Yeah, this was going to be okay. A plan was slowly forming in his mind. A plan to get her into his house. No apartment would be good enough, or safe enough, for Selena. The guy ogling her a few minutes ago was a perfect example of what he needed to protect her from.
Looking at the muscles gently flexing in her arms, he suspected that the woman was perfectly capable of protecting herself, but still…what kind of gentleman leaves a woman to protect herself?
Not a good one, he told himself.
“I’m not even going to ask,” Selena said as she led him out of the apartment and back to the car, her hands clenching the brochures.
He laughed softly, still thinking about his plan. Opening the car, he took pleasure in watching her long legs flex as she stepped into his Jeep. “Why aren’t you going to ask?”
She slipped into the passenger seat. “Because you’ll just point out all of the bad things.”
He stared at her for a long, hard moment. He hadn’t noticed any bad things, other than the ass who had ogled her legs. Reid dismissed the fact that he’d also been looking at her legs. And her butt. And now that he thought about it, her breasts were pretty amazing too. Hell, every part of her was beautiful! Including her eyes. And her smile. Yeah, her lips were perfect!
Focusing back on the conversation, he put the Jeep in gear. “And you want to put your head in the sand and pretend as if the bad things aren’t there?”
She grinned up at him, feeling cheeky and confident. “Yep!”
He glared at her. “So the fact that you’d have a tiny washer and dryer instead of a full sized one doesn’t bother you?”
He watched, almost laughing when her smile dimmed slightly. “I’ll just do laundry more often.”
“The sales person said that the only available apartments are on the second and third floors. And there’s no elevator, so you’ll be hauling your groceries up three flights of stairs.” He paused, watching her enthusiasm dim further. “That’s a problem during the months with good weather. But we get snow here in Denver. Imagine hauling your groceries along those pathways when they’re covered with snow.” The management company most likely cleared the snow with a plow, but he wasn’t telling her that.
He could see her thinking about it. “Groceries get heavy when you’re hauling them up that many stairs.”
She huffed, blowing a wisp of hair off of her forehead. “Next place.”
With a spurt of victory that he hid from her, he nodded his head with approval. “Where to now?” he asked as he backed up again.
Selena looked down at her phone. “The next place is in Thornton.”
“No. Too far from the city. You’ll spend too much time in traffic on Highway Twenty-Five.”
She looked over at him as if he’d gone crazy.
“What?” he asked as he turned left instead of right to head back into the city. No way was he letting her live all the way out in Thornton. Nice place, but too far from him.
“You remember where I used to live just a week ago, right?”
“Okay, so Washington, D.C. has the worst traffic in the country, but you also lived in Arlington, which is very close to the city. You didn’t get the full brunt of living outside of where everything was happening.”
“True, the people who live in the outer suburbs had it worse. But you have to understand. People who live in Las Vegas learn to deal with the heat. People in Alaska figure out how to handle snow and cold. People in Florida…well, I’m not sure any of them really learn to deal with alligators or the pythons but…my point is, the traffic here in Denver is nothing compared to what people in DC have to go through every day.”
He conceded that she had a point, but that didn’t mean he was giving in. “You’re going to need a place closer to the heart of Denver, Selena. You can’t live in Thornton or further out.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
Her laughter should have irritated him. So, why did the sound make him smile? Even Reid had to acknowledge that it really had been a lame response. In this case though, he didn’t give a damn. “I’m the boss,” he told her, thinking that was a better reason.