Free Hot Pursuit by Suzanne Brockmann Page B

him to catch her staring, except, whoa. He wasn’t the only one eager to keep from overheating, taking off more layers than just their jackets.
    “I’m so sorry,” she said again, although she had to admit that she was lying at least a little, because all around her, as the SEALs stripped down to their T-shirts and jeans, the normally dingy little room was filled with a wide variety of muscles and sexy flashes of incredibly interesting tattoos on smooth expanses of sun-kissed skin.
    And that, along with their many serious cases of hathead—or in Parka Man’s case, hoodhead—and still rosy cheeks from the frigid outside air, made them seem a curiously attractive mix of boyishly charming and curl-one’s-toes hot.
    And the realization that this worked for her so completely made her pause. This attraction was, perhaps, at the basis of her failed relationships with both John One and John Two, neither of whom were particularly good at handling basic responsibilities, yet had mastered the art of using a boyish smile to get women—with the tried and true fallback being their own pathetic mothers—to do their laundry and feed them.
    But both Johns got banished safely back into the distant past where they belonged when one of the SEALs all but lifted her out of his way. He was eager to help Parka and Steamy as they attempted to turn the knob on the radiator—a knob that hadn’t moved a whit for the past seventy years. If not longer.
    He was the SEAL she’d dubbed Lucky, because his matinee-idol face, his lush brown hair, and his long,
long
eyelashes were purely a result of genetics. He’d been lucky to get the parents that he’d had, it was as simple as that.
    He’d also come in with his not-particularly-thick jacket alreadyunzipped, as if he’d been walking around with it open, with no hat and no gloves to boot. Apparently, the minus fifteen degree wind-chill of the city streets didn’t bother him.
    But the room’s current temperature certainly put him into a near panic.
    “Holy shit,” he muttered to Parka. Jenn clearly wasn’t meant to overhear him, because he mumbled, “Excuse me, ma’am,” when he looked up and saw she was watching him.
    Okay,
staring
at him. She was staring, she’d cop to that. He was just so … stare-able.
    “It’s okay,” she told him, pushing her glasses up her nose. “It took me awhile to get used to it, too. I went through the whole process. You know, anger, denial, bargaining …”
    He laughed at that, and his smile—a flash of straight, white teeth—was perfect. A dash of rue and a pinch of chagrin mixed nicely with his genuine, intelligent amusement.
    “The cost of replacing the heating system is astronomical,” Jenn told him, told his friends, too, because she didn’t want him to think she’d singled him out. Although she bet that, looking as he did, he was often singled out. “The landlord won’t do it without raising the rent—at which point we’d have to move. I’ve got the same problem in my apartment, too. It’s part of living low-budget in New York City.”
    “I’m not sure I could ever reach that kind of acceptance,” Lucky admitted.
    “You’ve absolutely got to want it,” Jenn agreed. “Living here’s not for everyone. But if you love it enough … Well, I’ve lived in Jersey, and I’ve found I can put up with almost anything to stay in Manhattan.”
    “Gilligan’s okay with it being hot, hot, hot,” Jacked chimed in. “As long as he’s outside. It’s the heat plus no open windows thing that makes him super-squirrelly. Tight places bug him, too.”
    “And
I have bad breath in the morning.” Lucky wasn’t veryhappy with Jacked. “Don’t forget that. As long as you’re listing my failings. Jesus, Zanella.”
    “And here we go,” Starrett murmured to his laughing little son, whom he’d stripped down to a short-sleeved onesie and a diaper.
    Okay, so Jacked was Zanella, and Lucky was also known as
Gilligan
—which had to be a