“It’s fine, I know where this one is,” she said, breathlessly, disappearing into my bedroom.
Was that fucking weird, or was I just being paranoid? Amelia offered me no sounding board. She was licking her empty food bowl, her paws slipping a little.
After a couple of minutes, I decided to investigate, and make sure Mia was okay. Maybe she was actually sick and didn’t want to admit to it. Maybe she had food poisoning or something and didn’t want me to hear her throw up.
When I went into my bedroom, I almost fell over Mia. She was on the floor, crawling on her hands and knees. Given that she was wearing a sundress that had ridden up and barely covered her ass, it was momentarily distracting. My dick got hard and my mouth watered. I had yet to enjoy this particular position with Mia. What would she do if I ran my hand over that curvy ass?
I resisted the urge. “What are you doing?” I asked.
She jumped, her hand moving so quickly she fell onto her stomach. “What?” she asked breathlessly, glancing back at me. “What do you mean?”
Now I was really curious. “You’re crawling on my bedroom floor,” I pointed out. “A good seven feet from the bathroom, which you allegedly had to use.”
Mia’s red hair was in her face as she blinked up at me. She was lying on her one arm, hand tucked under her chest. She was partially propped up with the other hand. “I dropped my bag.”
Her bag was two feet behind her. “Show me what you’re hiding, Mia.” She was clearly lying on something to conceal it. I felt like I did with the puppy when she was running off with something she wasn’t supposed to have. Like I was going to have to go and take it from Mia in a grappling session.
For a second, she opened her mouth like she was going to spin a tale of bullshit, but then she just grumbled, “Fine.” She pushed herself off the carpet and sat back on her feet. She held her hand out to me.
My wallet was in it.
Interesting.
About time she admitted she’d taken it.
I took it. “You found my wallet? Crawling around on the floor?” I knew she hadn’t but I wanted her to tell me the truth.
“No. I found your wallet in my bag,” she said, grudgingly. “I didn’t know it was there, I swear. I was going to toss it behind your dresser so you would eventually find it and think it fell behind there that night we met.”
I had no idea if that was the truth or not. At this point, I wasn’t sure if I would ever know the truth. Without a word, I tossed the wallet onto my dresser.
“Aren’t you going to say anything? Or check inside?”
“No.” I didn’t care about the cash and my ID and my credit cards had already been replaced. “Do you actually have to piss or not?”
She shook her head.
“Then let’s go walk the dog.” Amelia was currently tumbling all over Mia’s legs, trying to reach her lap.
Mia pursed her lips and petted the dog. “Are you mad at me?”
“I’m not thrilled. And I don’t see my ring in your other hand.”
“I don’t have your ring. I dumped my whole bag out looking for it and I don’t have it.”
We were back to our original stalemate. “Okay. Let’s go walk the dog.” I scooped Amelia off of Mia.
“I feel like you’re mad at me.” She used the bed to pull herself off the floor.
“I’m not mad at you.” I wasn’t. Not exactly. I was determined to get to the bottom of what was going on with Mia. I was determined to have sex with her again. I was determined to have her continue to walk my dog with me. And I was determined that I was going to figure out why I was determined to do all of those things. “Do you care if I’m mad at you?” I asked, curious.
“Of course I care. I don’t want you to hate me.”
“I don’t hate you.” That I was certain of. Anything beyond that was fucking muddled in my head. “I feel a lot of things about you, but hate is not one of them.”
“Like what?” Her voice was husky as she stood by my bed in that short dress. The outfit was casual, but it showed off her legs in a way that made me forget what the hell we were even talking about.
“I feel like you need to step away from that bed before I put you on it.”
She opened her mouth, probably to reprimand me, when she glanced to the right. “Is that my shoe? It is.”
Shit. It was. Just sitting on my dresser, where I had plunked it almost six months earlier. I saw it every day, thought of her every day, and didn’t ever move the shoe. The shoe she’d left behind in December, like some sexy redheaded Cinderella. “You ran out of here so fast you forgot it. You were in a real hurry to run out barefoot in December.”
“I had to get to work.” She picked up the shoe and stared at me. “Why didn’t you just throw this away?”
That was the question of the year. One I didn’t have an answer for. “I don’t know. Maybe I thought if we ever saw each other, we could do an even exchange. The shoe for my championship ring.”
“These shoes cost eight dollars.”
That made me momentarily speechless.
Could you even make shoes for that little amount of money? My God, it must be like strapping your feet into zip ties. Nothing that cheap could be comfortable.
My expression must have given me away. She started laughing. “It’s true.” She lowered her voice to whisper and gave me a grin. “They’re secondhand.”
I was still speechless. Maybe even more so. The thought of wearing shoes someone else’s feet had been in made my gut tighten. I have a bit of a neat freak personality, for no particular reason. The house I’d grown up in was typical, my mother’s housekeeping normal, neither slovenly nor obsessive. It was a clean, but sometimes cluttered house, as the demands of life and kids and a husband who frequently ruined clothes at work would be. I had just always liked to be neat and tidy, with crisp clothes and new shoes. It was how I was wired.
“I never would have guessed,” I said, when it became obvious she expected me to say something.
Mia set the shoe back down on the dresser, but kept her hand on it. “So it just sits here, like a cheap trophy? Don’t other women you bring home ask you about it?”
Her tone was casual, but her shoulders had tensed. She was asking me if I had fucked anyone else in the last six months. Interesting. She wouldn’t ask that if she didn’t care what my answer was.
“Generally speaking, the women I bring home are mostly focused on themselves.” I leaned casually against the doorframe, enjoying the way the conversation was going.
Mia looked like she wanted to use that shoe to commit bodily harm against my other sex partners. She was jealous. And while jealousy wasn’t a fantastic emotion, it did mean that she was way more interested in me than she was letting on. And I was more interested in that than I should be.
“It was brought to my attention that you have an active social life.”
“It’s a professional perk.” I hadn’t spent the last six months celibate, and I wasn’t going to lie about it. Granted, none of those women had even come close to satisfying me the way Mia had, but I definitely hadn’t been sitting at home feeling sorry for myself. She’d ditched me and I thought I would never see her again, especially when I didn’t see her at the hotel during any of my stays.