He returned his attention to her face, to those eyes that saw everything. “Is that a problem?”
Did he want it to be a problem? Did he want her to want him to stay? A bloody ludicrous notion. They barely knew each other.
She twisted the bracelet around her wrist. “No, it’s not a problem.”
“The race is in seven weeks. The fight is a little over a week after that. There’s one choice that makes sense—one path forward for you both,” Augie offered.
“One path where you aren’t charged with lewd behavior,” the chief added.
He almost forgot about the bloody vibrator incident.
“Libby,” he began, but she waved him off.
“Briggs, did you mean what you said about your company covering my brothers’ tuition?”
“Every word. I’ve got the contract right here. We’ll pay half now and the other half just before the fight,” Briggs answered, holding up his mobile.
This was insanity!
He paced the length of the office. Off-kilter and damn near ready to fall arse over elbow, he tried to regain his balance. One minute, Libby’s lobbing cocks at him. The next, she’s his spiritual advisor.
It was too much.
He needed to give her some time to process this.
He needed time to process himself.
Standing in the Denver police chief’s office, staring at a donkey T-shirt and his bloody agent, it was safe to say time wasn’t on their side. His son would be here in two days. He had to keep training. Still, he hated to see Libby cornered like this.
“Plum,” he began, but she cut him off.
“Your trainer’s right, Raz. This is the way forward—the only way forward.” She swallowed hard and released a shaky breath, then turned to Madelyn and Briggs. “You want my answer? You’ve got it. I’ll do it. I’m in.”
Six
Libby
Libby watched the traffic light change from red to green, then glanced at the hulk of a man sitting next to her in the driver’s seat.
Your path will lead you to your intended destination.
Oh, sweet Buddha, you have one utterly jacked-up sense of humor.
She hadn’t expected her path to lead her here, sitting in Erasmus Cress’s gargantuan Hummer. As of a half-hour ago, she’d become not only his kid’s nanny but his spiritual advisor as well.
She didn’t even like boxing—or know anything about it. And what was there to spiritually advise about when it came to two men bashing each other’s faces in?
How had it come to this?
How had she allowed herself to spiral out of control?
Sure, her chi was trashed, and her O had skipped town, but like a maniac, the unadulterated, fierce energy that had coursed through her as she chucked vibrators at the beefcake had completely taken over. And then, in the blink of an eye, or in her case, the whir of a police siren, the pendulum had swung. As she’d stared into the beefcake’s eyes in the back seat of the squad car, a beautiful stillness had engulfed them. Shrouded in a hue that flowed from blue to violet, their auras met, mingled, and caressed each other.
Yes, met, mingled, and caressed. It was like an out-of-body experience. She’d never felt anything like it.
She’d read others’ auras and interpreted their energy, but her aura had never called out to another’s like this.
Was Raz’s chi as screwed up as hers?
But there was more.
With his lips hovering a breath away, the maddeningly lopsided set adrift life force she’d been grappling with for seventy-five days evaporated. In that hazy slice of time, everything about the man had centered her. With his muscled body and earthy, physical scent, his beefcake pheromones infected her brain, rendering her a woozy heap of well-balanced swoon. But it wasn’t just her mind that had buzzed with a frenzied intensity. Her chakras had taken notice.
In particular, the sacral chakra.
The spiritual home of her sexuality had twitched. Like in the movies, when doctors think that a patient has flatlined, then suddenly, there’s a blip, a beep, the monitor flashes.
She’s alive! She’s alive!
For an intoxicatingly fleeting moment, her libido had been resurrected. She could almost hear her O calling out, I’m here. Come and get me.
Had Raz’s beefcake chi jumpstarted her like an old Honda?
No, she could not go there—and she couldn’t start calling her O an old Honda either. What O would want to return home to that sort of welcome?
But the facts were the facts. The man had wrecked her with his arrogant energy.
She couldn’t allow herself to fall for him. The whole centering bit had to be due to stress—the stress of getting hauled into the police station for chucking sex toys at a boxer in public.
And the complete cosmic catastrophe was available to view on the internet for all to see.
She wrapped her arms around her body, holding herself together when her fingertips brushed against something crusty. “Oh, gross!” She gasped, then wiped her hand on her knee.
“What is it?” Raz asked, worry creasing his brow. “Do you need me to pull over?”
The breath caught in her throat at the sound of his voice. Lit by the glow of the car’s dash, she studied his profile as he flicked his gaze back to the road. Briggs had driven Raz’s car to the station, and Madelyn had insisted on having her people transport her Buick to Raz’s home. That meant her first act as a spiritual advisor was to take a car ride with her client.
Her client.
That’s how she had to frame it. She had to forget the almost-kiss in the back of the police cruiser.
She was an employee.
His employee.
They’d barely spoken since they’d left the station with their donkey T-shirts and, thank you, universe, without a summons to appear in court for lewd behavior. She pressed her thighs together, attempting to calm her sexytimes chakra from firing up, but his voice, that sexy, rolling British accent that she should not find appealing, sent a delicious tingle down her spine.
She checked her hand for bird crap. “It’s my wrap. I forgot about the bird poop on the shoulder,” she replied, then cringed. Here she was, casually mentioning bird crap with her nemesis new boss.
“We can throw it in the wash when we get home,” he said, eyes trained forward.
Home.
His home was about to become her home—well, his Denver home, and then they’d head to Rickety Rock for the summer. In a darkly humorous way, it made sense that her energy would attract someplace rickety.
Her phone pinged in her bag, and she slid her focus from Raz’s profile to the tote.
“Do you need to get that?” he asked.
She fidgeted with her bracelet. “It’s my friends. I should text them back, but I’m not sure how to explain what happened tonight.”
He sighed a heavy breath. “That makes two of us, plum.”
Plum.
Was that a British thing or some strange term of endearment he employed with women, akin to babe?
She’d been explicitly clear when she’d ordered him not to apply the term to her, but there was something oddly sweet about being called plum. She was about to ask him about it when a robotic voice rang out over the car’s speakers.
Call from Calliope.