“Come on,” he urged.
I went, tucking my head under his chin and curling into his body.
He wasn’t the only one that’d had a long day.
In fact, if I could curl up right here and go to sleep…
• • •
CROFT
She fell asleep against me like it was the most normal thing in the world to do.
“She’s such a loser,” Flint grumbled. “I swear, she’s been doing that since she was born. All it takes is one lousy cuddle, and she’s out.”
“She’s sweet,” my mother admitted. “I’m excited for you, honey.”
“Excited about what?” Camryn asked around another bite of pizza.
“My brother finally pulled his head out of his ass and is dating the CrossFit queen.” Raleigh clapped her hands.
“She hates when you call her that,” Flint chuckled. “Why do you call her that?”
“Because when we started CrossFit, she was the woman we wanted to be,” Camryn said around a bite of pizza. “Seriously. She showed us how to do handstand pushups one day, and like just kicked up onto the wall and started knocking them out like it was nothing. Then, when we all try, we can’t accomplish shit. And she’s so fuckin’ pretty, too.”
“Amen.” Raleigh sighed. “She can wear those short shorts and rock them while the rest of us can’t even walk out of the house in pants.”
“You can pull off shorts,” Flint said, patting his wife’s thigh.
“Yeah.” She paused. “But not like she can.”
Camryn had a smoking body. She always had.
But she was right.
She’d never, not once, been able to fill out a pair of booty shorts the way that Carmichael could.
The first time I’d ever walked into their gym, I’d zeroed in on her.
She’d been bent over doing a deadlift with her ass to the door. She’d been mid-workout, her face sweaty, her shirt caught up in her shorts, and her legs quivering as she lifted a heavy barbell. But her ass. My God, her ass.
I had dreams about that ass.
“I know that look,” Ezra drawled.
I curled up my lip at him and flipped him off with my good hand. “I don’t want to know about you having these looks when it comes to my sister.”
“You’re just jealous,” Raleigh teased.
“I’m most certainly not,” I disagreed. “I have what I want. And I seriously don’t want to think about y’all. Just no.”
Ezra dropped a kiss to Raleigh’s neck, and I caught his eyes and narrowed my own, a nonverbal ‘watch yourself’ passing from me to him.
He grinned and looked to my parents to see my mother staring at me with hearts in her eyes.
“I want more grandbabies,” she ordered. “And to accomplish that, you probably should start working on it.”
I rolled my eyes, but the thought was planted.
Carmichael pregnant with my baby did sound really fucking awesome.
Like, so awesome that I just might get her that way. If she’d let me, anyway.
“We’ll see, Mom,” I teased. “Could someone go let the dogs out?”
Mom got up and did that, taking the now-empty pizza box with her.
Danger, huddled close to her side, stayed with her, surprising me.
“Maybe Danger will do good with her,” Raleigh said softly. “They don’t look like they hate each other.”
“No,” I agreed. “They don’t.”
CHAPTER 14
Kind of a lady. More of a pervert.
-Coffee Cup
CARMICHAEL
When I woke up the next morning, Croft was gone.
I was also asleep in my bed, with an obvious dent where Croft had once laid his head for the night, and the smell of him on my sheets.
After getting up, I walked through the house, finding that I was alone.
Danger was nowhere to be found, which obviously meant that she’d gone with Merida, Mrs. Crusie.
Lion was gone, too, which prompted me to look outside and take a look across the street.
Croft was nowhere to be found—or his car anyway—but there was a police cruiser sitting outside my house.
I looked at my watch and winced.
I was supposed to be teaching a noon class in about thirty minutes.
I’d better hurry if I was going to make it in time.
But just as I got to my bedroom to get dressed, I found a note at the bottom of my bed with my name on it.
Carmichael, I went to teach the class. Can’t move or demonstrate, but I was bored as hell and you slept for, like, ever. I’ll be home in about an hour and a half with lunch. –C
Grinning, I thought about the night before.
It’d only been hours later that I’d woken up to find that we were alone.
I’d woken up somewhere around two in the morning and had a hard time going back to sleep.
So, since I did this on a regular basis, I stayed up for a couple of hours and read one of my all-time favorite romance novels.
Which then had me thinking about other things, which happened to be why I started doing what I was doing next.
Which also happened to be when my sister-in-law came into the room with Raleigh.
“Knock much?” I asked as I saw the two of them enter.
“Yes,” Raleigh said as she held out a footlong Subway Sandwich. “I asked your brother, and he said that you liked this kind of sandwich. Hopefully he wasn’t just pulling my chain, because I got it for you.”
“What kind is it?” I asked curiously.
“It’s a meatball sub,” she answered.
I took it without dropping what I had in my other hand which happened to be a condom that I had attached to a plastic bottle and placed it on the counter.
“What are you doing?” Camryn asked as she came to stand next to me.
“I’m testing something,” I said as I turned my Mountain Dew bottle upside down.
“What?” she asked, looking from me to the condom and back.
“I’m testing to see how much liquid can go into one of these things before it breaks,” I answered, stating what I thought was the obvious.
“But why?” she pushed.
I looked over at her, then back to my task. “So. Say that I might or might not have had sex with someone. Say that the condom wearer might or might not have come in the same condom twice. I just need to make sure that it’s built to withstand the load without breaking.”
“There’s no way in hell that two ‘loads’ will be the equivalent to a two-liter-filled thing.” She gestured to what I was doing with the two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew.
“But the penis was…” I stopped, unsure whether or not I wanted to admit just how big Croft’s penis was.
I didn’t really think that the woman that used to have a crush on my crush needed to be told about his penis size. Nor said owner of the penis’s sister.
It was bad enough that Camryn had once liked him.
I didn’t really want to gross Raleigh out. I liked her and I wanted to continue to have her as a friend.
“Are we talking about my brother’s penis?” Raleigh asked. “I’ve heard rumors. I always assumed those rumors were false.”