Lia’s hands slowed, and it took a moment for her to look up. Her eyes studied my face intently.
“Only if you want,” I said quietly. “Or I can get one for you and be right back down. There’s a toilet downstairs where you could change if you’d rather.”
She set down the towel and lifted her chin to meet my gaze head-on. “I like the upstairs option.”
Bloody hell, I did too.
I took a deep breath and decided not to weigh the intelligence of walking this beautiful woman upstairs into the empty flat of my brother’s pub, where I could close and lock the door. Where there was a sofa. And a bed. Hell, a kitchen table would do at that point.
Carl returned from the kitchen.
“Everything all right?” I asked.
He nodded. “Vickie dropped a glass. All good.”
“Right.” I tilted my head at Lia. “I’m going to get her a clean shirt from upstairs.”
His eyes narrowed. I narrowed mine back.
He’d worked for my brother long enough to know there was no point in talking a McAllister out of whatever course they were on. He held up his hands. “I’ll be right here. Where I always am,” he muttered.
I smiled.
Lia set her hand on my back, and I turned. Her head just barely cleared my shoulder as she stared up at me. “Shall we?” I asked.
She answered me with a lopsided grin, and I led her upstairs.
LIA
Two options lay in front of me as I followed the hot man with the phenomenal ass up the narrow stairs that led to the space above the pub.
1- I was going to be chopped into a thousand pieces because he was a murderer.
2- I was going to get epically laid by the most beautiful man I’d ever seen.
And he wasn’t even just beautiful. Considering I almost orgasmed just listening to him talk about soccer, I figured my chances of satisfaction were pretty freaking high.
“Do you live up here?”
He glanced over his shoulder, sending me a grin so boyish and delicious that I almost tripped.
Smooth, Lia.
“No, it’s mainly used for storage, but there is a place to crash in a pinch.” He stopped on the landing, sliding his hands above the doorframe until he found the key.
The doorknob was beautiful, as was the paneling on the deep red door. “That’s beautiful,” I murmured, touching one of the raised edges.
“Have a thing for doors, do you?”
I tell you what I had a thing for. British men named Jude with long legs and broad shoulders, a jaw cut like granite, and the kind of scruff lining it that made me feel downright naughty. But sure, we could talk about doors.
I smiled. “Don’t you ever look at doors like that and wonder who made it?”
Jude unlocked the door and pushed it open for me. “Not particularly,” he admitted wryly.
The room above the pub wasn’t large, but it was clean. Plaster walls painted a soft gray had boxes stacked along one side. Floor-to-ceiling windows lined in beautiful trim looked out at the street below.
At the back of the room were two identical, white-painted doors with antique crystal doorknobs. He opened one door and stuck his head in, appearing with something large and white in his hand.
“It’ll be big, but it’s clean,” he said, eyes holding mine steadily. Finally, I could see them clearly. They were a deep, clear green.
Honestly, I felt a little relieved I could see all of him clearly, so I took the shirt and walked through the second door, which wasn’t more than a large closet. A closet it may have been, but it gave me a necessary moment to breathe. As I quietly tugged off my beer-soaked shirt, I studied a few pictures taped up on the wall. Jude had his arm slung around a guy with a similar face. Based on how Jude looked now—I’d pegged him in his early thirties—the picture was easily fifteen years old, both men wearing a team jersey in bright green. A soccer jersey, I thought with a tiny smile. No wonder. Maybe he played in high school.
Before I left the privacy of the closet, I took a moment to be completely vain. I tugged my phone out of my purse and used the camera feature to gauge just how shitty I looked after my run in the rain.
With a wince, I caught sight of my hair. Frizz-tastic. The phone went back in my purse, and I did what I could with my hands and an elastic band, trying to wind my hair into a bun and anchor it on the top of my head. With a pinch of my cheeks and a deep breath to gather myself, I had to take a beat. You know the kind. Where you recognize the ramifications of being alone in a room with a bed and a hot British man who made my thighs squeeze together when he said things like, utterly perfect.
“Would you like another drink?” he called out.
A metaphorical door opened with those five words. Sometimes, just by nature of studying what I did, I thought about situations as if they were playing out in a book. Was the character making a sympathetic choice? Could the reader understand why—based on previous history, cultural norms, established patterns in the narrative—why things were decided in the way they were?
In my silence, he spoke quietly. “We don’t have to, of course. But I’d be remiss not to offer the opportunity for privacy in light of our conversation earlier.”
He was giving me an out. We could go straight back downstairs, and he wouldn’t hold it against me. We’d take our places where we sat earlier and probably engage in some heavy, harmless flirting until I left to catch my train back to Oxford. I’d never see him again, but I’d go home with a story about the night I wished I indulged a bit. I’d go back to my small flat, get in bed alone, and I’d wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed for an extra drink.
The strap of my purse bit into my skin where I clutched it in my fingers. On one hand, I was not a sleep with a guy I’d met that night kind of girl. No judgment, I had friends back in Washington who were that type. More power to them and all that. It just wasn’t me.
Partially because I’d never met anyone who’d made me want to sleep with them on the night I met them.
And Jude just about had me panting on that stool, whispering naughty soccer things in my ear. Want wasn’t the problem.
If I left, if I took the out, I’d regret it.
I’d wonder. I’d wish. And I’d lament the fact that I didn’t take a chance and learn how a man like him kissed. And just about more than anything, I hated feeling like I’d missed out.
“What the hell, right?” I whispered.
I shoved the jacket back into my purse and took a deep breath before I left the tiny room.
His back was to me when I cleared the doorway, and Lord, his frame was glorious. Tall and broad with strong shoulders and slim hips. His hands were big where they held the whiskey bottle, his arms roped with muscle and a few tattoos that I couldn’t make out.
“Sounds perfect.”
For a moment, he froze, like he hadn’t expected me to say that. But when he turned, a pleased grin covered his stupid-handsome face.
“It may be a rubbish drink.” Setting the whiskey down, he crouched in front of one of the boxes on the floor. “I have ginger ale and soda water, both room temp.”
When I grimaced, he laughed.
“I know,” he said. “It’s a tragedy, to be sure.”
“Ginger ale, I guess.”
Jude went to work, fixing two rubbish drinks while I wandered the space and trailed my hand along a small bar cart lined with bottles in all shapes and sizes.
Opposite of the boxes was a daybed, and I smiled at the sight of it.
“A thing for beds then too?” he asked. This question had his voice pitched lower, and the suggestiveness was obvious.
New Book: Back Home to Marry Off Myself
Loredana’s father left the family for his mistress, leaving them to fend for themselves abroad. When life was at its toughest, her father showed up with “good news” after 8 years of absence: To marry off Loredana to a paralyzed son of the wealthy Mendelsohn family.