Basic Attraction (2 page)

“That’s how brothers talk to sisters.”

“And you called your brothers stupid and yelled ‘boo’ at me so that I almost fell off my chair.” Her denouncements came out in a breathless rush. “And you flicked a ladybug in my face. Then at the barbeque, you bullied my dance partner until he switched with you so that I had to dance with you instead.”

He had flicked a ladybug in her face? That had to be made up. He had zero memory of that or what would have motivated him to throw an insect at her. But somehow he didn’t think Sheri was a liar. Stated together, it was slightly damaging. But “bully” was still a gross exaggeration. Besides, sometimes his motives were pure of heart. In a roundabout self-serving sort of way.

He had to defend himself. “That guy was like six inches shorter than you. I was just trying to stop him from looking like an ass trying to dance with you.”

She gasped. “Oh, thank you for pointing out that I’m an Amazon. I hadn’t realized it until you so clearly pointed it out, Luke.”

His pleasure that Sheri had finally spoken his name directly was superseded by the fact that she thought he had been calling her an Amazon. Which conjured some sexy images of warrior princesses tying him onto a stone slab and having their way with him. However, he knew she didn’t see it as a compliment.

He swore. “Fuck, Sheri. I didn’t say Amazon. You did.”

Before he could try and climb out of the hole he’d dug, she waved her hands in exasperation. “It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. I don’t want to have this conversation with you anymore.” Her cheeks were pink, and her breath was coming in ragged little pants of air.

He raised a brow. “What do you want, gorgeous?”

“I want you to put your pants on.”

“Really?” He was in no hurry. He had nowhere to be.

“Yes. You’re distracting me from the real problem at hand.”

Pleased to hear he was a distraction, he said lazily, “Which is?”

“Mookie!” She stared at him as if he were the stupidest man in town.

Which apparently he was. His mind was blank. “What’s Mookie?”

“The cat!”

Oh, right. The orange blob he’d seen darting under the couch once or twice in Angel’s apartment back in Chicago before she had starting splitting her time between Illinois and Tennessee. He didn’t remember seeing it here though.

“The cat. Right. Where is the cat?” He looked around the empty living room. Nothing but the TV.

“That’s the problem.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “He’s missing! I can’t find him anywhere.”

His towel was slipping again, and since his hands were full, his grab for it resulted in a miss. The towel hit the floor again, but the bundle of clothes in his hand blocked the important parts from her view. Too bad.

Sheri glared at him before squeezing her eyes shut again. “That’s it. I’m not saying another word until you put some clothes on.”

He came very close to laughing at her childish indignation. The only thing she hadn’t done yet was stomp her foot. “You’re not even going to hum this time? I must really be in trouble.”

Without opening her eyes, she mimed zipping her lips shut. Amused, he dropped his jeans and T-shirt to the floor then pulled on his briefs, kicking the towel aside. He saw no need to actually walk all the way down the hall to cover what she’d already seen. He put on his jeans.

“Done. You can open your eyes now, Chicken Little.”

They popped open suspiciously. “Where’s your shirt?”

“I’m not putting that back on. It smells like day-old sweat.”

Her look of horror made him laugh out loud. He didn’t know how she was capable of looking prissy and sexy at the same time, but she was pulling it off. And he was having more fun than he’d had in months.

Sheri Green hadn’t been this shocked and horrified since she had walked in on her parents’
inflagrante delecto
on the kitchen table.

Actually, that was a complete and total lie. Seeing her parents had been truly horrifying. What was horrifying now was not seeing Luke naked, it was her reaction to it. Never in her twenty-eight years of life had she been so irrationally aroused by a man who was all wrong for her. She’d never even had teen crushes on bad boys, but now she couldn’t get Luke Weiss out of her head. It was like she was making up for lost time.

She hadn’t expected anyone to be in the house. Certainly not Angel’s disreputable brother. Well, Angel claimed he was a good guy, but given that he looked like he belonged in a heavy metal band, she wasn’t buying it.

He was dangerous. He was a big old-fashioned bully who used his good looks and scruffy appearance to intimidate everyone around him. He was doing it now.

