“What?” I blurted out. His direct question rattled me, and I groaned my irritation. “Did Preston tell you?”
He laughed. “No, I made an educated guess. I was on-call last week, and when I came home, I noticed Troy’s Jeep in your driveway—at four a.m.”
I threw my hands up in the air, because why fight it? It felt sort of good that people knew, and there was no judgment in his eyes. I tucked my mail under my arm and twined my fingers together. “Okay, yeah. Troy and I . . . I don’t know how it happened. But it has.”
“Hey,” he sounded amused, “if anyone’s going to understand, it’s going to be me.” His expression turned thoughtful. “My unsolicited and clichéd advice? Do what makes you happy. That’s coming from someone who spends a lot of time dealing with the unexpected, like motorcycle accidents, strokes, and aneurysms.” It carried far more weight than a simple platitude. “Life is short.”
There was a loud splash from the pool, followed by the playful screams of those who’d gotten drenched.
“You’re an asshole, Preston,” a girl scolded.
It broke the tension between Greg and I, and he turned, pulling down a branch of the crepe myrtle to check on his son. What I didn’t realize until the flowering branch was out of my way, was I recognized one of the guys sitting at the edge of the pool, his feet dangling in the water. He laughed as a girl wrapped her arms around Preston’s shoulders and tried to dunk him.
Greg heard my sharp intake of breath. “Oh, yeah. Preston invited him.”
It was surreal to see Troy like this, and an uncomfortable pain banded across my midsection. Wasn’t this how he was supposed to be? Hanging out with friends who were the same age as him? Dating a girl who didn’t know what the other side of twenty years of marriage looked like?
But then his posture stiffened as he went on alert, and it only took a single heartbeat for me to know what had set him off. His eyes, hidden from me behind his sunglasses, had discovered me lurking behind the bush with the other adult. He put his hand down on the concrete so he could pull his feet from the water, and when he stood, he no longer belonged with the rest of these twenty-something-year-olds.
He was meant to be with me.
“You can grab your suit and join us,” Greg said.
I had no idea if he was being genuine or simply polite, but I flashed him a hurried smile. Troy was stalking across the pool deck toward me, and I was coming apart at the seams, both dying to talk to him and desperately not ready. Our date had been fantastic, but it was a baby step to being a true couple and hanging out with Troy’s friends was a gigantic leap I hadn’t prepared for.
“Ms. Graham.” Troy’s hair was wet from the pool, and he wiped a hand over it to push it back out of his eyes. His gaze bounced from me to Greg and back again. “Hey, I haven’t checked on your pool yet. Should I do it now?”
I bit down on my bottom lip, feeling Greg’s knowing gaze burrow into me. “Uh, sure.”
“Cool.” Troy’s coy smile was dazzling. “Let me grab my stuff and I’ll be right over.”
He bounded back the way he’d come, reaching for his bag with his towel, phone, and presumably a shirt.
Greg cleared his throat. “Let him park in your garage. It won’t be long before Judy notices his Jeep, and then I expect she’ll find a way to complain about it.”
“Fucking Judy,” I muttered.
“Yup,” Greg agreed.
Troy
As I got my shit together and stepped into my flipflops, Preston slapped the surface of the pool and flung water at me.
“Where the fuck are you going?” he asked.
His grin said he already knew the answer. He’d seen Erika talking to his dad, and then the way I’d hurried over to her. Could he blame me? She looked so fucking hot today, standing on the stone paver in her skinny pants and off-white shirt, her reddish-brown hair falling past her shoulders.
I wanted to grab a fistful of that hair, jerk her head back, and kiss her until she begged me to fuck her. It was what I’d been planning since Preston invited me over this afternoon. Yeah, I’d wanted to be there for him as he dealt with helping his dad celebrate Cassidy’s birthday, but I’d also been biding my time until Erika got home.
But when I left the Lowe house, let myself in through her gate, and walked up the hill toward her pool, she was nowhere to be found.
“Erika?”
I dropped my bag on one of the loungers and peered toward the windows of the house. We’d come a long way in our relationship but barging in uninvited to her house wasn’t something I felt comfortable doing yet, plus I was still wet from the pool. Maybe she was in her pool house.
Heat rose inside me at that idea. We could role play and reenact when we’d watched each other jerk off, only this time we’d get to do all the things we’d wanted to do then. That could be hot.
But she wasn’t in the pool house either.
I stared at the work bench where she kept her chemicals. Fuck it. I was here and I was supposed to do it anyway. I grabbed the water test kit, went outside, and plunged the plastic collection block elbow deep into the pool, turning it right side up to let it fill with a sample.
I put the drops in and swirled the block, checking all the levels—which were fine. The skimmers were mostly clean, but I emptied them anyway. I dumped the sample water in her rock bed, repeated the process for the spa, put the kit back in the pool house, and measured out the chemicals I needed. She didn’t use her pool much, but it’d been a few weeks since I’d shocked it.
When I came out of the pool house carrying the measuring cup, Erika was standing in the shade of her covered patio. I tossed the cup of powder into the deep end, then set the plastic measuring cup on the table beside the lounger, making my way up the two steps to meet her.
Holy shit.
Around her shoulders was a white, gauzy cover-up, but I was more focused on what was beneath. I gazed at her blue-green bikini with a small ruffle accentuating her magnificent cleavage. “Is that new?” I grinned. “I like it.”
“Thanks.” She seemed distracted as she pulled out a chair at the table to sit. “Can we talk business for a minute?”
“Yup.” I sat in the chair opposite her. “Before I forget, you’re almost out of shock for the pool. Want me to order more for you?”
“What?” She blinked. “Uh, sure, but I need to find someone else to handle that going forward.”
I couldn’t help my teasing, hurt tone, and pressed my hand to my bare chest. “Are you saying I can’t be your pool boy anymore?”
Her smile was humoring me. “I highly doubt you’re going to have the time.” She drew in a deep breath. “And also . . . I can’t be your manager anymore.”
It was warm outside, but the way her voice broke as she said it left me cold. “Sorry, what?”
I hadn’t noticed the papers on the table until she pushed them toward me. “This transfers the copyright of ‘Power’ over to you. I retain the credit, but it’s your song, Troy.”
I picked up the paper and stared at the dense, legal text, but couldn’t process any of it. She was just giving me the song she’d written? “Wait, go back to the part where you said you can’t be my manager anymore.”