Hennessey?”
“Brett,” he called back.
“I…Brett. Right. I called. But there was no answer, so—”
“Oh, shower. Sorry.” He walked over to the door, juggled the kitty bundle, and cracked the door open.
Her gaze fixed on his chest and then scooted down to the squirming towel bundle, right back up to his chest, briefly to his face, then away all together. “I’m—sorry. I just, you said…and dinner is—anyway—” She frowned. “You didn’t take the cat, you know, into—” She nodded toward the room behind him. “Did something happen?”
“What? Oh. I was in the shower. Shredder here decided to climb the curtain because apparently she’s not happy unless she’s trying to find new ways to terrify people.”
He glanced from the kitten to Kirby’s face in time to see her almost laugh and then compose herself. “I’m sorry, really. I shouldn’t have let you keep her in the first place. I mean, not that you can’t, but you obviously didn’t come here to rescue a kitten. I should—we should—just leave you alone.” She reached out to take the squirmy bundle from him.
“Does that mean I don’t get dinner?”
“What?” She looked up, got caught somewhere about chest height, then finally looked at his face. “I mean, no, no, not at all. I just—I hope you didn’t have your heart set on pot roast. There were a few…kitchen issues. Minor, really, but—”
“I’m not picky,” he reassured her. What he was, he realized, was starving. And not just for dinner. If she kept looking at him like that…well, it was making him want to feed an entirely different kind of appetite. In fact…He shut that mental path down. His life, such as it was, didn’t have room for further complications. And she’d be one. Hell, she already was. “I shouldn’t have gotten you to cook anyway. You’ve had quite a day, and given what The Claw here did to your—my—shower curtain—I’ll pay for a new one—I can only imagine that you must need more medical attention than I realized.”
“Don’t worry about that, I’m fine. Here,” she said, reaching out for the wriggling towel bundle. “Why don’t I go ahead and take her off your hands. I can put her out on the back porch for a bit, let you get, uh, dressed.”
Really, she had to stop looking at him like that. Like he was a…a pot roast or something. With gravy. And potatoes. Damn he was really hungry. Voraciously so. Did she have any idea how long he’d been on the road? With only himself and the sound of the wind for company? Actually, it had been far longer than that, but he really didn’t need to acknowledge that right about now.
Then she was reaching for him, and he was right at that point where he was going to say the hell with it and drag her into the room and the hell with dinner, too…only she wasn’t reaching for him. She was reaching for the damn kitten. He sort of shoved it into her hands, then shifted so a little more of the door was between them…and a little less of a view of the front of his towel. Which was in a rather revealing situation at the moment.
“Thanks,” he said. “I appreciate it. I’ll go down—be down—in just a few minutes.” He really needed to shut this door. Before he made her nervous. Or worse. I mean, sure, she was looking at him like he was her last supper, but that didn’t mean she was open to being ogled in return by a paying guest. Especially when he was the only paying guest in residence. Even if that did mean they had the house to themselves. And privacy. Lots and lots of privacy. “Five minutes,” he blurted, and all but slammed the door in her face.
Crap, if Dan could see him at the moment, he’d be laughing his damn ass off. As would most of Vegas. Not only did Brett happen to play high stakes poker pretty well, but the supporters and promoters seemed to think he was also a draw because of his looks. And no, he wasn’t blind, he knew he’d been relatively blessed, genetically speaking, for which he was grateful. No one would choose to be ugly. A least he wouldn’t think so.
But while the looks had come naturally, that whole bad boy, cocky attitude vibe that was supposed to go with it had not. Not that he was shy. Exactly.
He was confident in his abilities, what they were, and what they weren’t. But confidence was one thing. Arrogance another. And just because women threw themselves at him didn’t mean he was comfortable catching them. Mostly due to the fact that he was well aware that women weren’t throwing themselves at him because of who he was. But because of what he was. Some kind of quasi-poker rock star. They were batting eyelashes, thrusting cleavage, and passing phone numbers and room keys because of his fame, his fortune, his ability to score freebies from hotels and sponsors, and somewhere on that list, probably his looks weren’t hurting him, either.
Nowhere on the list, however, did it appear that getting to know the guy behind the deck of cards and the stacks of chips was of any remote interest.
And there lay the irony.
He was a guy surrounded by women. In the city that gave sin a whole new meaning. Complete with diagrams, video clips, soundtracks, and anything else a person might desire when indulging in a very wide range of wants or needs. Even the most casual observer would likely assume that Brett had a different woman in his bed every night. Possibly more than one. Or three. It wasn’t a scenario that he was entirely comfortable with, but the promoters ate it up and pushed for more, so he tolerated the whole thing…for appearances. Because it helped the promoters get a bigger buy-in, which meant a bigger potential payday for him and everyone else playing the game. But that was just while he was playing.
Appearances aside, he generally went to bed alone. The dealers got more action than he did. Hell, so did the busboys, the bellhops, and every other damn person in the city. But then, the available action simply wasn’t his thing.
Dan said he’d just needed to expand his horizons beyond the casino floor and try to meet women elsewhere. But there wasn’t any elsewhere for him in Vegas. Except on Dan’s job site…and there weren’t many women swinging hammers and hauling lumber.
So, he supposed it made perfect sense that the more often he laid eyes on Ms. Farrell, the more often his thoughts strayed from figuring out what he was going to do with the rest of his life…to fantasizing about what he’d really like to be doing for the next few hours. Or days. Possibly even a week or two. Or three.
It had been a pretty long dry spell, after all.
“It’s just dinner,” he reminded himself as he trotted down the stairs a few minutes later, hair toweled dry, and the still slightly rumpled long-sleeve tee paired with his jeans. And the increasingly delectable innkeeper was not on the dessert menu. Even if she did look at him like he was dipped in chocolate. And she’d been craving a Godiva fix for weeks.
Funny, he thought, how all those women wanting him for nothing more than his looks or body in Vegas had been a major turnoff. But let Kirby run her soft gray eyes over his towel-clad body a few times and he was fully on board with whatever her little heart desired, no further questions asked.
Yep, that was downright hilarious.
He forced his wayward thoughts elsewhere so he didn’t enter the dining room sporting uncomfortably fitting jeans. Which would have worked out just fine, he was sure, except the instant he entered the dining room, he found her bending over the table, all long legs and sweet heart-shaped ass staring him right in the face. She was wearing form-fitting, soft ivory khakis, an even softer looking, thin blue sweater, and had her hair pulled up off her neck—a perfectly beautiful, slender span of creamy skin that he was a lot more
