The 48 Hour Hookup (Chase Brothers) (16 page)

“Okay, so disaster struck. I believe you now. Has she spoken to you yet?”

“Yeah. She forgave me for that.” Multiple times, but Liam didn’t throw that part out there.

“So what did it?”

“She overheard me telling Sawyer I’d nailed her, that I wasn’t sure if that meant I’d lost or won the bet, and I couldn’t wait to get home.” Liam said every word with his eyes closed.

“Shit, man. You’re screwed.”

Well and truly.

Because he missed her already, and there was no way of undoing any of it. Not the bet. Not the sex. Not the smashed truck or the hot chocolate or the tree that fell. Twice. There was no going back and no moving ahead.

There was just nothing but her.

And she was gone.

Chapter Seventeen

Four days before Christmas

Liam was kicked back in his recliner, not even seeing what was on TV, when his buzzer rang. He ignored it. He didn’t need to see anyone. He didn’t need to talk. He really just needed to forget about Claire, and especially forget about whatever kept him from forgetting about her. It wasn’t like they’d actually had one of those moments where he knew he couldn’t let her go.

Or maybe it was precisely
because
of that. Yeah, they had stuff in common. And the sex was amazing, but it went beyond that. It was some damned indescribable feeling that burrowed into his chest and stayed there, and no amount of beer had come close to washing it away. The Chinese takeout he’d ordered earlier hadn’t budged it either.

And staring at the television wasn’t helping any more than listening to the buzzer. Finally, he kicked the foot rest down and answered it. “Yeah.”

“It’s…it’s Claire.”

He wasn’t even sure he heard her right, but he knew her voice. He had a goddamned
visceral
reaction
to her voice. “Come on up,” he said, glancing around and finding the place mostly decent. His coffee mug from that morning was still on the counter, and he’d thrown his jacket over a chair, but hell, if that made her run, she probably should.

She’d barely knocked when the opened the door, wondering at the last second which version he’d find. The made-up, camera-ready Claire, or the natural one—the one who’d fallen in a snow drift with him and smashed hot chocolate against his chest. He hoped for that one.

She didn’t disappoint.

She looked like she’d just stepped off the slopes, with her hair pulled back, blue eyes bright, lips a natural, delectable shade. She wore those same snug-fitting stretchy pants and a ski jacket that almost exactly matched her eyes.

She was…stunning. The kind of beautiful that would bring a man to his knees, though looking at her, he realized he’d pretty much been there since that morning she’d walked out of the club room that held abandoned poker hands and smelled of stale cigars.

“You didn’t charge me for the service,” she said, kind of like she was pissed.

Bewildered, he stepped aside, letting her in. “You came all the way here to tell me that? I didn’t even write the ticket.”

“I didn’t trade sex for you to service my furnace.”

“No, you didn’t.” Okay, so maybe she
had
come all the way here to yell at him. Unless she was back for some other reason, which didn’t help his mood much.

She was glancing around, taking in his apartment. He kind of was, too. Memorizing how she looked in there, taking notes for when she’d leave. He knew damn well she couldn’t stay.

Finally, she asked, “Then why didn’t you bill me?”

He shrugged. “We did. Standard service call.”

“Three hours upstate? And you were there how many days?”

Was she
kidding
? Actually here to give him crap about the stupid bill, and for that matter for it not being high enough? “You know what’s funny?” he said, actually not finding anything the least bit amusing. “I’m standing here thinking how ungodly beautiful you are and realizing the city sky has never been as blue as your eyes, and you’re over there worried about underpaying a fucking furnace bill. You can write the damned check for whatever you want to write the damned check for. Are you happy now? Is that why you’re here?”

She threw out her hands. “I don’t know. I guess I just…wanted to see if you were real.”

He just stared for a long moment before he finally said, “If I haven’t convinced you of that yet, I’m afraid I’m out of ideas.” Maybe he could use a few. Something to distract him from remembering what was under those clothes, and the way she said his name and how she looked riding him, her head thrown back, the tips of her long hair grazing his thighs. Because he hadn’t been able to unsee that, and now he was seeing it with her in his apartment.

“Not that kind of real,” she stammered. “Or maybe that kind. I don’t know. I just—”

He hauled her in and kissed her, hard.

