“When he pranks me good. This is lame. It’s the tea towel incident revisited except not at all funny. Even if he put these all over town, it’s like…it’s been done.”
“Tea towel incident?”
“People on my shit list don’t get that story from me.” She frowns at me, a one-eyed, squinty frown. “Your burger’s ready.”
I blink. “What?”
“Go back and eat your burger.” She pries another towel off the wall, revealing more white paint that I’m positive is a design choice and not the path of least resistance in getting her kitchen finished.
She also completely ignores me, which makes me mad. Again.
“Did you get a text?”
“Thirty-seven years in food service. I know when a burger’s ready, dude. Yours is up.”
“You’re not thirty-seven years old.”
“But I feel like it tonight.”
Any other day, she’d probably accompany that statement with a wide Tillie Jean smile—number four hundred twelve—and top it with a but you’re welcome to make me feel young again, big guy wink.
Tonight, she doesn’t.
And right now, I miss the happy-go-lucky, freckles-in-summer, mischief-in-winter, big-hearted woman that she is around every other person on the planet.
Every other person who’s not me.
She stifles a yawn. “Seriously, Max, go get your burger. I don’t need help. I forgive you for being an ass, okay? We can be friends. No biggie. If you can’t leave for your burger, leave for your fries. They’re no good after they’re—oh!”
Gone is the cranky, tired woman ready to give up on fighting for the night, and in her place is a firecracker with pink rising in her cheeks and horror making her mouth go round.
“TJ?”
She ignores me and dashes out of the kitchen.
I glance around her kitchen one more time, then set aside the towel in my hand and follow her.
And immediately wish I hadn’t.
Not just because she’s in her bedroom, climbing onto her four-poster bed, but because her bedroom has charcoal walls broken up with wispy ivory and pink sketches of rose buds, and her bed is draped with twisted black sheets and wrapped with soft pink gauzy stuff hanging between the posts, and now I’m thinking about fuzzy handcuffs and feather boas and leather.
My mouth is dry.
My gut is quaking.
My dick wants out to play.
And this is Cooper’s sister.
His baby sister.
His very, very off-limits baby sister who’s standing in the middle of her bed, reaching a hand up to the ceiling fan blades, making her shirt lift and exposing a slice of skin that reminds me of a ripe summer peach.
If ever there was a recipe for a panic attack, it’s the idea of getting caught in this bedroom with this woman with my dick straining in my pants.
I have to swallow three times before I remember how to form words. “What are you doing?”
“A-ha! Hand me the vacuum, Growly Bear. Someone sprinkled glitter on my ceiling fan blades.” It’s like she flipped a switch and all of her mad disappeared, which is also something I’ve seen before, and one more reason I dislike Tillie Jean. How does she get over being mad so easily?
“Get. Down.”
“I knew it couldn’t be so obvious that he’d stop with just papering my walls with tea towels.” She teeters over her bed.
I reach for her hips to steady her, pretend I’m grabbing one of the damn mascots that management had competing to be the team’s new primary mascot all season, and don’t pull it off.
I am definitely grabbing Tillie Jean Rock by her very shapely hips, right here, next to her bed, and my body knows it.
“Vacuum?” she repeats. And then she does the last thing in the world that she has any business doing.
She runs her fingers through my hair. “Oh, look at that. You still have glitter. I didn’t mean to do that, you know. I really didn’t. Every time I see you, I think, Bad Tillie Jean. All that glitter wasted. It could’ve been ruining Cooper’s chances at endorsement deals instead.”
“Tillie Jean.”
“You shouldn’t growl my name like that. I like it, and I don’t want to. I wasn’t dating Chance Schwartz seriously, you know. At first I was excited that he was into me, then it was like, this rush to sleep with him, especially since I was off-again with Ben at the time, except he wasn’t very good—which you probably figured out—and he was really into himself. Like, way into himself. I knew what I was involved with.”
“Please stop talking.” One, because I don’t want to know.
Two, because she could just as easily be describing me.
She turns, and now I have a face full of Tillie Jean boob while my hands are still gripping her hips.
If Cooper walked in here right now, I would be a dead man.
I would be such a dead man.
“What would it take for us to be friends like I’m friends with Luca and Emilio and Trevor and Robinson?” She’s still running her fingers through my hair, and my scalp is in heaven.
I don’t like people touching me.
Not as a general rule.
Tillie Jean could give me a scalp rub all night, and my scalp—and my skin, and my hair, and my face, and my whole damn body—wouldn’t mind a bit.
I jerk back out of reach. “Get down. You can clean the glitter tomorrow.”
“Why are you so—” A car door slams outside, cutting her off, but only for a second. “Oh! Aunt Glory must’ve sent a delivery.”
She bends, plants her hands on my shoulders like she’s planning to use them as a vault, and freezes.
Our faces are inches apart.
Not even.
I can see the darker blue ring around her irises, the brush strokes of lighter blue fanning out from her summer sky irises, and I can’t look away from the way her eyes are dilating as her breath gets heavier.
The tiniest threads of pink in the whites of her eyes.
The hint of coffee on her breath.
The quiver of her nostrils.
The heat of her fingers on my shoulders and the firm muscle in her ass. I’m not trying to grab her ass, but my hands are big, and they’ve been sitting on her hips, and my fingers naturally go all the way back to those sweet round globes.
“I’m getting down,” she whispers. “Your hamburger is here.”
I suddenly don’t give a damn about my cheat burger.
Kissing Tillie Jean to shut her up a few weeks ago wasn’t a fluke.
It’s what I’ve wanted to do for weeks. Months.
Years.
I don’t have ten million reasons I hate Tillie Jean Rock.
I have ten million reasons that I hate that I like her.
“Get back, you mangy goats,” someone says distantly, and I realize who I am, where I am, and what I need to do.
“Get down,” I say again, except this time, I grip her hips tighter, lift her off the bed, and set her on her feet.
And then I retreat.
Tillie Jean Rock is my teammate’s sister. She’s off-limits.
She’s—she’s—
You know what?
She might as well be my sister. And that’s how it’ll be.
Yes.
Yes.
This is the perfect plan.
As far as I’m concerned, Tillie Jean Rock is now my sister, and therefore, disgusting and repulsive to my body.