Muffin Top

Fucking A. This woman. “Maybe.”

“Now, that is interesting,” Tom said, stopping outside the French doors and, for the first time since they’d arrived, not looking at Frankie as if he were the barbarian at the gates. “I’d love to talk to you more about this. Are you an early riser? I could fit you in before my first morning appointment tomorrow.”

Oh yeah, because that’s what his Irish ass was about to do—talk about his feelings about sex. Somewhere, one of his ancestors rolled over in his Catholic grave at even the idea of it. “I appreciate the offer, but I think I’ll be fine after a few weeks on the bench to get my head straight.”

“You should take him up on it.” Lucy hooked her arm in his and looked up at him as if she hadn’t just slid a shiv right into his tender parts. “He’s considered a national treasure in the sex therapy community.”

“I’m sure he is, but all the same…” He let the rest of the sentence drop, wishing like hell he was already in the room above the garage.

“Don’t pester him, Lucy. He’ll find his own way,” Tom said, his expression taking on some of its papa bear effects again as his gaze dropped to where she was touching Frankie. “And in the meantime, I’ll help you carry your bags to your room. Frankie, I’ll show you the door to get to the garage apartment on the way.”

Lucy didn’t look like she was ready to let it drop, but after a second she did and they followed her dad inside.

“This isn’t over,” she whispered under her breath before slipping her arm out of his, picking up her suitcase and heading off down the hall.

…

Not for the first time in her life, Lucy cursed her big mouth, which was almost as big as her ass and twice as troublesome. However, this time she was determined to keep it shut for at least as long as it took her to get from her old room to the garage apartment.

She’d considered apologizing to Frankie via text, but it seemed kinda cold. Plus, she’d have a much better chance of getting him to actually talk to her dad if she said she was sorry in person. It was a helluva lot harder to ignore her when she was standing right there as opposed to a text.

She just had to treat this as if she was talking to one of her clients so he’d understand the brilliance of her plan, and not as if she was talking to a guy who made her panties damp every time he looked at her, despite the fact that he’d probably seen more panties than she owned. Nope. That wasn’t factoring into her decision to tiptoe past her dad’s room as if she was fifteen again and go talk to a cute boy. Not. At. All.

By the time she climbed the stairs to the guest suite above the garage, she had a plan of attack. Really, this was for his own good. If there was anything a child of a therapist knew, it was the value of figuring out the reason why behind a behavior. Frankie just needed to do a deep dive and figure his shit out. Helping him do that would be a much better form of repayment than gas money for coming with her to the reunion  .

Frankie answered on the second quick tap on the door. He was in a pair of loose shorts that hung low on his hips and nothing else. She shouldn’t look, but his brawny form filled the door and she didn’t have any other place to look. So she perused. She took in. Okay, she totally gawked—who wouldn’t when presented with that much hotness? Part of her knew she should look away. After all, the man had given up more than a week of his life to come to her reunion  . He deserved some appreciation of the non-eye-fucking kind. Instead of eyeballing him like he was as gorgeous as the perfect pair of heels that were cute and comfortable, she should be keeping her eyes on his face and not his broad shoulders, reddish gold hair dusting his pecs, or the way his shorts left very little to the imagination about how very not little he was.

She was a horrible person, she knew that. However, she also knew that Frankie’s happy trail matched his ginger hair. That item of information would get stored away for future jilling off material.

See? Horrible person who should know better and is looking anyway!

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“No.” She steeled herself for the words she had to say. “I need to apologize, and I hate apologizing.”

His mouth wavered as if he was trying to stop a smirk from emerging. “I’m shocked. You seem like the kind of person who just loves saying she was wrong.”

From anyone else, the sarcasm would have scratched its way under her skin and down to her don’t-fuck-with-me marrow. But from Frankie Hartigan? The man couldn’t even do mockery without turning it into flirting. It would be annoying if she didn’t enjoy it so much. It was nice being the object of someone’s “A” flirt game. It wasn’t that men didn’t hit on her. They did. It was the type of men who made a move on her that made her dating prospects so poor. Suffice it to say that fat fetishists and guys who thought she didn’t have options and would go for their still-living-in-their-mom’s-basement asses tended to clog up her dating app inbox. But guys like Frankie? This was just FWC: flirting without consequences—especially since the man was on a no-sex diet.