Muffin Top

He would. He was a man of action and he’d taken it, cutting himself off and getting himself out of temptation’s way. At least that had been his plan—right up until Lucy showed up at his house in that ridiculous electric car and had given him shit about Scarlett. What did it say about him that he’d gotten turned on not just by what he could imagine that sweet mouth of hers doing to him, but also by what she was actually saying? It said that even this brief conversation with Dr. Sex Therapist had fucked with his head.

He needed to get out of here.

The only reason he was even sitting down for breakfast was to get a peek at the woman who’d completely screwed any chance he’d had of getting eight hours of sleep last night.

“Lucy set this up, didn’t she?” The woman was trouble—and not in the way the women he wanted to get up close and naked with usually were. Nope. She was trouble in the maneuvering-him-around-like-a-pawn-on-a-chessboard way. “That’s why she’s not here.”

Tom didn’t say anything, but his gaze shifted to the kitchen doorway. Frankie followed the older man’s lead. Lucy stood there, her hair pulled back into a high ponytail that she must have worn to sleep because it was beyond jacked up, with chunks of hair that looked like hair bubbles popping up around her head.

“What did I set up?” she asked, her voice still thick with sleep.

She was wearing that damned tank top and pair of shorts that should not look sexual at all, but on her, with the massive rack she had? Yeah, he was officially up now.

Shifting in his chair, Frankie dropped his gaze back to his cereal.

“Nothing, Muffin,” Tom said, brushing over the question she’d walked in on as he made his way to the coffeepot and poured some of the brew into a muffin-shaped mug. “How did you sleep?”

“Like the dead,” she said, seemingly looking everywhere but at Frankie.

Yeah, Frankie could definitely not claim a good night’s sleep. He’d spent most of the night thinking about Lucy. At three in the morning, he decided that he didn’t give a shit how much he was proving the point that all he did was follow his dick and jerked off while thinking about the sway of her heavy tits under the tank top she was still wearing.

And when in the hell had he turned into the kind of asshole who was overthinking everything? He liked things simple. House burning down? Put the fire out. Hot chick giving him the look? Bang her in the bar bathroom.

His life had been simple, right up until it wasn’t. Fucking A.

This is what happened when there was an attempted therapy intervention first thing in the morning.

Lucy, studiously ignoring the fact that he was sitting at the table, shuffled into the kitchen with Gussie trotting in on her heels, his eyes bugging out and his tongue hanging from his mouth. When she didn’t drop any flakes on the floor as she poured her cereal, the dog gave a little huff of disappointment and made a beeline for the doggie bowls by the back door.

“So, what’s the plan?” he asked, unable to look away from her.

Who’d known he was such a glutton for punishment? First the no sex—and wow had he spent a lot of time looking for loopholes in that little pledge he’d made to himself—and now spending almost every moment of the next week with a woman who could make him harder than the pole at the firehouse. Shit. He really did not need to make that comparison right now, because all he could picture was Lucy sliding down that pole in a Marilyn Monroe–type dress that would fly straight out. Good God. He was turning into an upskirt perv. Maybe he should take Tom up on his offer to talk this shit out before he joined some online I’m-a-loser chat group.

Of course, staring at Lucy right now wasn’t helping. She kept her back to him, which gave him the perfect view of how her ass looked in those sleep shorts. Like the view from the front, it was definitely more than a handful and it made his mouth go dry with wanting.

Oblivious to the direction of his thoughts, Lucy answered the question he’d forgotten he’d asked as she poured almond milk into her bowl. “We have to get down to the high school and pick up our reunion   packets.”

The sheer level of totally not thrilled in her tone broke through the lusty haze of his thoughts. “You make it sound like we’re going to our own hanging.”

She turned to face the kitchen table, still not looking directly at him, gripping her cereal bowl hard enough that her knuckles were white. “That’s because I’ve met Constance Harmon.”

“Do I want to know?” Rhetorical question because he hated that Constance bitch on pure loyalty grounds.

Lucy’s gaze flicked over to him and then back down. “You’ll find out soon enough. I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”