Three days later, Kaitlin lay on the couch watching the blades of her ceiling fan go round. She hadn’t been back to Mike’s since their near-kiss on his front lawn. If this wasn’t an awkward situation before that, it definitely was now. The idea of kissing him again scared her more than anything.

What if she liked it even more than last time? She’d be a goner over a guy whose sole purpose in life to this point seemed to be messing with her for laughs.

Meanwhile, her supposed actual crush was clueless, overseas, donating his time and care to the less fortunate.

Still, there was work to be done. Promises to be upheld. And she was starting to get cabin fever.

Sick of feeling sorry for herself, she dragged herself up to stand.

Hard work would probably do her some good. She’d call Mike and tell him that she had been sick but that she’d be there to work tomorrow morning.

No way he’d believe that.

Okay, so maybe she would just call and air it all out. Tell him that she wasn’t thinking straight since her little mishap. He’d understand that. They had to talk about it, they couldn’t just ignore that there was this sexual tension that caused the air around them to buzz with a sort of static charge just three days prior.

She’d finally convinced herself to pick up the phone when a knock sounded at the door.

“Kitty? You home?”

Shit.

It was Mike. And she was wearing her Daffy Duck t-shirt and a pair of plaid boxers.

“Uh, just a minute,” she yelled at the door.

Her body went into autopilot as she stormed through her bedroom like a tornado, yanking off her clothes as she went. She slipped on the sexiest bra she owned that was clean – a teal, lacey number. On top of that, she threw on a midnight blue, deep-v shirt that accented both her eyes and her cleavage. A matching thong and a pair of black leggings were next.

No big. She would’ve done the same for any guest.

“Take your time,” he called from her porch. “I’ve got plenty of beer and pizza out here to last me through the night.”

The next ten seconds were spent deciding whether to wear her hair up or down. She finally gave up, threw it in a ponytail and slicked on some peach lip-gloss.

She looked in the mirror. Not bad. From pajamas to perky in three minutes. Satisfied, she half-jogged to the door and swung it open.

Mike stood there with a smile, a six-pack of beer in his left hand and a large pizza in his right. And boy did he look good. His thick, black hair gleamed in the fading sunlight. He wore a black t-shirt that barely contained his ink-covered, sun-kissed muscles and a smile that made her tummy ache.

“Truce? I haven’t seen you leave the house in three days. So I thought I’d come feed my landscape designer before she starved to death,” he said.

Kaitlin returned the smile. “I know, I’m so sorry. It’s just…I--”

“No, I’m sorry,” he cut in, “I shouldn’t have put you in that position again after what happened the night before. And I swear I didn’t turn the sprinklers on you. Even if it was god damn funny.”

She waited for the humiliation to come with his teasing words, but it never did. “Yeah, I guess it was pretty funny,” she said with a grudging smile. “Well, come on in.” She gestured to the living room.

“Man, it feels like forever since I’ve been in this house,” he said as he stepped into the foyer.

“It has. Not since I graduated and you and Rick took me out to the bars,” Kaitlin reminded him.

She led him into the living room and motioned for him to set the pizza on the table.

“I’ll get some plates.”

When she returned, Mike had cracked open a couple of beers. He handed one to her and they each took a slice. For the first time since she’d gone over in her trench coat, she felt like she could breathe. She couldn’t say why she felt so relieved that she hadn’t driven a permanent wedge between them with her actions the other night, but damn it, she did.

“I love Roberto’s pizza,” she murmured, before closing her teeth around a bite. The tangy tomato sauce and gooey cheese hit her tongue and she moaned with pleasure. “Sooo good. I haven’t had it since high school,” Kaitlin murmured between bites.

“Yeah, I used to cut class so I could get lunch there every Friday,” he admitted with a grin.

“I wish I’d cut class more. High school sucked,” she admitted, taking a sip of the icy beer he’d brought.

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“For you, maybe!” she said with a laugh. “I mean, you graduated my Junior year, but I still never stopped hearing rumors about your sexual conquests until the day that I graduated. Every guy I met in my grade or below me asked if I knew you when they found out I lived next door to the Blade brothers.”

“I highly doubt that.”

“It’s true,” Kaitlin said, matter-of-factly. “Every guy in your class wanted to be you, and every girl in school wanted you. I mean, you slept with half the girls in school. They couldn’t stop fawning at your feet.”

Mike took a swig of his beer and shook his head. “Those rumors are greatly exaggerated. I really didn’t sleep with that many girls in high school.”

“I bet.”

“I may have gotten around some, but it wasn’t because I had some twisted desire to fuck my way through school. I just never found anyone I liked enough to stick with them.”

Kaitlin wolfed down another slice of pizza. Until then, she hadn’t realized just how hungry she was. “I see,” she said, “commitment issues, huh?”

Then it dawned on her. How could she be so stupid? Of course he had commitment issues. His drug addict mother dumped him and his brother off on his grandma’s doorstep when they were just ten years old. Loneliness and loss had to be an all-too-familiar feeling to him. Could she really blame him for not wanting to risk experiencing that feeling again? If that had happened to her, she’d probably feel the same way. She was trying to figure out how to backpedal, but he seemed unfazed.

He polished off the rest of his beer and set the empty bottle on the table. “Yeah, I guess. You were pretty much the only girl I was even friends with all four years.”

The fluttering in her stomach, the same dizzy feeling she had when they nearly kissed three days ago, started up again.

“Why me?” she asked him.

“I don’t know. You just weren’t like them. You were real. And I liked you as a person. I would never have tried to sleep with you – I didn’t want to ruin the weird but fun relationship we had.”

He caught her gaze with his dark, mesmerizing eyes.

“Plus, I guess I always figured you had a thing for my brother,” he said, cracking open another beer and handing it to her.

She thought long and hard about that notion. Maybe she had started out with a plan to go there and seduce Rick, but that seemed like a million years ago now. Had part of her known all along? Because all she thought about since then was Mike. He haunted her dreams and her days were filled with thoughts of what might have been if he hadn’t stopped her.

Kaitlin pulled another swig of the beer, wondering if she was already tipsy or if being around Mike was making her feel this way.

“That might have been so,” she said. “But where was Rick when that guy was picking on me on the bus that time and you punched him in the stomach? And where was Rick and his coat when I was freezing that night we did the pub-crawl? The night you kissed me?”

“I mean, really, you were the one kissing me that night. And you were drunk. We both were.”

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t like it,” she shot back.

Jesus, who was she right now? She must be buzzed if she’d said that out loud.

“Is that so?” he asked, raising a single eyebrow.

“Maybe.” Her tongue felt thick and fuzzy as her pulse stuttered.

“If you liked it so much, then why did you run off the other night?” Mike asked, his voice all grit.

“I’m not sure,” she said honestly. “I guess I was scared. And embarrassed.”

But tonight, there wasn’t a shred of that embarrassment left. In fact, she felt bold. Wild. A little crazy.

For Michael Blade.

Heat radiated from her center outward until every nerve-ending stood on end.

Sure, it would just be tonight. He was too much man to tame, and the last thing she wanted was to live the kind of life her mother had lived, always watching over her shoulder for the next woman out to steal her all-too-easy-to-steal man.

But tonight?

Tonight she knew exactly what she wanted, and he was sitting right next to her with the sexiest smirk she’d ever seen. And when he put his muscular, ink-covered arm around her to draw her in closer, she didn’t pull away.

“I’m not embarrassed anymore, though,” she murmured.

He lifted her up effortlessly and set her onto his lap, so that she was straddling him. He grabbed her by the ass and pulled her in tight to his rock hard body.

“Then prove it.”