Christmas in Coconut Creek (Dirty Delta, #1)(93)
Her eyes rolled. “Something tells me you won’t mind spending the time together.”
“Congratulations you two.” Frankie sniffled, his emotions getting the best of him then, too. My heart pulsed like thunder inside my chest, warming like the crackling fire.
“We need to toast,” I said, leaning down to the coffee table for what was left of my wine, my friends following suit with their drinks. “To love,” I proclaimed. Frankie watched me intently, the corner of his lip lifting into a devilishly handsome smile. “Best friends, happiness, Coconut Creek…” I continued. “And to planning the most kick-ass fucking wedding anyone has ever seen.”
30
The girls laughing from the living room the minute I stepped through the front door turned my mood from sour to sweet. I spent the morning stretched out on a table playing puppet with a physiotherapist—which was my least favorite fucking thing to come out of my accident.
At first, it was a couple times a week. Cardio, strength training, learning how to sit down on a fucking toilet again without reinjuring myself—that wasn’t dehumanizing at all. Slow and steady exercises leading to me standing on two feet again, and then moping about the therapy unit with a cane I’d thought about beating myself to death with a hundred times over.
The stronger the fusions got in my back, the less I had to report to the doctors. Until it was only every few months to keep me healthy and progressing. Because I was thinking about going back out in the field I unfortunately needed to swallow my pride and take all medical advice sternly and seriously. Even if it meant crawling out of a warm bed away from a beautiful girl under the false pretenses of “going to work.”
Ophelia hadn’t asked me about my scars. She touched the long, precise lines on my lower back though, tracing them when she thought I was asleep. The conversation I longed to have about it burned at the tip of my tongue as I lay there, but I couldn’t force myself to turn over and address it. I hated the way a person’s face warped into pity when they knew the details, and I didn’t think I could stomach that look from her. Nor did she need a fucking trauma dump every time we were alone together.
I was supposed to be her good time. Her fun, breezy, guiltless pleasure.
If she asked, I would tell her.
“There he is,” Mateo called out, sitting in front of a game of cards with O and Tally. “Back from…work.” The idiot winked, knowing full well we didn’t have any security installs until after the new year. “Sorry I couldn’t make it into the office today, Pike. I was just telling the ladies that I have no idea how I’ll manage shop when you ship up to Colorado. You’re the only partner I trust.”
“Make sure you lick my balls, too, while you’re down there sucking my cock, Cap.” I popped open the fridge and took out a tray of leftovers.
“I’m serious!” he rattled on. “I have the business mindset, we know this. But I don’t deal well with fucking morons, so you’re the negotiator. You look like a puppy, and people love puppies.”
Ophelia hopped off her barstool and preheated the oven, stealing the Pyrex of ham out of my hands and taking over.
“Hi,” I mumbled through a smile.
“Hi,” she answered back bashfully.
We’d been playing house for three days. We woke up, had coffee, ate all our meals together, showered together, played every single board game Ophelia scraped out of the hall closet, scrolled through Netflix for long enough to get bored and let our hands wander—and then we had our merry way with one another until the sun came back up.
I was a spoiled fucking brat by all shreds of the cloth. Generally I’d never let a woman lift a finger for me, that’s not the way I was raised. But watching Ophelia prance around the house like she was a permanent staple—leaving her contact case on my nightstand, sifting through my drawers, wearing old T-shirts that ran down her tan thighs all the way to her knees—I’d let her do just about anything she wanted.
If that meant running my laundry through the wash with hers, saving me the largest piece of leftover lasagna, and finding a place for all our clean plates out of the dishwasher in foreign cabinets—who was I to complain?
She was an organized, calculated woman. At any given moment I could tell there was a trapdoor of endless lists and theoretical questions just behind her eyes. As if she didn’t keep busy, the perpetual background noise in her ears would come to a complete stop altogether and there would be nothing but a black hole of silence.
The only time that jittery energy evened out was when it was just the two of us. Time stopped in the little space between our bodies, reducing everything to slow motion. Like we were stuck inside a snow globe that someone had just given a shake.
Tally put her hand of cards down on the table and revealed a royal flush.
“Goddamnit!” Cap threw his cards down in frustration, his chair scraping across the kitchen floor as he stood and did a tantrum lap behind it.
“He’s right, Frankie.” Tally snorted. “Your patience is crucial to the entire operation. Clients will be leaving in droves when they get a hold of this sore loser.”
“Bratty isn’t on the content schedule today, sweetheart. But if you want to push it…” Cap pressed against his future wife’s chair and put his palms on the table on either side of her, showing a very uncomfortable amount of dominance. It quickly felt like Ophelia and I were props on a plaster movie set.