If he’d caught her off guard, she recovered nicely, fisting his shirt, dragging him lower, pulling him deeper. But what started as a demand quickly dissolved into slow, unmerciful exploration. His heart hammered and raced like he’d never been touched before. Her lips were soft and warm, setting fire to him. “Stay with me a while,” he murmured. “Please.”

“As long as there are no winter sports in here,” she managed. “Or raccoons. I’m fresh out of bananas.”

“I promise you’re safe from live critters and winter sports. I, on the other hand, fully intend to ravage you. It might be the worst idea I’ve ever had, but you’re here, and my heart has already stopped once. I might need a kick start of some kind. Or maybe you’ll just go ahead and finish me. I don’t care. I just want you.”

“I think I can finish you,” she murmured.

“I’m going to hold you to that.” He reached over to lock the door, not letting go of her. Too afraid she was a figment of his imagination who would disappear. Hell, she probably would anyway. She’d showed up to dispute her bill, not declare her undying love. But he held on anyway. It wasn’t a thing he did, holding on. Certainly not anything he’d wanted to do before, but she was different. He didn’t know what that meant, other than not letting go.

He had her shirt off before they made it through his bedroom door, and he relieved her of everything else she wore before she hit the bed. She’d made that makeshift bed at the lodge seem incredible, but seeing her there, naked and stretched out on his bed, freshly washed comforter billowing around her, kind of like the snow had that day he’d landed in the drift with her on top of him, skis tangled.

He stripped off his clothes and then the comforter, playfully tossing her to the side before joining her on the bed. Every cell in his body begged for him to dive right in, but he captured her hand and her gaze and for a moment just drowned in the fact that she was there. Not as part of a memory, but the fantasies…yeah, this was happening.

She touched his cheek with her free hand and brushed back the hair that had fallen in his face. The way she was looking at him, he half expected her to say something profound—something he’d have to run from later. Instead she said, “Why is there a stuffed raccoon on your bed?”

He laughed. “Because I have three brothers,” he said. Like that made sense. Eventually, if she met them, it would. In the meantime, he wanted to spend zero seconds discussing them.

“Did you name it?”

“Name what?” He kissed her fingertips, then that little spot at her collarbone, then worked his way lower, enjoying the way her hand tightened in his hair when he grazed her breast with his teeth.

“The stuffed raccoon.”

“Yeah,” he said with a grin, looking up. “I sure did.” Right then, he had. “His name is Bandit.”

He expected that to have been cute, but he wasn’t sure she heard him. She had her eyes closed, probably because he’d eased his fingers inside her and was shamelessly stroking her, not fast enough to drive her in any particular direction. Just slow, lazy, deep penetration that had the good girl arching her back and clutching at his sheets, her holds on him forgotten. Had he been a better man, he would have coaxed all that pleasure out of her, but he wasn’t a better man. He was a man who had spent way too many nights alone, remember in far too vivid detail the way that woman exploded around him.

He managed to reach his condom stash, untouched since he left her, without breaking contact. And when she opened her eyes to see what he was doing, she didn’t look away, either. She watched him put the thing on, then held both of his hands, their fingers laced, holding on tight, as he sank into her.

God help him, he didn’t want to leave. Not even for the second it would take to drive deeper. He’d thought he couldn’t possibly remember how incredible she was, but the truth was, he didn’t remember enough. There was no way a memory could do justice to the way she responded to him, drawing him in, throwing back her head, whimpering his name, dragging her nails across his back.

How the hell was he supposed to let that go?

He was still wondering that later, when he walked her out. It was the middle of the night. He wanted her to stay, but he didn’t argue when she said she should go. He’d already worried about what would happen if someone saw them together in the morning, so as much as he wanted her in his arms, her timing was a bit of a relief.

Letting her go wasn’t. Mostly he just wanted to haul her back upstairs. She was so beautiful standing there, even if the city lights had nothing on the stars that had provided ambient light on top of her mountain.

He didn’t seem to be the only one with second thoughts. She hesitated on the front stoop, fingertips toying with the hem of the shirt he’d thrown on against the December cold. Dirty snow, the result of a recent couple of inches, sat in chunks at the curbs. There were no evergreens. No endless skies.

No place for that here.

“What are we doing here, Liam?” She frowned, but not even that didn’t mar that ethereal glow that made her look like some kind of angel. Her hair shone, her eyes luminously blue against the grimy city.

