed some deepening involved.
It was as if he snapped. As if Eve snapped, too. All the lust and hunger hit them both like a scorcher heat wave that raced right through them. Not good. Because deep kisses led to jockeying for position so they could get closer to each other.
Lawson fixed that problem by hauling Eve onto his lap.
Since this was their third set of kissing as adults, Lawson couldn’t fix the problem of dismissing it. Nope. It seemed stupid not to admit that this attraction just wasn’t going away, and since it wasn’t, Lawson made the most of the kissing. And of his favorite part, the touching. Even though he knew this was going to lead to something much more that they’d likely end up regretting.
Regrets aside for now, his hand ended up between them, which, all in all, was a good place for it to be, and she slid his hand around her back. Then to her butt. It not only gave him some premium touching, but it allowed him to align their lower bodies just right.
Again, he was thankful for that blue dress because it just slid right up on her thighs, making room for the front of her panties to land against the front of his zipper.
Definitely some premium touching now.
And it would have continued if he hadn’t heard the sound of someone saying, “Am I interrupting anything, Baby-Cakes?”
At this point, Lawson wouldn’t have wanted to hear anything other than Eve’s continuing purr, but this voice was one that was especially unwelcome.
Because it was Kellan Carver’s. And the asshole was standing in the doorway, grinning at them.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
KELLAN FIGURED SOME men would have cared much seeing their baby mama on the verge of having sex with another man, but truth was, he just didn’t feel that way about Eve. Yeah, they’d been onetime lovers, but it wasn’t as if he was especially eager to get back in her pants.
Unlike Lawson. The cowboy was clearly trying to do that.
Clearly furious, too, at the interruption because he was scowling at Kellan the whole time that Eve was crawling off his lap.
“What are you doing here?” Eve asked at the exact moment Lawson barked, “What the hell do you want?”
“I’m here to talk to you,” he said to Lawson. “About a business proposition.”
All right, that obviously didn’t go over well because Eve and Lawson gave him a blank look. Kellan tried again. “I have a movie-producer friend who wants to use some real cowboys as extras—”