“Mom, I have to go. ’Bye.”
“Wait!” But she was talking to the air because Tessie had already ended the call.
Eve sighed. She really did need to practice exactly how she was going to tell Tessie the news. Also, since it was highly likely that Tessie wouldn’t see her anytime soon, Eve also needed to practice saying it very quickly to get it all out before another hang-up.
Frustrated, she scrubbed her hand over her face and peeked out through the binoculars again. The chicken-chase was still going on and had escalated. Lawson had taken off his shirt and appeared to be using it to try to grab the running chicken.
The chicken was winning.
It was like an old Keystone Cops scene playing out in front of her. Except that the cop had never looked that good. It was a reminder of why they’d become lovers in the first place. Lawson was still Hot Cowboy.
She watched as he lunged forward, causing all those muscles to respond to the movement. Eve responded, too, and she suddenly wished she were the chicken when Lawson scooped it up in his shirt and held it against his chest. Once, he’d held her that way. Well, not with her head wrapped in his shirt, but Eve remembered in complete detail what it was like to be in his arms.
Vita went to Lawson, extracted the chicken from the shirt and took it from him. That brought an end to the chase. And the peep show, because he put his shirt back on. With the chicken now tucked under her arm, Vita headed to her bicycle, which was leaning against Lawson’s truck.
He said something to the old woman, probably an offer to give her a ride, but Vita waved him off and peddled away, somehow managing to keep hold of both the chicken and the handlebars. Lawson watched her for a few seconds before he went to his porch. He stopped though, and with his back to Eve, he stayed there a few seconds before he glanced over his shoulder.
At her.
Or rather in her direction.
That sent Eve scurrying back in case he could see her. She doubted that he actually could, but her heart was sprinting as if she’d just gotten caught doing something she shouldn’t have been doing. Which she was.
Lawson didn’t make the glance a lingering one. Instead, he went inside. There was nothing particularly life-changing about the moment, but it hit Eve like a slam from a rodeo bull. She needed to amend her plan about telling Tessie and give the news to Lawson first. That way, maybe they could tell Tessie together. And there was no time better than the present to fill in Lawson, so before she could talk herself out of it, she pulled her phone from her pocket and called him.
She hadn’t thought it possible, but her heart rate went up a notch with the first ring. It went up even more with the second. By the fourth ring, Eve thought she might be about to go into cardiac arrest.
And then the call went to voice mail.
His recorded greeting was short and sweet. “This is Lawson Granger. Leave me a message.”
Eve didn’t do that. She would just call him back later. After the chicken-chase, he’d probably headed straight to the shower.
Or not.
She peered through the binoculars again and saw him at the back of his house. He was drinking a beer and looking out at the creek. Maybe he’d forgotten to take his phone outside with him.
At the exact moment she had that thought, he took his phone from his jeans pocket and glanced at it. Then he glanced in her direction again. A missed call with her name on it was likely on his screen. Eve kept watching, waiting to see what he was going to do, and she tried to steel herself for him to call her back. The steeling took a nosedive though when her phone rang, the sound causing her to shriek like a schoolgirl.
But it wasn’t Lawson. It was his cousin Sophie.
Since Sophie hadn’t called her in weeks, Eve answered as fast as she could get her fingers working. She hoped nothing had gone wrong.
“How many baby throw-up stains do you have on the shirt you’re wearing right now?” Sophie immediately asked.
It certainly wasn’t a question Eve got every day, but she knew where this was going since Sophie was the mom of toddler twins. “Only one. But you caught me on a good day.” Eve smiled. “How about you?”
“I’ve graduated from throw-up to food stains. My son can squish a pea between his index finger and thumb and then flick it in the same motion. My daughter pretends her mouth is the blowhole of a whale and spews out apple juice.”
Eve laughed. Sophie wasn’t making motherhood sound fun or sanitary, but she’d seen Sophie with the twins and knew that motherhood suited her.
“And that brings me to why I’m calling,” Sophie went on. “Want a girls’ night out, one where we can wear unstained clothes, speak in complete sentences and not have to change a diaper?”
“Does such a night exist?” Eve joked. “After three months, I can’t remember.”
“Oh, yes. It exists all right. How about a week from this Saturday at the Longhorn Bar? That’ll give you some time to get a sitter because I also want you to bring your friend Cassidy. I’ll bring Mila and Nicky.”
Mila was Roman’s wife and Nicky was married to Sophie’s other brother, Garrett. Eve knew them both and had even seen them around town, but she hadn’t had time to catch up with what was going on in their lives.
“A sitter?” Eve repeated.
Now Sophie chuckled. “Yeah, I know. You probably haven’t left him with a sitter other than Cassidy, but there are several good ones in town. I’ll text you a list, and if none of them are available, you can try Karlee’s cousin.”
Eve knew Karlee O’Malley, as well. She was Lucian’s assistant, but Eve didn’t remember the woman having a cousin, only Karlee’s brothers. There were three, maybe four of them.
“So, we’re on?” Sophie pressed.