He traced his fingertips lightly over her cheek. When she shivered, he almost held her, but then he remembered where they were and took a step away from her. The hurt look on her face made his chest tighten and cemented the knot he seemed to carry with any distance between them. Whether that was ten inches or ten miles didn’t seem to matter. He just hated not touching her. “I assume you’re not looking for the obvious,” he said.

She frowned. “I’m serious. We can’t just meet up and…
nail
.”

He wanted to wrap his arms around her, but this was New York, the city that never slept. Three in the morning meant nothing for anonymity there. “I vote for meeting and nailing with increased frequency. And also reckless abandon.” Ironic he should throw out
reckless
when he worried about touching her in public in the middle of the night, but that was what his life had become.

“Will you be simultaneously nailing anyone else at the same time?”

“I’d really rather just nail you,” he said, keeping his voice light, though the question irked him. How could he possibly think of anyone else? And did she really think he was
that
guy?

She exhaled, then seemed to take a measured breath. “Lovely. But that brings me to my point. How is this not a relationship?”

It was his turn to sigh. “Why does it need a label?”

She frowned. “It just…does. I don’t want to go there again. It starts with sex at the lodge, and then it’s sex here, and at some point, we’ll go out in public and resurrect those old headlines, and when it ends, I’ll be a laughingstock all over again.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t touch her. “So you’d rather me believe you drove all the way here to argue about a bill than have me think there’s more?”

“I don’t
know
. I just know I can’t…
do
this. I don’t trust myself. For God’s sake, you had a
bet
about whether you’d sleep with me—”

“Actually, it was about whether you’d still speak to me after spending forty-eight hours with me at the lodge.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I never did let you explain. So explain.”

He expected that achingly familiar angst to hit in the chest like it always did when he was put on the spot. And it should have, because he’d never really needed anyone to understand like he needed her right then, but the spiraling didn’t happen.

For once, he wanted to put himself out there, and especially to erase any lingering hurt or doubts following that stupid bet. “Sawyer and Crosby were always the outgoing ones out of all of my brothers. I was ‘the quiet one.’ Ethan was somewhere in the middle. When I was a kid, I was stupidly shy, to the point where I once literally tried to fake a case of Ebola rather than give an oral report in front of my English class in middle school. It didn’t work, and I wound up grabbing the recycling bin and bolting for the door in the middle of said report. Fortunately, I made it into the hallway before my lunch made a repeat appearance. The teacher gave me a passing grade on the assignment out of pity and because I cleaned out the bin for the janitor.”

She winced. “Wow. That’s extreme.”

“Says the news reporter who loves cameras.” He went on. “It got better as I got older, of course. But I’m still an idiot when I actually try to flirt with someone, and I usually end up saying something so awkward or horrible, I either make her cry or suspect I’m a serial killer. Once I admitted to Sawyer that you were hot, he bet me I couldn’t actually attempt flirting with you and not scare you off. I meant what I said before. I needed coffee with you, not sex.”

“Flattering as that is,” she said dryly, “I chased you down, so one way or another, I guess you won your bet.”

“Could you forget the bet?”

“I’d
love
to forget the bet,” he said.

“And what about us? Are you saying you want a relationship?”

“No,” he said. “I can’t say that.”

She tensed. “And I can’t be your fuck buddy until someone less infamous comes along.”

His heart tumbled and flailed and unceremoniously splatted on the dirty pavement. “Claire.”

She shook her head. “I won’t say I’m not confused or conflicted, but unless you tell me you want this to go somewhere, there’s nothing to figure out.”

“I can’t. I mean, I can’t begin to explain the sheer randomness of going viral over a wet T-shirt, but I can tell you the utter bullshit of some people calling nonstop and setting up service calls just to have one of us show up and either be Hot HVAC Guy or not, but in either case wasting our time and resources. The calls are so ridiculous the office can’t keep up, and the real customers get lost in the fray. It’s not just my life that gets fucked up, although that’s bad enough. It’s affecting other people. It’s affecting a business that’s been around for generations.”

She sighed, and the shakiness of it broke his heart. “Okay,” she said. “I get it. I mean, I really do. But some things are worth a chance. It’s hard to know what things, when you’re in a situation like this where you have to take a small chance to see if the big one is worth it, but sometimes even the smallest chance is too much. Especially when you have as much at stake as you do.”