Oh yeah, and hornier than a horny toad riding a Texas longhorn while playing trumpet in the horn section of a jazz band. Damn she needed to get laid.
Instead of sharing that fact with Garrett, she stretched and pretended to watch boats glide by on the lake. She needed to get out there and go wake boarding sometime this summer. Sports relieved a lot of her stress. Maybe Nox would want to go too. Speaking of Nox. “Why is that kid so strong?” she asked Garrett. “I’m still freaked out from him picking me up.”
Garrett shrugged with the same easy grace as Nox. “He’s my son.”
“You should teach a class on clarity and how not to bring it to a situation.”
His brows lifted in response. She echoed his expression. When a slow smile curved his delectable lips butterflies with wings of liquid flame began to flutter in her belly. Lennox dropped to a bent knee in order to tie the nonexistent laces on her sneakers for a second time. Garrett took in a deep breath as if smelling the air. When she looked at him his amused expression turned positively wicked.
Lennox blanched. If Garrett got her naked again, he was going to eat her alive. Her nipples did the pebbling thing. She chewed the inside of her cheek. “You look like the big bad wolf,” she said.
He shook himself and turned to face the lake. “Sorry. Be assured, I didn’t get anything out of this morning’s session. I focused on taking care of your needs.” He did that thing where he rubbed his five o’clock shadow hard enough to wipe it off his face. “It won’t happen again.”
Well, hallelujah. She didn’t need the complication of Garrett wanting her. Not when she knew it would only be sexual and not a long-term commitment. Plus, she didn’t want to be with Garrett in a lifelong “married with babies” kind of way anymore. Right? Sure.
“I’m ready,” Nox called to them from the tree line. Garrett nodded and joined his son. Lennox followed. “What game are you going to play?”
“Ricochet,” Nox said, jogging backwards deeper into the woods.
A bright patch of red caught Lennox’s eye, then green and blue, pink, orange. Rubber balls decorated the bases of several of the trees around the area. “How do you play?”
“Watch,” Nox said. “Ready, Dad?”
“More ready than you.” Garrett picked up a bright pink ball and teased Nox by pretending he was going to throw it in several different directions. The kid’s eyes darted, more focused on the ball than on his father. Nox tensed and bent at the knees as though ready to pounce. Garrett hurled the ball to the far left. It bounced off a tree, flew in a V-shape and hit another tree. It ricocheted a second time before Nox ran between the branches, leaped, and caught it.
Aha. Ricochet. Now she understood. The level of athletic ability needed to play this game boggled the mind. Lennox wasn’t sure she could handle it. It took hand-eye coordination, speed, and a strong knowledge of geometry. Lennox had the first two in her skill set but the third would test her.
Garrett continued to throw and Nox caught several of the balls. Although some of the zigzag patterns Garrett devised were too much for her godson. He missed more than a few catches. Nox didn’t pout, though. He listened to his dad’s pointers, picked himself up when he fell and kept going. After an hour of watching them play Lennox could see improvement. Pride made her puff out her chest a little more.
She couldn’t pinpoint when it first started, but at some point she’d developed a love for watching fathers spend time with their children. The habit definitely started before her father died. Perhaps because her dad had adored her—she knew how it felt to stand in the glow of fatherly love—seeing children receive that kind of adoration usually made her happy. Just not today. Today Garrett and Nox’s playtime broke her heart.
She didn’t want to watch. Not when it came to them. She wanted to be a part of it all. She
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