Julie exhaled a breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding. Open-mouthed she ogled her Superman Khal Drogo hybrid—Super Drogo. Mesmerized by the ruffle of lashes fanning down at her in slow motion, she sighed. The man was gorgeous.
Hello again.
It was hard to pinpoint exactly what she was feeling, but if her dry mouth and sluggish heartbeat were any clues, she had to be dreaming. Time stood still and as Julie licked her lips and rested her teeth on her bottom lip, she realized that she didn’t mind one bit. She was entranced as her gaze traveled down to his pouty, delicious mouth. Yummy.
There went her adult words again.
He stared at her for what seemed like forever taking her under his spell. That head full of dark wavy curls and angel eyes. The panty-dropper smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth. But the second he unleashed that twinkling toothy grin, she freeze-framed him again. The sexy image of him locked in her vault.
Then, it was just the two of them and his lashes again.
“How long do we have you this time?” Dane’s thunderous voice broke the spell and hot truck guy tore his gaze away.
Luckily, since she wasn’t sure how much she could handle of Super Drogo all at once.
Dane’s voice echoed with joy and something resembling pride. “I want to be ready with a net to catch that trail of broken hearts you leave behind,” he said, but at that point, Julie was only half listening.
“Yeah. You know how I do,” Super-Drogo boasted. And just like that, the record came to a screeching halt.
Ew. Trail of broken hearts? A net?
If she wasn’t listening before, she was now. Both ears perked up toward their voices, hungry for a hint that she heard wrong.
As her gold strike of luck would have it, she hadn’t misheard. The more they talked, the more she understood exactly what they were talking about. Flipping over all the pieces of their conversation and putting them together, she didn’t like the picture they painted of this guy.
How many women did he have that he needed a net? And how many hearts had he broken? Furthermore, why was he content to brag about it?
Dammit. Hot truck guy was just another sleazy gym guy.
She rested on her back, flat against the mat with her upper lip curled in disgust. Her brow screwed low over her eyes. It figured. Five unguarded minutes was all it took to see what kind of manwhore he was. Just another basic fuckboy.
“Nah, man. I’m back. Sick and tired of all this back and forth, you know? I’m here for a while. Got a whole bunch of kids waiting on me.”
And scene. That’s my cue. Drawing the line at deadbeats, she’d be damned before she sat there and listened to this. Enough!
Julie leapt to her feet in a haughty pout, darting toward the exit. For the life of her, she couldn’t figure whether she was more disgusted with this guy’s nonchalance about the hoard of kids he’d conveniently left behind, or the fact that she’d, for even a second, thought this guy could be anything more than a handsome face.
Once outside, she sat in her car without turning on the ignition. As rain began to drizzle onto the hood of her car, she felt sick. Disgusted with herself, more than anything. She closed her eyes against the sting of angry tears and shook her head. She hated the void that in her heart. It pissed her off that she would give anything, everything for another second with her dad. What she wouldn’t do to play video games with him, or let him win at Scrabble even though he always hid extra letter tiles under the scorepad. She missed the smell of Old Spice on his stubbly cheek and the way he always knew just the right thing to say when no one else did.
How could this guy be so cavalier about kids when she had no dad?
Julie knew what a father’s absence did to people. What it did to her. She knew how it felt to be a pebble left behind in that trail of broken hearts.
Deceased was completely different than absentee, but the void was all the same. Those kids were missing a piece of themselves.
She swallowed back the lump in her throat, blinking away the tears threatening to fall.
“Julie?” a muffled voice thundered at the driver side window.
Her heart nearly jumped from her chest as she jolted away from the blurry glass. A loud thump struck the window when a large hand pressed against it and wiped side to side.
“It’s Nico. I’m friends with Dane.” He offered. Nico.
She didn’t recognize him at first, but the garish red stripes on his shirt flashed at her like a beacon with that stupid elephant logo. But, then she raised her eyes.
And there was the full picture. More than the pair of dreamy, chocolaty eyes she’d seen over Dane’s shoulder. The ones that immobilized her in the middle of traffic. This was him, up close and personal. And he had a name. Nico.
She was mad at him, though. What kind of person left their kids on purpose? Not that she knew the circumstances, but Julie couldn’t imagine a good excuse.
“Nico?” she tasted his name on her tongue. It was as delicious as the watery silhouette before her. Stop it. You hate him.
