Sandbridge Box Set

Chapter 9-2

Scooter didn’t usually smoke in the middle of the day; two per day was his compromise between his bad habits and his general attention to his health. (His ma had died of cancer, for f**k’s sake and smoking seemed somehow disrespectful, even if it wasn’t lung cancer she’d had.)

But he was gonna f*****g fall over and die of a heart attack and he needed a cigarette damn bad.

He’d just put Andy’s sweats down on the table when he’d heard a familiar noise from the bathroom. Andy always sounded sexy as hell when he took that first sip of coffee in the morning. Starting work half-hard for the last two weeks had been killing him, but Scooter couldn’t seem to give it up. He was a pile of bad habits loosely disguised as a responsible adult.

Andy probably didn’t drink coffee in the shower.

And then Andy had made another sound, this unbelievable moan that had Scooter moving before he’d even realized what he was doing. His hand had been nearly on the knob of the bathroom door before he’d come to his senses and fled, closing the apartment’s door as quietly as possible behind him.

Oh, God. Oh, dear sweet Christ. He’d thought Andy’s little coffee moan was hot? That sound was going to haunt him forever.

He lit the smoke and took a drag.

“Was it—how do you say—good for you?” Kat appeared beside him, silent like a spy as always, giving him her cat-in-the-cream smile as she leaned back against the deck rail.

Scooter choked, coughed. He almost blew the smoke in her face; she hated that with a passion, but if he did that, she’d step up her game and God only knew what Kat would do if she was actually angry with him. “Nothing happened,” he protested. And then he blushed because he’d just gone right where she’d meant him to go, and now he’d said it out loud, so she knew where his mind was. f**k.

Her eyebrows went up, just a little. Her act for the customers was so over-the-top, she tended to go the other way, understated and subtle, barely readable at all, when she was being herself. “Why not?”

“He’s not for me,” Scooter said, keeping his gaze steady on the ocean, not wanting to witness the smug flicker of emotions at play on her face. There was no point pretending he didn’t know what she was on about. That game never played out well. “I can’t—there’s good reasons I have policies in place. I’m his boss, it’d be all kinds of wrong to take advantage.”

She plucked the cigarette from his fingers and took a drag. “You wouldn’t,” she said, as calm and certain as if she was telling him the sun would come up the next morning. “He wants you, too.”

Scooter scoffed. He wasn’t sure if he was denying her observation, or desperately wanting to be convinced. “Since I’m such a great catch,” Scooter said, his voice edgy and unsteady. He held his fingers, V-ed out, for the cigarette and took a long drag, blowing a smoke ring.

“You are,” she said, her gaze inscrutable. “But that is not your call to make. Andy must decide what Andy wants.”

“Maybe,” Scooter said. “But that’s for him to make, I guess. If he starts something up. I’m still his boss, it wouldn’t be fair. Far as I can tell, he’s got nothing, Kat. He hasn’t called anyone, doesn’t talk about people much at all. I don’t want to put him in a position where he thinks that he owes me, not like that. I don’t want anyone to think that. You already know what people think of me. It can’t start with me, no matter how much I want him.”

Kat looked delighted rather than dissuaded. “So if he starts this thing, you will go along with it?”

Shit. How did she do that? All she had to do was poke at him and he’d start talking just to fill up empty space. He opened his mouth to deny it, and then remembered that goddamned sound, and dear God, what he wouldn’t do to hear that noise while Andy was under him. Oh, f**k. He gritted his teeth, trying to push his desire away, to slow the pounding of his heart.

“Him,” Scooter said, firm. “Don’t you go pushing him. Nor D’ante. And you better not have money laid out on it, I know you, Ekaterina Sokolov. No bets.”

“Of course not!” She rounded her eyes at him, innocent-wounded, and even though he knew better, he couldn’t resist them. She threaded her arm through his and leaned against him, her head on his shoulder. “We just want you to be happy.”

“I’m happy,” he said, patting her hand. “No complaints.”