Chapter Three
Brett
Okay, Sophia was acting really weird. It started with the one-word answers and not being able to look me in the eye. Then it was like she was purposefully avoiding coming anywhere near me, to the extent that she ate her pancakes while standing near the door instead of sitting at the kitchen island with us.
“Bet you feel like someone is tapdancing in your stomach,” Mark teased, clearly chalking up Soph’s weirdness to an epic hangover. It might have been the cause, but I had a feeling it wasn’t.
Sophia made a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat and kept her eyes on the floor.
Mark shoveled pancakes like it was nobody’s business, and Sophia studiously examined the checkered flooring. I took the opportunity to give her a long onceover. It wasn’t like the answer was tattooed on her golden skin, of course. But I still searched her like it was.
At least, that was my story and I was sticking to it. I was looking for any clue about why she was acting the way that she was. That was all.
Her wavy hair shone in the morning light poring through their wide kitchen windows, and her narrow shoulders slightly slumped like she was trying to make herself ever smaller than she already was. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear absently, the tip of it a bright pink color.
She was wearing tiny pajamas that made my blood rush south, despite my very best efforts. The bottoms barely hid her pert ass, and the top clung to her round breasts just enough to make my cock twitch with appreciation.
There was cursive lettering on her shirt that read, “It’s a messy hair and pajamas kind of day,” in a deeper shade of blue than the material was. It was just so perfectly her.
Jesus Christ, Brett. What’s gotten into you? I silently admonished myself. Since when did I have these kinds of thoughts about sweet little Sophia Love?
Scrubbing my hands over the stubble on my chin, I forced myself to focus on the crispy saltiness of the bacon and the sweet, syrup-covered pancakes on my plate.
Mark’s fork clamored to his plate, and his stool scraped on the floor as he pushed back on it. “Okay, I’m done. I gotta go shower quick. Then we’ll head out?”
“Sure thing,” I told him, wolfing down the last of my breakfast.
When Mark moved to the sink, Sophia stopped him in a small voice. “That’s okay. You cooked. I’ll clean up. Go shower. I’m sure you two have plans.”
“That we do.” Mark grinned. “Thanks, sis.”
Sophia shot him a thumbs up and moved silently toward the sink and dishwasher that sat slightly to the left below it. Mark was out of the room a second later, padding to his room at the far end of the hall.
Once again, Sophia and I were alone, and once again, I felt a tension between us that hadn’t been there before.
Crack a joke or something. Lighten this fucking mood.
“So, are you being weird because you accidentally told me I was hot last night?” I asked.
What the fuck? That wasn’t going to lighten the damn mood.
I smirked anyway. At least, my tone was light.
“No,” Sophia said, moving to the stove to collect the pan Mark had used for the pancakes. She still didn’t look at me. “And it wasn’t accidental.”
I nearly fell off the stool. “What?”
Sophia shrugged, placing the pan along with their plates in the dishwater. “What? You know that you are. What difference does it make that I said it?”
What difference? Well, fuck. “I am a handsome son of gun, aren’t I?”
I never had and never would call myself a son of bitch. Not under any circumstances. I respected my mother way too much to even use the figure of speech. My father, on the other hand, could’ve actually been a gun for all that I knew. If it were humanly possible to conceive like that.
I thought of him more like a sperm donor. I’d never met the man that I could remember, since he’d cut and run when I was all of two months old.
Mom never talked about him, and she raised me by herself, completely alone with no one to take care of us but her. And she did a hell of a job at it.
While I was growing up, she worked as a waitress, a receptionist, and a bookkeeper in her nonexistent free time. It turned out that I had her knack for numbers, possibly because I’d always been on the lookout for where possible pitfalls might lie as a kid. It was like risk assessment.
Those two things combined, along with a healthy cash investment from my first boss when I’d pitched him the idea, had now made me a billionaire. It was more than hard to believe sometimes.
I founded BKR when I was twenty-four, rented a shitty office with my previous employer as my only client, and took the biggest leap faith known to man. It paid off.
Five years later, Brett Kelly Risk Management Services was a powerhouse in the industry, even if I did say so myself. I was no longer alone in a dingy building that had paint cracking on the walls, but had hundreds of people working underneath me and clients from all over the country.
None of which would have happened if it hadn’t been for my drive to provide for Mom. Something I was now able to do in spectacular style and was damn proud of being able to do.
Sophia, of course, knew all of this, and her soft voice pulled me back to reality.
“You’re not the son of a gun,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’re the son of a wonderful, hardworking woman who loves you more than life itself. Speaking of whom, how is Mary these days?”
That. That was why I loved the Loves. Aside from Mark and Sophia, no one ever asked about Mom. Shit, apart from Sophia, no woman ever did. Not even the ones I kept around for months and actually introduced to the main woman in my life had ever bothered asking.
Sophia, however, made a point of it. Better yet, she always listened to my answer with rapturous attention and then told me to send her love.
“She’s okay. Good, I think. She’s still staying with me at the house.” I’d bought her one, but she refused to live in it, insisting that I rent it out instead. “She claims that I’ll get into too much trouble without her there.”
