With heavy lids and an expression of disgust, she tossed both jars of perfectly good jam into the trash. “Yoga, my ass.”
“What the…?” He fished the jam out of the trash and set it on the counter next to all the other food she’d pulled from his cabinets. “Would you knock that shit off? Look, I don’t know what Drake said, but—”
“Are you still drunk?”
“No,” he said, then closed his eyes, searching for patience. “I just don’t remember the conversation.”
“Un-freaking-believable.” She let the fridge door close, turned, and yanked open a cabinet, then grabbed his Lucky Charms in one hand, his Cocoa Puffs in the other.
“Uh-uh,” he said. “No way.”
“Noah, baby…” The female voice coming from the opposite direction stopped him from grabbing his treasured boxes of cereal. He’d completely forgotten about the fling chick.
He turned as she walked into the kitchen in exactly what she’d been wearing on the sofa, nothing but bra and panties.
Fuuuuuuuck. He certainly wasn’t a prude, but he wasn’t interested in flaunting his poor judgment either.
But there she was, standing in his kitchen, blurry eyed, big tits, curvy ass, long legs, bottle-blonde hair, and heavy makeup. She might look smeared and smudged now, but he was sure she’d looked damn flashy last night. At least that was what his morning-after brain was telling him. Now, though, there was no denying she looked about as good as Noah felt. Which reminded him he couldn’t look much better.
He dropped his head and rubbed his eyes on a heavy exhale of defeat.
What a clusterfuck.
“Oh, hi.” Fling-chick—Noah still had no idea of her name—came to a sudden stop at the sight of another woman. She swept a look over Julia and cuddled up next to him. Noah kept his arms crossed but barely resisted easing away. “I’m Samantha.”
“Julia,” she said, curt and direct.
Samantha nodded, then turned her mascara-smeared eyes up to Noah. “She’s pretty. Is she joining us?”
A sound scraped Julia’s throat, half laugh, half guffaw. She rested her palms behind her on the granite countertop and focused on Noah. “Way to be out there.” Then her gaze shifted to Fling-chick. “No, sweetheart. I don’t share my men, and I don’t want this one. I’m the woman who’s going to get ‘Noah baby’ back on the slopes. So, if you want to continue fucking a professional athlete, go home and don’t come back for at least six weeks. He’s out of commission until then.”
This was turning from awkward into an avalanche of just plain wrong.
“Whoa, hold on.” Everything Julia had said clicked in his mind at once. “You’re another goddamned physical therapist??
??
“You tell her, Noah,” Samantha whined, “she can’t talk to me like that.”
Julia shifted on her feet, cocked her hip, crossed her arms, and gave Noah a clear, one-wrong-word-and-you’ll-regret-it stare.
If he had to pick his battles, he’d choose the one he could win here and now. He turned to Samantha, “I’ve really got to take care of some business here.” He put a hand at the middle of her back and guided her toward the theater. “Go ahead and get dressed. We’ll talk later.”
“Like, six weeks later,” Julia added, earning a wicked over-the-shoulder glare from Samantha. But Noah kept her moving toward the theater, grabbed his jeans from the floor, pulled his phone from the back pocket, and called a cab.
“What a bitch,” Samantha said, sliding into a slinky black piece of nothing he guessed should have been a shirt. “If that’s your housekeeper, you need to fire her.”
Getting into his jeans again was much harder than getting out had been, and the throb in his leg had intensified by the time he was half-dressed. Pain always turned him from sensible and easy-going to a shit, and he could already feel his temper simmering just beneath the rage setting. It would get better once he got rid of the whining chick and confronted the bossy chick. He just had to hold on to his sanity until they were both gone.
Samantha had already wriggled into skintight jeans and knee-high Uggs, and while she was in the bathroom off the theatre brushing her hair and washing her face, Noah collected her things. As he walked her past the kitchen toward the front door, he hung his arm around her shoulder to support his weight.
He caught sight of the yellow cab coming to a stop out front through the big front window, which made him think about the night before again. “I hope I didn’t drive last night…”
“Of course not,” she said as if the idea were silly. “Mercer gave us a ride back from the bar, and Finn followed in your car. He said he’d leave your keys in the visor.”
“Oh, right.” As if he remembered. “Thanks.”
He helped her into her jacket, and she looked over her shoulder at him with pleading eyes. “Call me?”