Muffin Top (Page 17)
“This isn’t over,” she whispered under her breath before slipping her arm out of his, picking up her suitcase and heading off down the hall.
…
Not for the first time in her life, Lucy cursed her big mouth, which was almost as big as her ass and twice as troublesome. However, this time she was determined to keep it shut for at least as long as it took her to get from her old room to the garage apartment.
She’d considered apologizing to Frankie via text, but it seemed kinda cold. Plus, she’d have a much better chance of getting him to actually talk to her dad if she said she was sorry in person. It was a helluva lot harder to ignore her when she was standing right there as opposed to a text.
She just had to treat this as if she was talking to one of her clients so he’d understand the brilliance of her plan, and not as if she was talking to a guy who made her panties damp every time he looked at her, despite the fact that he’d probably seen more panties than she owned. Nope. That wasn’t factoring into her decision to tiptoe past her dad’s room as if she was fifteen again and go talk to a cute boy. Not. At. All.
By the time she climbed the stairs to the guest suite above the garage, she had a plan of attack. Really, this was for his own good. If there was anything a child of a therapist knew, it was the value of figuring out the reason why behind a behavior. Frankie just needed to do a deep dive and figure his shit out. Helping him do that would be a much better form of repayment than gas money for coming with her to the reunion.
Frankie answered on the second quick tap on the door. He was in a pair of loose shorts that hung low on his hips and nothing else. She shouldn’t look, but his brawny form filled the door and she didn’t have any other place to look. So she perused. She took in. Okay, she totally gawked—who wouldn’t when presented with that much hotness? Part of her knew she should look away. After all, the man had given up more than a week of his life to come to her reunion. He deserved some appreciation of the non-eye-fucking kind. Instead of eyeballing him like he was as gorgeous as the perfect pair of heels that were cute and comfortable, she should be keeping her eyes on his face and not his broad shoulders, reddish gold hair dusting his pecs, or the way his shorts left very little to the imagination about how very not little he was.
She was a horrible person, she knew that. However, she also knew that Frankie’s happy trail matched his ginger hair. That item of information would get stored away for future jilling off material.
See? Horrible person who should know better and is looking anyway!
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“No.” She steeled herself for the words she had to say. “I need to apologize, and I hate apologizing.”
His mouth wavered as if he was trying to stop a smirk from emerging. “I’m shocked. You seem like the kind of person who just loves saying she was wrong.”
From anyone else, the sarcasm would have scratched its way under her skin and down to her don’t-fuck-with-me marrow. But from Frankie Hartigan? The man couldn’t even do mockery without turning it into flirting. It would be annoying if she didn’t enjoy it so much. It was nice being the object of someone’s “A” flirt game. It wasn’t that men didn’t hit on her. They did. It was the type of men who made a move on her that made her dating prospects so poor. Suffice it to say that fat fetishists and guys who thought she didn’t have options and would go for their still-living-in-their-mom’s-basement asses tended to clog up her dating app inbox. But guys like Frankie? This was just FWC: flirting without consequences—especially since the man was on a no-sex diet.
“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
“No.” He grinned at her. “I’m enjoying it too much.”
Since sliding through the doorway while he blocked 90 percent of it wasn’t an option, she put one hand on her hip and gave him her best don’t-waste-my-time glare. It usually made her clients—even the fuming mad ones—step out of her way. Frankie just folded his arms across the wide expanse of his chest, totally unperturbed. Of course he did.
“May I come in?” she asked, resisting the urge the play with the hem of her shirt to give her hands something to do. “We need to talk.”
“That sounds serious.” He took a pivot step, giving her enough space to pass by him and walk into the room.
To distract herself from taking an extra sniff—and yes, she was still horrible, and no, there wasn’t anyone who could judge her more harshly than she was giving herself the side-eye at that moment—she looked around the room. It might be above the garage, but it was a great space, the back wall composed of windows overlooking the woods that in a few miles became a part of the Dogwood Canyon Nature Park.
The view outside was almost as good as the one inside the room.
Not that she was looking, because that was a very not-good idea. She liked sex as much as any other woman—maybe a little more compared to some folks—but making a run at someone like Frankie Hartigan wasn’t smart. Taking a few steps away from him meant getting closer to the bed, but it was better than standing next to him and having her pheromones going crazy.
“It’s about you talking to my dad,” she said, stopping a few steps shy of the bed. “I really think he could help. You’ve got to admit, you’ve gone from one extreme to the other.”
He snorted. “No offense, but I’m not talking about my sex life with your dad.”
What was it about sex therapists that freaked people out so much? It wasn’t like 95 percent of the population was allergic to orgasms and the kind of intimate connection that came from sex.
“Why not?” she asked. “It’s his job, and he could help.”
“I’m pretty sure I can do that on my own,” he said and looked purposefully at the open door. “But thanks for stopping by.”
There was no missing that don’t-let-the-door-hit-you-in-the-ass-on-the-way-out dismissal, but she wasn’t giving in that easy. If she was that kind of woman, she wouldn’t have been able to get Harbor City’s most hated hockey player to agree to doing a series of visits to sick kids at St. Vincent’s Hospital. There was definitely a reason why Zach Blackburn called her B.B. after he finally agreed to her plan to start rehabbing his image so the team wouldn’t kick his tattooed self to the curb come free agency time. They both knew B.B. stood for Ball Buster. She didn’t give a shit. She embraced the nickname a lot more than the one everyone had called her since she was a kid—Muffin Top. Her dad hadn’t meant it to be mean and had given it to her when she was just a baby. He just had no clue what it was like to be a fat woman in society’s eyes—which brought everything back to the whole reason why the redwood of hotness known as Frankie Hartigan was standing in front of her.
“Fine, we can talk about the plan of attack for this week.” She made her way farther into the room, moving toward that wall of windows while stating her point that she wasn’t going until she was good and ready without saying a word about it. “We need to walk a fine line between being believable and shutting up everyone’s mouths.”
He crossed his arms over his bare chest and raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean by believable?”
What did he think she meant? That people were going to take a look at her and then at him and then figure something was rotten in Antioch—and they’d be right. If going to her reunion alone was going to be bad, going to her reunion with Frankie and having everyone realize it was a farce would be about a million times worse. Humiliation was very much not her thing.