Explosive Alliance (Wingmen Warriors 9)

Did she sleep in a nightshirt? Pajamas? Sleep pants and a T-shirt maybe? Or something silky. Or nothing at all with silkier skin to explore. He'd envisioned her in each one and found them all beyond appealing.

Winds kicked up, dropping the temperature another ten degrees or so and rustling the oak tree across the yard. Who'd have thought it could get this cold in May? At least if the lowering temps continued into the night, the freeze would knock out the mosquito population.

"What's that you're playing?" Paige's voice drifted over his shoulder.

Bo glanced back. Hell, he hadn't even heard her coming. He continued to pluck along the strings, waiting for her to join him on the double-seater while Kirstie's swing on the oak twisted in the wind. "I was working on a tune for Cupcake. She seems to like nursery rhymes and poems. I thought she would enjoy hearing one or two of them set to music."

She took her seat beside him, close but not touching, a stack of paperwork clasped to her generous chest. "That's really thoughtful."

"It's fun." He pulled his eyes off her br**sts and back onto the star studded sky. "She's a great kid."

"I think so, but I accept I might be biased." She lowered the folder to her knees. "Do you mind if I hang with you out here while I go through these?"

What was she up to now? He never knew with Paige. "No problem. Do you have a music preference?"

"Whatever you want to play is fine."

His fingers picked up where he'd left off on the tune for Kirstie, night bugs echoing like a quirky back-up band. Paige stayed quiet as he plucked through the piece while the wind carried the scent of fresh-mown grass and Paige's flowery soap. He enjoyed how she just let him play without needing a running commentary. He enjoyed a lot of things about her, which made it tough to keep his no-kissing, no-touching rule for the past week.

Living in the same place crammed more getting-to-know-each-other time into a few days than he would normally have in a month of dates. Along with information he would never find out through dinner and a movie, even dinner and a movie followed by sex.

He'd discovered she refused to share her newspaper with anyone who crinkled the edges or creased the pages in the wrong direction. She was a fastidious neatnik around the house, picking up any crumb she or Kirstie spilled, but would step over Vic's same pair of discarded socks for four days running in an admirable refusal to be anyone's maid.

She needed three alarms ringing successively before she rolled out of bed every morning, a fact that tortured him on a daily basis through the wall as he was forced to wake up early and think about her lying in bed wearing a nightshirt or sleep pants or satin.

Or nothing.

All of that should have made his head explode. Except he knew she overslept because after working all day she often stayed up late curled beside Kirstie to soothe away nightmares. When she read the paper, her eyes filled with sentimental tears over who-knew-what. And while she walked over Vic Jansen's socks, she never said a word about how ratty those socks were. She'd confided to Bo they'd been a present from Vic's daughter shortly before the little girl drowned.

No wonder the guy was overprotective of the females in his life, and this woman with her roughened hands and soft heart more than deserved some pampering.

Bo stopped playing and rested his guitar against the porch railing, then shrugged out of his leather flight jacket. "Here. Wear this. It's cold out tonight."

Teeth chattering, Paige stared at Bo's jacket that would carry his musky-scented heat and reminded herself about the cold-day-in-hell resolve. "I'm fine, thanks."

He skimmed a finger up her chilled arm, raising fresh goose bumps that had nothing to do with the cold now. "Really?"

No, but rejecting the jacket would be a telling move. She'd come out here to prove a point. She set aside her paperwork and slipped her arms into the sleeves. Oh, yeah, definitely still warm and spicy smelling.

Bo tapped the edge of the folders on her lap. "What's that you've got there?"

"Mail. Billing stuff for the clinic. Some paperwork from my attorney in Charleston."

"Attorney?"

"There are so many things to take care of when someone dies, especially when they die in a pile of trouble." She tried to laugh, but it lodged in her throat. "I don't want to think about all of this right now."

She dropped the folders to the porch and weighted them down with the end table to buy herself time to shake off thoughts of Kurt, which were threatening to chill her faster than the wind.

Paige straightened, forcing her clenched hands to relax. "Make me smile. With something funny, I mean."

"Well, damn." He gave her that bad-boy wink and flash of crooked teeth that made her smile without anything more.

"Thank you."

"Hey, I'm just getting started. When I was six—"

"So you were at the orphanage then?" She settled deeper into the swing and his coat. "St.