“What are you doing?” he asks, and cocks his head to the side as he stares at my phone.
“Getting an Uber and going home.”
He shakes his friend’s keys. “I can drive you. Seeing you home safely is the least I can do after setting your girlfriend up with my brother.”
I lower my phone. “Wait. Kane is your brother?” My God, the two look nothing alike. I never would have put that together. But damn, their parents must be proud to have two professional hockey players in the family.
“Not by blood, but yeah.” He quickly turns from me, but not before I catch the flash of darkness in his eyes. Why do I suddenly get the feeling that I touched on a sore spot? He holds the fob out, presses it, and in the near distance a car door unlocks.
“Well, I have four siblings. I’m the oldest of five.” Why the hell did I just tell him that?
He turns back to me, and he has the strangest look on his face. I’m not sure what to make of it, and I don’t know him well enough to call it, but for the briefest of seconds I get the impression that he’s all alone in this world. But he’s not. He has Kane, and his entire team, right?
“That’s nice,” he says so quietly I have to strain to hear.
Silence falls over us, and I suddenly can’t remember what we were talking about before I asked about his brother. When he shifts from one foot to the other, the keys rattle.
Right, he’d offered me a ride home, before my brain went off in another direction.
“I don’t get into cars with strangers,” I say with a lift of my chin.
Humor is back in his eyes when he turns to me. “Friends with every Uber driver in Seattle, are you?” he teases, that sexy little dimple on display again.
I give an exaggerated eye roll that seems to amuse him. “Well no. Of course not, but they have safety measures. You could be a serial killer, for all I know.”
“I’m not and I don’t make it a habit of driving random women home either, you know. Maybe you’re not a real nurse.” He glances the length of me. “Maybe you only wear scrubs because you’re an organ thief and it saves time when you’re ready to harvest some unsuspecting dude’s parts,” he teases, as he cups his crotch.
I burst out laughing. “You have a very wild imagination. I’m not after your organs, Ride
r.” I point downward. “Especially that one.”
“Whew. Okay, what do you do for fun?” he questions, like he’s not ready for this night to be over any more than I am.
“I like gardening, and art, and I like to repair and paint old furniture.” I’m about to ask him what he does for fun, but he slaps his head.
“What a coincidence.”
I fold my arms, and stare at him, wondering where he’s going with this, but entertained with his antics just the same. “What?”
He jerks his thumb down the street. “I was actually on my way to get a whopper wiener at the Bad Art Museum. Join me. We can eat and look at art.”
“Bad art, you mean.”
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, baby.”
“And those wieners will kill you. Instead of whopper wiener, they should be called heart attack hotdog.”
He laughs at the joke. “So you want one, too?”
“Well, yeah.”
He laughs harder and I join in as we start down the sidewalk. “After we eat, if you decide I’m not a serial killer, and my intentions are to get you home safely, I’ll drive you. If you’re still not comfortable, I’ll get you an Uber.”
“Deal.”
Light rain drops sprinkle down on us. “We better make a run for it,” he says. “This isn’t looking good.”
He captures my hand, and we hurry down the sidewalk, but the light rain turns to fat drops and soaks our clothes before we reach our destination.