“Sure.” But Eve thought there was a good chance she’d cancel. Aiden was almost certainly ready to stay with a sitter, but she wasn’t sure she was.
“How’s Lawson, by the way?” Sophie asked.
Eve didn’t think that was a casual question, and she certainly didn’t want to confess that it’d only been minutes since her last Lawson sighting. She glanced through the binoculars again to update the timing of that sighting, but Lawson was no longer in the yard.
“Uh, why do you ask?” Eve countered.
“Just wondering since you’re practically neighbors now. And I haven’t seen him in a while. He seems to be taking a lot of business trips lately. I think he’s trying to avoid Darby.”
“More likely he’s trying to avoid me.” Eve muttered that a little louder than planned. She hadn’t intended for Sophie to hear.
“No, definitely Darby,” Sophie argued. “A couple of weeks ago, I walked into his office at the ranch, and Lawson was holding a copy of one of those old tabloids with you on the cover. He was staring at it but put it away when I saw him.”
Lawson was more likely glaring at it rather than staring.
“And he was touching it,” Sophie added.
Eve did a mental double take. “He was doing what?”
“Touching it,” Sophie repeated. “It was hard to tell from the angle where I was standing, but it looked as if he was running his fingers over the picture of your face.”
Eve didn’t intend to read anything into that. He could have been brushing off crumbs he’d dropped there from his lunch. “Why’d he have a copy of a magazine like that, anyway?”
“Tate’s girlfriend, Arwen. Have you met Tate yet?”
“Yes. He’s Roman’s son. I saw them together in town the other day.”
“Well, Arwen is a fan of Demon High and has watched all the episodes. She got some magazines from eBay and left them there with him so he could ask you about signing them. Lawson didn’t mention anything about doing that?”
“It probably slipped his mind.” And she hoped he hadn’t tossed the girl’s magazines just so he wouldn’t hav
e to see her to get the autographs. Just in case he’d done that, Eve would make sure to send her some signed copies.
Sophie huffed. “Not to worry. I’ll get them from Lawson and bring them to the Longhorn for our girls’ night out. See you then.”
Sophie obviously didn’t catch the “maybe” that Eve tossed out there before Sophie ended the call. It was a slim maybe, too, but she would at least look into getting a sitter in case there was some kind of emergency in the future.
She put her phone back in her pocket and had one final peek through the binoculars. Still no sign of Lawson, so Eve shifted them to the other side of his house where there was a grove of pecan trees.
And that’s when she saw the monster.
A hairy blob with giant eyeballs.
She let out a garbled scream and scurried back, bashing into the sofa. The collision off-balanced her, and she fell onto the cushions. She got up as fast as she could, taking out her phone again to call 911. But when she looked out the window, there was no monster.
Just Lawson.
His face was only a few inches from the glass. Without the magnification of the binocular lens, he no longer looked monstrous. Though he did look confused.
“Is everything okay?” Cassidy called out.
“Fine,” Eve managed to say, but there was no way she sounded fine. Her heart was somewhere in the vicinity of her toenails, and she was certain she was beet red from blushing.
Because Lawson had caught her spying.
Dreading what he might say about that, she went to the door and opened it. She didn’t have to wait long to see him since he was already on the porch.
“I didn’t want to knock or ring the bell in case the baby was sleeping, so when I spotted you in the window, I thought I’d get your attention,” he said. “Uh, are you all right?”
Eve repeated that lie of a response. “Fine.” And he had gotten her attention.
She definitely wasn’t fine though, but Lawson sure seemed to be. His face was a little misted with sweat. Not the kind that made you beet red from embarrassment, either. This was the sort of stuff added to underwear models’ chiseled faces for a photo shoot.
And speaking of underwear, she could see the top of his boxer shorts. That’s because he’d missed some of the bottom buttons on his shirt, and he hadn’t tucked it in. Since his jeans were low on his hips, she could see his stomach and belly button. Usually she didn’t consider navels to have any sexual appeal, but they apparently did on Lawson. Ditto for those boxers.
There’d been times when she had run her hand right down into his jeans to touch him. Times when her mouth had been in that general vicinity, too. She’d never managed to give him a successful blow job, mainly because she hadn’t known how, but she’d gotten pretty darn close back when they’d been seventeen.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” she heard him repeat.
That’s when Eve realized she was staring at the front of his jeans. And it was when she realized, too, that Lawson had noticed where she was staring. Great. Now she’d embarrassed herself twice in under a minute.
“Uh, did you want something?” Eve asked.
Lawson tipped his head to his pocket where she could see his phone. “I’d put my phone on silent when I was...well, trying to catch a chicken. Don’t ask,” he quickly added. “But when I finally looked at the screen, I saw that you’d called me.”
Yes, that. At the time, it’d seemed like the right thing to do, but that was before she’d gotten all hot from her hand-in-his-pants memories. Eve wasn’t sure what she was going to say to him, and she soon realized not speaking wasn’t a big deal.
“Damn you,” he snarled.
Even though that didn’t sound like it was the start of something good, it was. Lawson slung his hand around the back of her neck, yanked her to him. And he did the last thing on earth that Eve expected.
