He keeps his eyes locked on mine for several more heartbeats before lowering his hand and giving some sort of signal that Huck seems to understand. The dog practically leaps across the doorway, though he is careful not to knock my little girl down. She pats each side of his face with her chubby little hands three times before leaning down to kiss his nose. “Hi, My Huck. Wet’s go!”
I watch the two of them run off through the house, amazed at how careful the dog is not to bump into Stella and knock her down.
“Tristan,” Owen says softly. “I’m an idiot.”
“Well, I won’t argue. Would it bother you that much if I’d had a boyfriend?”
“You’ve no idea.” He tucks his hands in his pockets. “Can I come in still?”
“Who am I to give up free labor?”
Huck and Stella have settled in the living room in front of the TV. The dog has stretched out on his stomach, paws crossed over each other. She’s laid her head on his stomach, Phant curled into her side, the tiara hanging off the side of her head. He’s really amazing with her, and now no other dog is going to be good enough.
Owen follows me into the kitchen, where I immediately put on a pot of water to boil for the mac and cheese. My very non-gourmet meal sounds like even worse of an idea now than it did before he got here. Something about feeding Owen mac and cheese and hotdogs just seems incredibly wrong.
“I was thinking about ordering pizza.” I wipe my damp palms on the back of my jeans.
“So you put on a pot of water?”
I glare at him. “It is pizza or Dora-the-Explorer-shaped macaroni and cheese and hotdogs cooked in the microwave or a pot of boiling water. So pick.”
Owen eyes me carefully before slowly responding, “I think no matter which option I chose you’re going to be pissed at me.”
I snort. “I’m already pissed at you. So picking what you want for dinner isn’t going to change anything.” I snag my phone out of my back pocket, one hundred percent sure he’s going to choose pizza, because what respectable adult wants to eat mass-produced pasta and fake cheese in the shape of some cartoon character?
Evidently Owen does, because not even five seconds later he says, “I love mac and cheese and hotdogs, but I would request you let me grill the hotdogs. They taste better that way.”
“Fine.” I turn on the stove to get the water boiling and then move to the fridge to grab the fresh package of hotdogs I’d put in there earlier this week.
I don’t hear Owen come up behind me, but when I turn back around to hand him the hotdogs, he’s standing right behind me, all up in my personal space. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to get you not to be pissed at me.”
“By scaring me?”
“No.” He reaches out and puts a hand on my hip. “I just wanted to be closer to you.”
I instinctively take a step back, deeper into the refrigerator. The contrast between the heat of Owen standing in front of me and the cool air from the fridge at my back is slightly more intoxicating than I would like to admit.
“I don’t understand.” I lick my incredibly dry lips.
“It’s pretty damn simple.”
I shake my head. “Nothing about you appears to be simple.” I shove the package of hotdogs into his chest, ignoring the hard press of his pectoral muscles beneath my hands. “You scowled at me the entire first time we meet.”
“I thought you were going to murder my sister,” he interrupts.
“Then you flirt with me the second time we meet; at least I think you were flirting with me. I suck at reading these types of situations.”
“There was a little flirting, yes,” he confirms.
“Then there’s the beach, and I don’t even know what to say about that. You were flirting again, and you made Stella’s day when you did her ocean wave. Then you show up where I work and Lesa, who is basically my new boss, is clearly in love with you, which could cause me all kinds of problems, and yet somehow I let you convince me to invite you into my home where you get pissed because I’m on the phone with my sister.” I take a deep breath. “I think moving to Broward killed several thousand of my brain cells. This is completely out of character for me.”
His free hand settles on my other hip, turning my body into his. I flick my hand back and forth between us. “See!” I exclaim. “What in the hell is this? I’m so confused.”
“It’s pretty damned simple,” he says again, leaning in closer to me. He smells like leather and wood, and some sort of spice, and it’s intoxicating and not helping me grow any of those missing brain cells back. His nose rubs along the side of my neck. “Are you sniffing me?” Surely that’s not my breathless voice asking the question. His nose brushes just behind my ear, and my entire body involuntarily shudders in response. I’m pretty sure I’m about three-point-five seconds from having an orgasm, and he’s hardly touching me.
“You smell like peaches. I noticed it the other day. It makes me think of ice cream—peaches-and-cream ice cream, and I want to lick you to see if you taste how you smell.”
Shit. If his tongue touches me, I’m screwed, or not screwed but orgasmed. Is that a thing? It should be. And Owen Gallahanger can write the fucking book on how to do it.
“Owen,” I breathe out his name. “What are you doing?”
“Showing you how simple it really is.” His lips skim along the skin where my shoulder meets my neck, and I tilt my head to the side to give him access.
“Mama!” Stella’s voice screeches through the kitchen. “My Huck and I wanna go outside. Mama! Mama! Mama, where you go?”
Like a bucket of freaking ice water, the sound of her little voice splashes right against my libido and brings me screaming back to reality. I slam the package of hotdogs against his chest again, the package leaving a wet mark when he grabs it from me.
“That is why it isn’t simple, Owen. That little girl in there makes everything complicated. If you grill the hotdogs, I’ll dump the Dora noodles into the boiling water. It gives me a small thrill. Because that’s what my thrills are. Small. I don’t get to have dinner dates that I stretch into breakfast dates, and I don’t come and go as I please. I march to the beat of that little girl and her needs.”
I brush past him, taking several calming breaths as I move back to the stove to continue cooking the mac and cheese. I hear the fridge shut with a soft click and Owen takes a couple of small steps over to where I am, but Stella bursts into the kitchen before he can say anything else.
“My Huck and I wanna play ousside, Mama.”
Owen steps back. “I’m heading over to start the grill to cook the hotdogs. Why don’t the two of you come and help me? Does that work?”
“Yay!” Stella dances out of the room toward the front door, oblivious to the thick blanket of tension that has settled neatly over Owen and me. He waits until she’s left the room before leaning over to brush the tail of my braid off my shoulder. “This conversation isn’t over.”
He follows behind Stella, calling out for her and Huck to wait for him at the front door so they can walk across the yard together. The second the front door closes behind him, my body deflates. I definitely need to limit my time with Owen Gallahanger, if for my sanity more than anything else.