Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 83167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83167 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
And Mo standing in the kitchen, wearing a dove gray shirt with a sheen that made it almost silver, dark gray trousers, head tipped back, corded throat on display through his open collar, downing water from a black Hydro Flask.
I did not have it in me to react to all this goodness in my living room and kitchen, even Mo looking extra double hot wearing nice clothes and downing water in a way I got that view of his throat.
We were leaving in five minutes for his mom’s and I was in a state.
“Babe, what the fuck? You don’t have beer?” Mag stated after pulling his head out of the fridge.
“I only drink beer on special occasions or at your place,” I replied.
He stared at me saying, “That’s impossible.”
“Crib is tight, Lots,” Auggie told me as I rushed by him (or limped by him on one spike heel, one bare foot, clutching my other shoe to my chest as well as the bag I was switching out to).
“Thanks,” I muttered to Auggie.
Mo had come out from behind the Hydro and was staring at me in a way that, if we weren’t imminently going to dinner at his mom’s, and his buds weren’t hanging around being hot, I would be on my back on the kitchen floor getting fucked.
Good to know he liked the dress.
But I couldn’t even let that penetrate.
“How can you not drink beer?” Mag demanded to know.
“She’s fit, asshole,” Axl called. “That’s how. Not everyone has your metabolism and a cast-iron liver.”
“Mac, babe, seriously, that calendar on your fridge,” Boone said to me as I dumped all that was in my hands on the counter by his hip.
I looked up at him.
“What?” I asked.
“Three-month oil changes?” He shook his head. “Check your manual. Unless you drive a Chrysler Lebaron circa nineteen eighty-two, it’s either five thousand or seven thousand. Sometimes even ten. That three-month or three-thousand-mile gig is totally overkill.”
“I just knew that was a scam,” I snapped.
He grinned at me. “Good you now got men in your life who’ll look out for you.”
I already had men in my life who looked out for me.
But none of them told me about the oil-change scam.
I would have words with Eddie.
Then Tex.
Later.
At that moment, I needed to freak out.
“Can I ask when my woman became all of your woman?” Mo requested to know from behind me, and he didn’t sound happy.
“Until we get our own,” Mag answered breezily. “You know sister wives? We’re like brother husbands.”
“No you aren’t.”
There was my man’s Brook No Argument Tone.
“Without the benefits, of course,” Mag added.
“Lottie, babe, step up the matchmaking shit,” Mo ordered, leaning hips against the counter beside me as I reached to my purse so I could switch out what I needed to my clutch.
But I felt it, that “it” was strong, and I had to stop what I was doing to look around.
I turned my head side to side to see everyone’s attention on me.
Even Axl had pushed up on my couch so he could look around the back of it my way.
“Matchmaking shit?” Boone asked.
“Lottie’s gonna set you boys up,” Mo told them.
I was?
“Let them be strippers. Please, God, if you love me even a little bit, let them be strippers,” Mag prayed, head tipped back, eyes to my ceiling and everything.
“Actually, Mag, we have a girl working her way through college at the club. She wants to be an engineer. And she’d be so your thing,” I told him.
His eyes came to me. “An engineer?”
“Software.”
Mag started to look like he might be quietly choking.
He clearly was when his next words sounded strangled. “A computer nerd?”
“Yep,” I said and turned back to my purse, trying not to smile.
Though I would never, in a million years, introduce Evan to him. He was a dawg. He was hot and he was funny and he loved Mo and he was sweet to me.
But he was a dawg.
And Evie was very pretty, in an understated way, when she didn’t have teased-out hair and wasn’t (somewhat awkwardly, she never got the hang of it, but she was so pretty, it didn’t matter) slithering on a stage with bills poking out of her g-string.
I already felt bad enough—for Mag and the women he involved—that Mag was working out his heartbreak from Nikki by tapping as much ass as he could to block out the pain.
Mo had told me she was the reason he needed a place to live. Nikki and Mag broke up three weeks before Tammy and Mo broke up. He’d been sleeping on Axl’s couch, until Mo’s breakup saved him from chronic back pain.
I wasn’t going to subject Evan to his This All Could Be Yours If Some Other Woman Hadn’t Fucked Me Up Routine.
Until…
“No offense to your friend, but I’ll pass,” Mag told me.