Free Resisting the Musician (a Head Over Heels Novel) (Entangled Indulgence) by Ally Blake

swishing her hair over her shoulder as she gave him a flat stare. Contrition flitted briefly across her eyes, but hell, they were pretty.
    “I can’t find my phone,” she said, which he figured was her version of an apology. She glanced back at the car. Silvery-blue this time, convertible. And no driver. “I must have left it with Mack.”
    “No calendars, no clocks, no machine telling you what to do. How will you survive?” He moved away from the door. “You coming in or not?”
    G lowering, as she’d clearly picked up on his less than amicable mood, at least she came.
    “Speaking of your sister, how is the lovely Callie?” he asked as she followed him toward the kitchen. “Showing any signs of becoming a bridezilla?”
    “If Callie had her way, she’d marry the guy tomorrow.”
    “The guy ?” Dash glanced over his shoulder. “You not a fan?”
    Surprise flashed within her vivid eyes before she shut them down tight. “I’m sure Jake is great guy.”
    “Damned by faint praise.”
    “That’s not what I—”
    “I’ve known Jake a long time, Lori.” He turned, walked backward. “I love the guy like a brother. Meaning I know his flaws better than most.”
    “Like the fact that he’s been engaged before? And how well did that turn out?”
    Ah, so she was protecting her sister. Couldn’t fault her there. “That wasn’t so much a flaw as…not looking where he was going.”
    Lori stopped walking in the shadow of the hall. Her voice had lost its usual stridence as she asked, “Are you suggesting he somehow… tripped into his last engagement?”
    Dash laughed, the sound swallowed by the shadows of the hall, yet the tightness inside unwound a little. “A very public break-up does wonders for a motivated country and western singer? You do the math.”
    Lori blinked at him, shifted her bag higher on her shoulder, and he saw the wheels turning in her mind. “I’d wondered. But even so, in my experience you can’t make a man stick around for love or money if he really wants to go.”
    “Hence the fact that Jake didn’t. Not once he found what he really wanted.”
    “Callie,” she said, rubbing her temples.
    “He’s all in there, Lori.”
    Her brow furrowed, her eyes huge in her face. “You really think so?”
    “I do.”
    Rather than jump for joy, she stared off into space. “My little sister’s getting married.”
    In the semi-darkness, with its open, shifting, warm kind of quiet, he wondered if perhaps he wasn’t the only one who’d had a shitty weekend.
    And it hit Dash like a sledgehammer; there was one way he could think to make them both feel a whole lot better.
    “I’m sorry about back there with the phone and the…” she said, cutting into his eddying thoughts.
    “Bug up my ass?”
    Her mouth curved into a smile, and the prettiness was like an explosion inside his head.
    “You are here at the suggested time as I requested, and I should offer the same courtesy.”
    She pursed her lips and took a long deep breath in and out. Her version of chilling , he expected. While he felt anything but chilled by the glossy pink pout, the light gleaming off the curves of her long legs, the way her dress kept threatening to fall from over the rise of her shoulder.
    Little Dash came to the party. “Down boy,” Big Dash muttered.
    Lori’s gaze searched for his huskies, who were once again off somewhere else and of no help to him at all.
    “Coming?” he asked, voice like he’d taken a hit to the windpipe.
    She nodded, and led the way; her swinging hair like a metronome, her swaying hips matching the drum beat behind his ribs. Beneath his shirt he scratched his belly right where the drums reverberated, but the itch remained.
    The woman was autocratic, quick-tempered, and the exact kind of person he’d done a hell of a lot to keep out of this life. But, hell if he didn’t want her with a kind of urgency he hadn’t felt in a long time.
    Maybe it was as simple as biological imperative and bad