“I know you are.” The corners of his eyes creased with his familiar laugh lines. He sidestepped out of the line and offered Maggie a hand to help her to her feet. One of Gwen’s baristas came around the counter with a mop. “It’s really okay.”
Maggie let Dean take over the napkin wielding and pressed her hands to her flaming cheeks. Now what? In the romance books, this scenario led to a shirtless hero, and a ravished—or at least partially tumbled—heroine, but despite the copious amounts of reading research she’d done over the past few days, Maggie couldn’t figure out how to get them to the next step now that she’d dumped her coffee down his front. Her mind had drawn a complete blank. It wasn’t like Dean was going to strip naked in the public coffee shop. He needed a place to change.
“You can come back to my place. I live next door.” Maggie pointed to the exposed brick of the wall that bordered her building.
Maggie flushed and Dean stopped mopping at his shirt to look at her. Why would he come back to her house when she didn’t have clothes for him? Although she had her own washer and dryer. That was a rare gem for apartment living, but it had been a necessity since laundromats always made her itchy. She’d gone weeks between laundry loads when she and Audrey had been roommates. Once Audrey found her hand-washing her jeans in the shower, she’d taken over the laundromat trips for both of them.
“Thanks, Babs.” The twinkle was gone from Dean’s eyes as they flitted back and forth searching hers. He dug out his wallet and handed her his credit card. “Grab yourself another drink. I have an extra shirt in my car.”
Given that she’d purposefully dumped her coffee on him, Maggie couldn’t bring herself to use his money to buy a replacement. Since his hands were full of napkins, she leaned forward and tucked the card back into the pocket of his pants. She patted the denim once and then brushed past him to walk to the glass door, trying to put an extra sway in her step and a shimmy in her hips.
Dean’s Mercedes had a prime parking spot in front of The Perk-u-Later. He clicked his keys and reached into the backseat, grabbing a hold of a small black duffel bag.
“Gym bag. All clean, too.” He hefted the bag over his shoulder and re-locked his car. Maggie inclined her head towards the three-decker where she rented the middle floor above Mrs. Weller, who gave her a good deal on rent for help with groceries and trips to the doctor, and below Trey and Moore, a sweet couple who spent so much time jet-setting that she rarely saw them at all. Maggie set off with her exaggerated, rolling hips and Dean reached out to snag her wrist. “Hey, you don’t need to be embarrassed, Babs. It was just an accident.”
“I’m not embarrassed,” Maggie said, because she would not tell him she doused him in coffee on purpose.
Dean frowned and rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. “Oh, you’re limping a little and I thought you were trying to escape the coffee shop because you were feeling weird or whatever.” He gestured to her hips. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m not hurt.”Try mortified.
Maggie left her seductress walk behind as she led Dean into the three-decker and up the stairs to her apartment. The door had barely closed behind him when Dean dropped his duffle and stripped his coffee-stained shirt off over his head. Maggie had a lifetime of memories of shirtless Dean by the pool from her childhood. She even had a secret stash of shirtless Dean memories from his high school athletics days, but both had been at least a decade in the past and did not prepare her for shirtless man Dean.
Maggie nearly swallowed her tongue seeing the acres of tanned skin. His abdomen was carved into defined muscles, his belly drum flat. A small dusting of golden chest hair grew in a little triangle between his pectorals. He used the dry part of his shirt to wipe the residual coffee off of his skin and Maggie had the urge to offer to clean him. With her tongue. Like a cat.
Dean’s hands slid to his waistband and made quick work of the button on his pants. He dipped his hands inside and pushed the wet denim to his knees. Maggie almost hit the floor. He wore a pair of navy boxer briefs, and the skin of his thick thighs was the same golden color as the skin on his chest and belly. The same golden hair curled along his legs, and Maggie swore she could hear the crisp rasp as the pants slid along the hair. The sound left her almost panting. She spun to face away from him, staring at her refrigerator and trying not to imagine him sliding off the underwear too.
“Did you need anything to drink? A towel?”A cuddle and a blow job?
“I’m good, thanks.” Dean said. Maggie heard the zipper on the duffle.