Down to her bones, she knew this guy was a Grade A jerk, but that didn’t stop her from getting lost in the smoke and mirrors.
His face was a watercolor masterpiece of angular lines in brown and gold, softened by the rain. Through the streaks in the glass she took in the beautiful olive undertones of his warm tawny skin. A strong square jaw with light stubble and a Roman nose rounded out the symmetry. Then there was his mouth. That pair of full delectable juicy lips made him irresistible.
As if that weren’t enough, Nico parted them to reveal a set of gleaming white teeth with a slight overbite that was sexy as hell, the way it sort of pushed his bottom lip out into a pucker.
Temporary insanity is what it was. What kind of crazy did it take for her to go from loathing this man to lusting after him in six seconds flat?
“Hey, are you all right in there?” His voice reverberated against the glass.
Given her current state of mind, she couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like genuine concern laced his words. The audacity. You’re not a nice person.
Even still, she couldn’t deny that he was nice looking. She couldn’t get past the fact that every word came in slow motion with sprays of water splishing and splashing off his taut muscles.
Julie licked her bottom lip and a fiery shiver blazed down her spine and settled between her thighs. Her pulse quickened and her toes curled inside her shoes.
For a moment, as she eyed his full lips and the sexy way his hair dripped at the temple, she had to remind herself that this wasn’t some elaborate shower fantasy. This was the loser who had just bragged about his conquests, who had actually gotten a pat on the back for breaking hearts.
She didn’t even know this guy, but she was determined to hate him. Not just on principle. The guy had broken hearts without the courtesy of sweeping up the shards. He left a trail in his wake for the next guy to pick up the pieces the same way Patrick had done. It wasn’t the same, but her dad had left those pieces for Julie and her mom to pick up.
Whether she was armed for it, a war raged between her body and mind. No matter how hot he was, or how her body responded to him, she couldn’t excuse that.
Julie pressed the button on her door panel to crack the window and a whip of crisp wet wind lashed across her cheek. “I’m fine. What do you want?” Her voice rang with a bravado she didn’t feel.
“You—”
“I what? I walked out? So what. Who are you, the gym police? Did Dane send you out here because I didn’t finish my session?” She laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“I was just going to tell you that—”
“It wasn’t enough for you guys to stand there, right in front of me. Like I wasn’t even there. Talking about—”
His large hand slapped the glass again and she stopped mid-sentence, her mouth gaping. “I don’t know what your problem is, but I just came out here to give you your shirt. You left it inside,” he said.
Julie’s gaze flickered toward his hands where he was holding her rain-spattered t-shirt. She swallowed, but couldn’t get past the lump in her throat.
He stared at her for a long moment before continuing. “Good luck with all that…whatever it is you’re doing in there,” he said as he pushed the shirt into the car, gave her a final look and walked away.
The second he left, Julie beat her hand against the steering wheel and screamed at the top of her lungs. Her mind clouded with an oily black haze. She was turning into a raving lunatic. And over what? A hot guy and a few extra pounds? Dane’s taunting?
It couldn’t really be what hot truck guy had said. Correction, what sleazy gym guy said.
“Don’t cry,” she ordered herself as her foot tapped incessantly against the floor panel. “Dammit. Don’t cry.”
She’d run out of the gym and didn’t exactly know what she was running from. This wasn’t about what some stupid jerk had said and she knew it. What did she care about this guy and his women and his kids? Nothing.
This was about her. How somehow she’d managed to construct an image and a persona out of a clear as day stranger. She didn’t know him from Adam and here she was building fantasies around him. Around the man she wanted him to be.
Patrick’s words sounded in her ears. Sick. Tired.
Julie was sick and tired, too. She’d built this guy up. Fantasized about him and his black pickup. It just seemed wrong to be proven wrong. What a let down.
She wiped at a determined tear now as it spilled down her cheek. Frustration bubbled into an anger that boiled inside her. It grated on her nerves as shallow breaths forged into panic. Her eyes stung at the welling tears and she dug her fingernails into the seat.
The windows glazed over as the drizzle outside came down harder, spattering raindrops over the roof of the car.
In the window crack, her damp gray shirt hung on the glass, stretching with the weight of the rain. Inch by inch, it slid through over the pane until she held it with both hands. But all she could see was wet eyelashes.