Free What I Love About You by Rachel Gibson Page A

picked up the mutt. At this rate, she was never going to get the dog home. “I’ll carry him to your house.” He subdued the recruit in a compression hold. “Settle your ass down before you piss yourself.”
    “You said a bad word.”
    “Are you going to tell your mom on me?”
    She thought a moment as they moved down the driveway. “No.” She shook her head. “I won’t tell. We’re friends.”
    Friends? He wouldn’t go that far. His friends were considerably older, male, and said as many bad words as they could fit into one sentence.
    Sparky wiggled as Blake looked up the neighboring driveway and at Sweet Cheeks leaning into the open hatchback of her Subaru. His male friends would pause to appreciate her ass in those jeans.
    “Mama, I got Spa-ky.”
    Natalie pulled out several bags of groceries and her blond hair swung across one shoulder. “Oh joy.”
    Blake set the dog on the ground and moved toward her. She straightened and he reached for the groceries in her hands. “I’ll get those.”
    Her sunglasses slid down her nose and her blue eyes stared at him above the brown frames. “I’ve got these, but you can get the last few.”
    There was something about the eyes the color of the deep ocean, the aviator glasses, and her pink mouth that licked at the sharp edges of craving. Something white hot, and turned it into a different kind of craving altogether.
    Blake grabbed the four remaining bags of groceries and shut the hatchback. He followed her and Charlotte in through the garage door and set the bags on the kitchen counter. The house smelled like a woman lived in it. Like fresh baked cake and flowers and clean laundry soap. The house looked like a woman lived in it, too. A white tablecloth. A pink smiley cup sitting in the sink, and lacy curtains. Photographs of Charlotte all over the place.
    “Do you need any more help?” he asked as he took in the sights and smells of the girly home. It was about half the square footage of his house and was semi-custom. Built from a builder’s blueprint with some nice woodwork, stone, and tile. The back faced the lake, like his.
    “No thank you.” She shucked off her jacket and tossed it on a kitchen chair. “Can you hang around for a minute?” His gaze slid to the front of her thin white T-shirt.
    The warm parts in his belly got hotter with the promise of a full-blown erection, and one thing was for certain, white-hot lust sure beat the hell out of white-knuckling it. “Sure.”
    “I want to show you something.”
    He wanted to see it. And when she was done showing what she had, he had something to show her, too. The way she’d looked at him the other day in the wine cellar was the way a woman looked at a man when she needed to get laid. He’d been with enough women to recognize that look. It wasn’t teasing. It wasn’t coy. It wasn’t manufactured. It was a dark yearning in the depths of a woman’s eyes. It was the drop of a full-bottom lip and a sweet inhalation.
    She walked across the wood floor to the refrigerator, and the puppy barked as Charlotte giggled in the living room.
    Standing there was a distraction. He didn’t plan to have sex with Natalie. She was the kind of woman who wanted sex to mean something. She wasn’t the kind to just get naked and have fun. She’d want some sort of commitment, but thinking about her thighs around his waist and bouncy breasts in his hands got him hard as a steel hooley.
    Blake pushed his sweatshirt sleeves up his forearms. He could control his hard-ons. There were those who thought he was like his dad, a guy who jumped from woman to woman, and that was partly true, he guessed. But unlike his dad, he’d always been in control of his dick. Unlike his brother, he’d never believed he had to be celibate to do it.

 
    Chapter Five
    Natalie grabbed a drawing stuck to the refrigerator with a cupcake magnet and set it on the counter. “Charlotte made this last night.” She pointed to a round figure with long dangly