“Okay.” Her voice came out at a decibel only dogs would recognize.
Dean searched through his clothes. The rustle of the vinyl bag made her wince. Suddenly, her limbs felt weighed down and heavy. Her head spun, her heart raced, and her breath came in small pants.
“I’m just going to go to the bathroom real quick.” She bolted from the room on shaking legs.
Maggie locked the door behind her and sank down to sit on the lid of the toilet. Her hands were shaking as she folded them over her thighs. What was wrong with her? Why was she hiding in the bathroom after getting Dean right where she wanted him? How did she go from admiring his muscles, to being terrified of him stripping to his birthday suit? Now was the time to march out there and touch all that beautiful golden skin, and share some lingering looks, and then roll up on her toes and press their mouths together. That’s what the heroine in her novels would do. She needed to take advantage of this situation. She’d already committed to it. If she missed this opportunity, she couldn’t just go around dumping more drinks on him. Dean would definitely notice something like that.
Maggie took a deep breath, and willed her hands to steady. She flushed the toilet for cover and turned on the sink so he wouldn’t think she had skipped washing her hands. Then she actually washed them just in case Dean noticed she didn’t smell like her citrus hand soap. She grabbed one of the fluffy yellow towels off of the shower door and tucked it under her arm. She’d just take the towel out there and offer to help him dry off with it. Easy Peasy. Then he’d pull on some new clothes and she’d suggest a new Netflix show and they’d snuggle up on her tiny loveseat. For once in her life, Maggie was thankful for the tiny piece of furniture.
Except she’d taken too long. By the time Maggie made it back to her kitchen, Dean had not only pulled on fresh clothes, he’d also tossed his dirty ones into the washer that stood next to the fridge. A threadbare t-shirt and a pair of loose gray sweatpants covered all of that smooth, golden skin. But Maggie could work with gray sweatpants. Gray sweatpants in the romance world were almost better than fully naked.
“I hope you don’t mind that I popped my things into your washing machine. Coffee can be a beast to get out.” He was lacing up a pair of brightly colored running shoes.
“I was going to offer to wash them for you.” Maggie eyed the sneakers. “Are you going somewhere? I thought we could play a board game or watch a movie or something like that.”
“I’m going to go for a run.” Dean straightened to his mammoth height and smiled at her, rocking in his running shoes. “I like to hit the park just a few blocks over. It’s a beautiful day to be outside.”
The outdoors was not Maggie’s favorite place to pass the time. Exercising was even lower on the list. She’d have much preferred the indoor cuddling option, but Dean was smiling down at her and his eyes were shining again, and his butt looked damn good in his sweatpants. A romance heroine would go for the run, Maggie thought. She’d put on a cute set of workout pants and a sports bra, bare her perfect body, and run in the sun with the perfect hero. Either she’d impress him with her stamina, or she’d twist an ankle and he’d have to nurse her back to health.
Maggie had maybe one sports bra, not that her girls needed much support, and she had leggings even if they were regular cotton ones and not the fancy athletic kind. She did have a pair of running shoes. Yes, she’d bought them because they were purple and not because she ran or exercised at all, but sneakers were sneakers. And if she died, then at least they could star in another trope where he came to her rescue and performed mouth-to-mouth. If it came to that, Maggie hoped it worked out better than the other tropes she’d tried, because spilling coffee on him had been a bust. Yes, she’d seen Dean shirtless, but now they were headed out on a run instead of making out and having him boost her up on the washer for the spin cycle.
“Let me just change my clothes and I’ll come with you,” Maggie sighed, and went to dig out her sports bra, hoping it was clean and hole-free.
***
The run had been one of the worst decisions of Maggie’s life. Not only had she panted, gasped, and sweated with every step—while pretending that she wasn’t—but even as she’d tried to keep step behind Dean’s glorious butt, she was too tired to enjoy the view. By the time they’d stopped back at her apartment, she was too irritable to enjoy having him in her space. Dean had switched his clothes to the dryer, promised to pick them up the next day, and left her to drag her aching body to the shower. She chose not to ask him to stay, because the sweat on her skin was making her itch and the memory of him asking if she wanted to quit made her throat tight.