Dropping his towel had not been an accident. Sheri’s cheeks grew warm. If only she hadn’t
looked
. That had been a grave error in judgment. Now she knew the horrifying truth. Luke had no problems in the size department. None whatsoever.

And that largeness had been all for her, a part of her brain yelled gleefully. The slutty part. The other more rational side pointed out that the man was a pig, and that a cool breeze probably served as a turn-on. She also knew enough to know that men suffered from that whole morning erection mystery.

She wished it were for her. Which meant she had to get the heck out of this house before she did something stupid, like smile at him.

Find the cat. Get out. She took a deep breath. “Have you seen Mookie at all since you got here?”

“No.” He scratched his chest again.

She wished he would just knock it off. He couldn’t possibly know that the simple act of brushing his fingernails across that firm, well-developed, warm chest was causing her knees to quiver. Not that she knew if his chest was warm. It just looked like it. The man needed a shirt. She was tempted to rip hers off and give it to him. Anything to cover that golden skin.

To make it even worse, she was equal parts fascinated and horrified to see that he had a tattoo on his chest, right above his pectoral muscle. It looked like a sunburst that had been torn apart with an atomic bomb, a shattered explosion, with lots of detailing and shading in bold black ink. It rippled when he moved his arms. He also had a sleeve with colorful and intricate imagery on one arm that she couldn’t decipher without staring. She’d never understood the lure of tattoos, but on Luke…
Have mercy
.

Where else did he have them? His calf, probably. His back, shoulders? She wanted to explore each and every one of them. With her tongue.

She tried to focus. “Not at all? When did you get here?”

“Yesterday about four o’clock. No cat.”

This was horrible. Angel was a good friend. She had trusted her with her one and only pet, and Sheri had lost him. She jammed her fingers into her now throbbing temples. The day was going from bad to worse. She was supposed to just feed the cat, give him fresh water, play with him a little. Instead, she was standing here with a half-naked bad boy, no cat in sight, and a serious case of confusion.

Luke appalled her. Yet she was wishing he would kiss her—among other very naked things. Why, she couldn’t begin to imagine. He wasn’t her type. Not that she really had a type. Being nearly six feet tall and gawky besides, her high school dating had been nonexistent. Then in college, she had gratefully gone out with anyone who had been willing to risk craning his neck and ask her.

In recent years, she had focused on athletic men who wouldn’t be intimidated by her size and physical lifestyle. She had grown comfortable with herself over the years, but the facts were plain and simple. Being tall might work to your advantage if you wanted to play women’s pro basketball or be a supermodel in New York or L.A., but in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, it got you nothing but a lot of empty Friday nights.

Having the last name Green had been an additional burden. If she heard another Jolly Green Giant joke, she would not be held responsible for her actions.

No man had ever looked at her quite the way Luke did. Hungry—that’s how he looked at her. It had her completely off balance. She had gotten used to being the pursuer, used to men being intimidated by her. Instead, Luke was pursuing. Luke was intimidating. And she didn’t know if it was just flirtation to him or if he really wanted to rip her clothes off and get hot and sweaty the way his eyes seemed to say he did.

“This is awful. Angel’s going to die.” She moaned a little, sagging against the wall.

“He’ll turn up.” Luke shrugged.

“This is your fault. You must have let him out when you came in yesterday.”

His blue eyes flashed at her. “I don’t think so, Chicken Little.”

The obscure nickname filtered through her worried thoughts. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

Smiling that devilish grin, he said, “Chicken Little overreacted. So are you.”

First Amazon, now Chicken Little. Maybe she was misreading the look in his eyes. Maybe he just wanted breakfast, not her. “Well, what would you do?”

“Nothing. He’s a cat. He’ll come back when he’s ready to.”

That was unacceptable. Glad she didn’t have to go to work today, she darted her gaze around the empty living room. There weren’t a whole lot of places for a cat to hide, but she needed to at least look. He could be trapped in a closet or something, slowly dehydrating.

“Mookie?” she called softly, starting across the old brown shag carpet Rick and Angel were having torn out.

