With a grumble, he yanked on a pair of shorts, checking to make sure it didn’t have any holes where it shouldn’t, and threw a what-might-be-clean T-shirt over his head. He hoped to fuck Ry had put on a pot of coffee before he left this morning after the night shift.
Apparently, the motel was the perfect place for the Fury college kids to work for the summer. But at least he had help and wasn’t chained to the office himself. Except for times like these when he got stuck working the front desk because Liz was no longer…
Fuck.
It had been two months. Why the fuck was she still haunting him?
Because she and that asshole were constantly in his fucking face. Hard to put something behind him when it was always in front of him.
On the weekends, he’d taken to texting someone at The Barn before heading over to make sure the happy couple wasn’t already there. Or texting Dodge first before going to Crazy Pete’s to drink and possibly find someone to fuck if he wasn’t in the mood for one of the sweet butts.
A couple of times he’d had Angel and Brandy over for a threesome. But it wasn’t the same. He was disappointed in the way they both ate pussy. Like they could barely tolerate it.
That was the good thing about…
Christ. He swallowed his curse and finished jogging down the steps that took him from his apartment upstairs to the office below.
His bare feet stopped on the bottom step as he saw the woman standing at the counter waiting.
Holy fuck.
Her dark eyes turned his way and for a second, he feared he might have released those two words out into the wild. He did his best not to curse in front of the guests. Sometimes he achieved it, most times he failed.
The current guest standing in his office had long, loose very dark brown hair that was kind of a mess, almost as if she’d been out in the wind or she’d kept dragging her hand through it. After a second, she shot him a smile that hit him directly in the dick.
It was genuine. Not an I-need-to-be-nice-to-the-help type of smile.
But as fast as it was there, it was gone. As if she caught herself doing something she shouldn’t.
Strange, but whatever. Smiling or not, she was still hot as fuck. And his day suddenly got more interesting and made it more tolerable after being forced out of bed before he was ready.
He took the final step and moved behind the counter, instead of just standing there gawking like a forty-year-old virgin.
Something he wasn’t. The virgin part, anyway.
“Hey.” He cleared his throat and dropped his voice an octave to repeat his “hey” greeting again—a lot more smoothly this time—but still wanting to kick himself in the nuts for his voice cracking the first time like a fourteen-year-old hitting puberty.
“Hi. I’m really sorry for checking in way too early, but I was hoping you had a room ready so I could catch up on some sleep. I had a long drive.”
Her voice wasn’t super chipper, thank fuck, because it was way too early for that, but more like the warm honey he’d licked off…
Fuck.
He jerked on his beard. He needed to evict Liz from his head. The woman standing on the other side of the counter could be the person to do that. If not in reality, then at least in his fantasies.
“Ain’t a thing. Got a room that wasn’t booked last night. Can stick you in that one.” He frowned as everything else she mentioned finally sunk into his not-quite-one-hundred-percent-awake brain. “Drove overnight?”
She nodded. “Less traffic.”
“More deer,” he mumbled as he studied her face. He saw it now, the dark half-moons under her brown eyes. Most likely from exhaustion. He also noticed a couple of fine lines spidering out from the corners. From the bottom of the steps, she looked, at most, in her early thirties. Closer up, he guessed she might be pushing late thirties.
But he had to look really fucking close to see it. And right now, only about three feet and the front desk counter stood between them.
Her lips curled up just slightly at the ends. “Yes, less car traffic, but more wildlife. Especially in northern Pennsylvania. I forgot how much dodging and weaving I’d have to do to avoid squishing critters.”
“Easier to dodge and weave when you’re on a sled.”
A crease marred her forehead when she asked, “A what?”
He shook his head and watched that crease quickly disappear. “Got a reservation?”
She nodded and placed a thick wallet on the counter. “Yes. Do you need the confirmation number?”
He shook his head again. He wasn’t typing that long-ass number into the computer. He typed with only two damn fingers. It would take him half the day to search for it that way. “Just your name. Credit card.”