“Deal.”
I wasn’t sure the handshake was an indication that I trusted the man, but it was sure as hell an indication that I couldn’t walk away from him nearly as easily as I wished I could.
“You won’t regret this,” Champ assured me before turning around and applying himself to his tacos.
I clenched my hand into a fist, still feeling his fingers sliding against mine while my heart beat out a crazy rhythm.
Oh, I was pretty sure I already regretted it…
And it only took a few days for me to confirm this beyond a shadow of a doubt.
6
CHAMP
It wasn’t until I was driving us home from Nashville that I realized in convincing Quinn to go along with my plan, I might have overpromised a little.
Or a lot.
It wasn’t that I was worried about having enough skilled labor to fix up the farm—most of my team would love the break from their usual work, and if worse came to worst, I could draw on the trust fund I hadn’t touched since the day I started Champion Security and hire more people to make it happen.
No, the real issue was finding a Nashville socialite who needed a wedding planner so I could replace the glitzy city wedding Quinn was hoping for.
I’d happily severed almost all my ties to the Nashville social circle the minute I’d left home for college. And while my mother would know the names of literally every person in Nashville society who was engaged—she probably had whole gossip dossiers on them—I would rather be forced to spend a solid hour playing fucking Horn of Glory than owe my mom a favor, which was exactly what would happen if I asked her for help.
“So…” I cleared my throat. “What about a minor league baseball player instead of a socialite? Would that work?”
I braced myself for yelling and flailing. When none came—in fact, when Quinn didn’t reply at all—I glanced over at the passenger’s seat and found him sacked out, with his dark head pressed against the glass and my jacket wrapped around his trim form like a large blanket.
My mouth twitched up before I could stop it. When I’d fed him beer at lunch, I’d completely forgotten how much smaller he was. It wasn’t at all the same as sharing a couple of beers at lunch with the bulked-up folks I worked with. Quinn wasn’t exactly slurring when we’d left the taco place, but he’d had a soft quality to his speech that had necessitated my taking his keys from him and trying to shove myself behind the wheel of his clown car.
God, the man was handsome. With his face relaxed in sleep, he looked even younger than he usually did, and I had to fight the urge to trace the Cupid’s bow of his mouth with my fin—
Whoa. Okay, no.
I caught my wandering thoughts, and my brain made a sound like a record scratch. What the fuck was wrong with me? What had they put in those tacos?
Quinn was good-looking, no doubt. Fun to fuck. Even fun to talk to. But I was getting all kinds of confused if I was starting to think poetical fucking thoughts about the shape of the man’s lips.
Getting the Horn was my priority—my only priority. The easiest way to accomplish that was to be around Quinn, but the man was still nothing more than my twenty-seven-night stand. And the sooner we could be done with this mission and get our rela—our arrangement—back on track, the better.
Hell, maybe if I found the Horn quickly, we could end the mission before the farm wedding ever had to take place, which would make Quinn all kinds of happy. I imagined him telling Marissa that we’d broken up, so the whole farm wedding concept was tainted by his broken dreams or some shit.
I chuckled to myself and glanced over at him again. The man would probably pull it off convincingly too. I’d been pleasantly surprised at how well he’d pivoted when it came to keeping up with our charade. I hadn’t expected him to keep up with me outside the bedroom too.
And if I couldn’t find the Horn quickly enough and the farm wedding had to go on… well, then I was going to keep my promises, even if that meant finding a fucking socialite and bribing them to hire Quinn. Not because I had feelings for the man, but because I wasn’t the sort of guy to fuck over someone who did me a favor.
Unlike certain people in his life.
My hands flexed on the steering wheel so hard the plastic creaked as I thought of Quinn’s ex, and I had to throttle back my rush of protective anger. As soon as I dropped Quinn off at his place, I was gonna get Hux to get me a full rundown on Scott the Onyx-fucker, and then I was going to schedule us a little chat. One Quinn never had to know about. One that would involve a large sum of cash landing in Quinn’s account.