He kissed her.
* * *
LAWSON DIDN’T HAVE to think about this. Plain and simple, it was a mistake. One that he seemed hell-bent on making, so he just decided to go with it so it’d be a mistake worth making.
Eve obviously hadn’t been toying with dirty thoughts as he had thought because she made a sound of surprise when he kissed her. That sound sort of got trapped there in between their lips, and it mingled well with the next sound she made.
A little purr of pleasure.
He knew that purr. Knew the feel of her body against his when she slipped right into his arms. It was like coming home, a birthday, losing his virginity and Christmas all rolled into one. Except this particular celebration was going to give him a raging hard-on. And regrets.
Best not to forget that part.
There’d definitely be regrets, and it wouldn’t be long before they arrived. Did that stop him? No. The hard-on in the making was in control here, and it convinced the rest of his body that if he didn’t kiss Eve, he was going to explode. And that was the justification Lawson used to keep on kissing her.
Thankfully, Eve kissed him right back, too. In fact, she was the one who deepened the kiss, and the purr turned to a hot, hungry, needy sound. As a general rule, it was what he preferred to hear after he’d gotten naked with a woman and not while he was making out with her on her porch. Still, it upped the speed of his full-blown hard-on.
Lawson couldn’t make himself stop kissing Eve, but he could do something about the porch issue. Without breaking the lip-lock or the grip he had with his arm around her waist, he maneuvered her into the foyer, and he kicked the door shut. Of course, being inside wasn’t necessarily obstacle-free, and he opened his eyes long enough to make sure Cassidy, the baby and no one else wasn’t around.
They weren’t.
Eve and he had the foyer to themselves.
Now that they had some possible privacy, Lawson went for a whole new level of stupid. He pushed her back against the wall and made the contact body-to-body with his chest against her breasts. Even after all these years, they still fit in all the right places. At least they did with their clothes on. Lawson figured it’d be the same if they were in their birthday suits.
Of course, that couldn’t happen.
It was one thing to kiss each other silly, but sex would complicate the hell out of things. His erection begged him to take on that complication, but there was still a glimmer of sanity left in his brain. And that’s why Lawson finally pulled back from her.
With her breath gusting, Eve stared at him and blinked. “Oh,” she said.
He had no clue what that meant or how to respond, so Lawson just stayed quiet while he tried to level his own breathing. It would have been better if he could put some distance between them, but he couldn’t walk just yet.
Eve didn’t move, either, but her attention did drift lower. At first, he thought she was going to look at the front of his jeans again—the very thing that had started the kissing. But she looked at the front of her own shirt.
It was wet.
Not an ordinary kind of wet. There were two circles of moisture right over her breasts.
“My milk,” she mumbled. She scooted away from him and folded her arms over her chest. “I’ve weaned Aiden to the bottle, but my milk still sometimes lets down. It’s a reflex action.”
Lawson wasn’t sure how that worked, but Eve suddenly seemed very uncomfortable. Maybe even in pain because her face was screwed up a little.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
That encompassed not just the possible pain but the kiss itself. Yeah, the regrets had set in. And when he heard the knock on the door, Lawson figured the regrets were going to skyrocket. Because now someone was going to see Eve and him like this. Of course, whoever it was might not know how to interpret the wet spots on her shirt or their heavy breathing, but unless they were blind, the erection straining against his jeans would be a no-brainer.
“Yoo-hoo?” s
omeone called out.
From that single-word greeting, Lawson knew who was on the other side of the door. Hell. What was she doing here?
“Uh, is that your mother?” Eve asked, and she sounded just as shocked, and alarmed, by that as he was.
Because, yes, it was indeed his mom.
“Yoo-hoo?” Regina repeated, and this time the knock on the door was much louder.
Footsteps followed, and several moments later, his mom was at the window, peering into the family room. It didn’t stretch her gaze much to continue that peering into the foyer. She smiled and waved at Eve. She quit smiling and waving though when her attention landed on Lawson.
Judging from the sound Eve made this time, she was trying to choke back a groan at the sight of her visitor. Lawson didn’t bother choking back his, but he did move behind Eve when she opened the door. His erection was going fast, but he didn’t want his mom to see the remnants of it.
The moment Eve had the door open, Regina pulled her into a hug. “It’s so good to see you. I’m back for a visit and just had to stop by.”
It had been nearly six months since he’d last seen his mother, and there’d been some changes. For her last visit, she’d been a brunette, but today her hair was flame red thanks to the wig she was wearing. So were her skinny jeans, top, heels and earrings. And her nail polish and lipstick. Apparently, Regina didn’t believe in mixing it up when it came to color schemes.
As his mom had done at the window, she was all smiles for Eve until she looked at him. “Why are you here?”
Lawson didn’t have a good answer for that, but no way was he going to admit he’d been there to kiss Eve’s lights out. Mission accomplished, which meant he should get the heck out and go back home. He slid his hat over the front of his jeans so he could walk past Regina, but that only seemed to make her notice what he was trying to hide.
Regina hugged him but then put her mouth right against his ear. “What’s going on?” she asked.
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