Muffin Top

“Since I usually see much worse on a daily basis, I’ll live. You look like you might today, too.” Her gaze flickered down from his face before speeding back up to somewhere just north of his head, her eyes wide. “You need to pull up your covers.”

That made him bristle. The last people who told him that he needed to do something were his folks. And he’d unknowingly signed huge loans they’d taken out in his name. They’d called it boring minutia he didn’t need to worry about, since they were his managers and would always watch out for him. The accountant he’d finally hired called it embezzlement and financial ruin. So long, humiliating, shitty story, he could give two shits what anyone felt he “needed to do” ever again.

However, something about the pink staining her cheeks had him looking downward. The basketball shorts he’d been wearing when he’d finally collapsed onto his king-sized bed, the only piece of furniture in the huge bedroom, had worked their way down, waaaaaay down. And Fallon had noticed.

He glanced over at her and caught her snapping her attention back up to his face and keeping it there as she approached his bed. But she couldn’t stop looking, even though it was obvious from her grimace that she didn’t want to.

Well, this could be useful. All he wanted was to deal with the grossness of food poisoning on his own. Alone. No one seeing any crack in his defenses. That’s how he lived his life now. He probably always should have.

But he couldn’t kick Fallon out of his house and stay in Lucy’s good graces.

However, if he got her to leave on her own…well then, that was a different story completely.

“Pull up my covers?” he asked, knowing he was about to put a skate across the line of decency even if he had absolutely zero plans of following through. Of course it wouldn’t be the first time he fought dirty, as many of his opponents on the ice would attest. “If I do that, how are you going to give me a sponge bath?”

She jolted to a stop at the foot of his bed, and he practically heard the match strike the dynamite. “A. Sponge. Bath?”

He shoots. He scores. He would have lifted his arms in celebration—after she stormed out of the house, of course—but something in his gut bubbled and cramped, causing beads of sweat to pop out along his forehead. Want had nothing to do with it anymore, he needed to get her away from here.

Hello? This is karma here to fuck you up, asshole.

Ignoring the vehemence in her tone, along with the continuing fizzle and twist in his stomach, Zach shrugged his shoulders and ran one of his hands down the hard ridges of his six-pack, playing the part of a sexist jerk who would actually ask for a sponge bath. “I ran a fever yesterday. It made me all sweaty.”

Closing her eyes, she tipped her pointed chin toward the ceiling and sucked in a deep breath. That gave him a chance to try to will his stomach into chilling the fuck out, which worked about as well as could be expected. Everything inside his abdomen did a shimmy-slosh thing that did not bode well. He barely got his oh-fuck expression off his face before she lowered her chin and opened her eyes, staring right at him with nothing but sweetness and light.

The air around him stilled, and the little hairs on the back of his neck stood up.

“Well, I’d hate for you—in your weakened condition—to slip in the shower and crack open your head,” she said, putting enough sugar in her words to put him in a diabetic coma. “Where do you keep your sponges?”

Like the Homecoming Queen in a slasher movie, Zach bolted from his bed, managing to yank up his basketball shorts from just above his junk to his waist.

He held up his hand like she was a vampire he had to ward off. “Don’t even think about it.”

Her laugh burst out, full and teasing. She’d gotten him. She’d seen right through him like he was an unshaded window.

With her eyes as big and round as an anime heroine’s, she cocked her head to one side. “Do you no longer need my professional sponge bath expertise? I’ll have you know that I excelled in the wax on, wax off motion of it at nursing school.” She let out a deep, melodramatic sigh. “If only I could have specialized in that instead of trauma medicine.”

Zach dropped his hand and closed his eyes. She was fucking with him. He clamped his jaw shut so she wouldn’t see the smile fighting to get out even as his stomach started to roil again.

Finally, he opened his eyes and took in a deep breath, knowing he had to get her out of this room before he puked again if he had any hope of hustling her from his house this morning. “Point taken. I’ll just get in the shower.” He started edging toward the en-suite bathroom.