Sophia laughed, whatever weirdness momentarily disappearing as she glanced at me over her shoulder, still packing away an inordinate amount of dishes to have only been used to make one meal.
“Smart woman.”
“That she is,” I agreed. Besides, her health was fading fast. It was better that she was with me, where I could take care of her. Too many years of stress about where our next meal was coming from and working almost around the clock was finally catching up to her.
“How’s her arthritis?” Sophia asked.
I swore that she could read my mind sometimes. “It’s not great. It’s been acting up again recently.”
The corners of Sophia’s mouth turned down. “I’m sorry to hear that. I read the other day that there’s a new drug on the market that’s showing some promise.”
“I’ve heard about it, too, but it’s still experimental.”
Sophia turned away from me again, after a moment of silence stretched between us, and she shifted awkwardly. Whatever was eating at her, I didn’t fucking like it. It was clearly hurting my friend.
“Seriously, what’s up with you today?”
“Nothing,” she replied, shoving detergent into the dishwasher and finally shutting its door. “I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“Uh-uh. I’ve seen you walking around like a zombie during exams, and you’ve never been like this.”
She spun around to face me, eyes flashing with some unnamed emotion. “I said I was fine. Stop pushing me.”
“I’m not pushing. I just want to know what’s wrong.”
“It’s nothing,” she grumbled, adding below her breath. “That you need to know about.”
“I need to know about everything. Information is my life. I would be nothing without it.”
Sophia crossed her arms and lifted her gaze to mine. “Well this information would mean exactly that to you. Nothing.”
Interesting.
“So, let me get this straight. You’re being weird with me, yet the reason why wouldn’t mean anything to me? That makes no sense, Soph.”
“Does to me,” she muttered darkly, busying herself with soaking items in the sink that hadn’t fit in the dishwasher.
“So, help a poor guy out here. Last night, I’m fucking hot, and today, I’m what? Not? So ‘not’ that you can’t even look at me?”
Sophia sighed. “That has nothing to do with this. All I need is a day in bed. Just let it go, will you?”
“No. What do you need a day in bed for, Soph? Experimenting for some column you’re writing?” It was meant to be a tease, but Sophia’s cheeks heated.
What the what?
“Maybe,” she said. Turning those bright blue eyes on me, I felt their heat in my dick. “What’s it to you?”
“It’s something to every responsible male out there. Pray tell, young journalist, what is this column about?”
Sophia didn’t write columns, and we both knew it. She was a hard-hitting, up-and-coming woman who had exposed a drug trafficking ring a few months before, but she was playing into the ruse for some reason.
“It’s about pleasure,” she said, looking me right in eyes.
Well, I’ll be damned. The tension in the air arced between us, igniting the need caused by months of abstinence in my veins. Instantly, my cock was hard and was begging me to explore this pleasure column thing that both of us knew was bullshit.
“Okay, tell me more. What kind of pleasure?” What the fuck was I doing asking her that? I was digging my own goddamn grave at this rate.
Death by horniness. What a slogan for a gravestone. I needed to find a wet, willing pussy to bury myself in. As soon as fucking possible. One that didn’t belong to Sophia Love.
“Every kind,” Sophia said vaguely, spotting my plate still on the counter. “Crap, I guess I didn’t see that one.”
“You wouldn’t have, since you haven’t really been looking at me,” I told her.
She rolled her eyes and reached for the plate at the same time I did. I didn’t need her waiting on me. I was perfectly capable of washing my own plate. The fork clattered to the floor from both of us tugging on the plate.
Jumping from the stool, I bent to retrieve it, but so did Sophia. Our fingers brushed when they touched the fork, and her eyes snapped to mine. Our gazes met and locked.
Her breath caught, and her lips parted, drawing my attention to them. They looked soft, inviting. She inched forward, her pupils dilating and breaths quickening.
I was thrown into some kind of trance. Drawn in by those red lips, enslaved by the sound of her heavy breaths.
Before I could stop myself or even think about what I was doing, I closed the distance between our mouths, claiming her lips with mine, kissing her for one insanely idiotic moment of time.
I pulled away almost immediately, muttering softly as I came to my senses. “What the hell?”
Sophia looked at me like I’d burnt her, pushing to her feet and fleeing to her room. The door slammed shut not a second later.
What the fuck just happened? I sure as shit didn’t know.
Mark strode into the kitchen just when I’d risen to my feet. “Ready to go, Brett? The traffic to iFly is gonna be a bitch if we don’t get going.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, my mind still racing and my dick still throbbing from what had to be one of the most charged, albeit brief, kisses of my life.
Mark and I were going indoor skydiving, and I was super happy that we hadn’t opted for actual skydiving. I wouldn’t have survived it in the frame of mind I was stuck in.
Mark chatted all the way there, but I was having a hard time concentrating. I was actually having a hard time all around. Being with Mark was hard, not thinking about Sophia and that fucking kiss was hard, and my dick was seconds away from getting hard at any given time because I couldn’t not think about it.
I lost count of the amount of times Mark asked me what was wrong, but my answer was the same each time. “It’s nothing, bro. Just tired.”
The irony of my answer wasn’t lost on me.