She opened the coat closet by the front door and found nothing but an old feather duster. She started down the hall, checking in all the bedrooms, in the closets, and behind doors. All the rooms were empty of furniture and Mookie, except for the smallest room. It had a mattress covered with a sheet, which looked deliciously rumpled. A half-empty bottle of beer was on the windowsill and a duffle bag was lying on the floor, a stick of deodorant spilling out.

This was where Luke had slept. Sparse, no nonsense—like the man himself.

There was nowhere for a cat to hide except in the duffel bag. She called for Mookie again then stepped towards the bag, shifting on the balls of her feet. Her gym shoes squeaked. No cat came running out.

Tentatively, she knelt down and stuck her hand inside the bag, feeling around. Clothes, a magazine, something in plastic wrap, a shampoo bottle. Definitely not a cat.

“If you wanted to touch my stuff, you could have just asked.”

She turned with a jerk to see Luke lounging in the doorway, his hands tucked in the front pockets of his jeans, smiling smugly. She wished he were short. It would be much easier to dismiss him from her thoughts if he were a head shorter than she was. But she suspected that, if they were to stand close enough to touch, they would be eye to eye. It was unnerving.

“I’m looking for the cat,” she snapped. “Though I can’t help but notice you don’t seem to own a brush.”

His fingers went up to his shaggy hair, which was falling down over his forehead in straight, thick locks. He had a tousled bedroom-eye look that set every nerve ending in her body on high alert. She would feel much more comfortable if he would head to the barber and chop all that soft, dark blond hair off.

“That’s what fingers are for.”

Desperation was starting to kick in. Sheri needed to get past him, but he looked like he had all the time in the world to just stand there and hold up the wall. If she tried to bluster past him, part of her was going to touch part of him, and she knew that would be harmful to her general health and well-being.

“Are you going to help me look for the cat or not?” Standing, she crossed her arms over her chest and tried to look firm, hoping he wouldn’t notice the panic that must be swimming in her eyes.

“Sure.” He started to turn around but threw back over his shoulder, “If I find him, what’s my reward?”

“The happiness of your sister.” She followed him out of the room, heading down the hall to check the bathroom.

She heard him rustling around in the hall closet before closing it again. He trailed after her into the bathroom.

As she opened the shower stall door with a click, he said, “How would a cat get in there?”

“I don’t know. But we need to check everywhere.”

“I never knew a cat who could open a shower door.”

Now he thought she was tall, overreacting, and stupid. “Okay. Point taken.” She pulled her head up from behind the toilet. “There’s only one place left to check. The basement.”

“After you.”

He gallantly swept his arm out, and she brushed past him in the narrow bathroom door. Her shoulder clipped his. Dammit. His bare skin was warm. Hot, in fact.

“So do you have a house, Sheri?”

She refused to look at him, so she walked doggedly on towards the basement steps leading off the kitchen. “No. I have an apartment.”

“Me too. I’m wondering about this owning-a-house business. Do you think it could be fun?”

There was that off-balance thing again. She had no idea if he was just making conversation or if there was a point. “I guess. More room to spread out. And I’d like having a garden in the backyard for my herbs.”

She grew herbs in innumerable small pots throughout her apartment for use in cooking and her tea. She liked to think of gardening as her feminine side. When she wasn’t jogging or working, she liked her plants.

“I’d get a dog.” Luke clamored down the steps into the basement behind her.

Pausing on the rickety wooden steps, she searched for the light switch. “What kind?” An image of him with a Doberman or a Chihuahua came to mind. Why such extremes, she wasn’t sure. But maybe because she imagined him wanting to make a statement with his pet. She found the light and flipped it on.

“An Irish Setter,” he said without hesitation.

Good thing she was facing away from him or he would have seen her jaw drop. She couldn’t quite reconcile the idea of him tossing a ball with a dog, letting it lick his face, or running his hand over that shiny chestnut coat with the man she had seen.

“Why?”

“I like their coloring. I’m partial to long brown hair with reddish streaks.”

Wait a minute. That was her hair color.

After turning quickly, she caught him staring at her behind as he followed her down the stairs. She stepped into the basement and coughed. Good thing it was still dim down here because she felt a flush creeping up her neck. Had he really just given her a hair compliment?