Chapter 14
“Son of a bitch!”
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, Jodi thought as she dropped her raised fist by her side and took a hesitant step back away from Danny’s door. Perhaps she’d overlooked something? she wondered, glancing back at the front door as she contemplated the pros and cons of going back outside.
After a minute, she came to the conclusion that standing outside in the middle of a thunderstorm probably wasn’t the best idea. That left her with two choices, sit in the hallway and catch a cold or ask Danny for help and a dry towel and risk losing what was left of her sanity.
“Oh, you son of a bitch!” came Danny’s shout, making the decision for her.
It took a minute, but she managed to find a rather comfortable spot on the floor by her door.
She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapped her trembling arms around them as she ignored the squishy sounds her clothes made against the rough carpet and tried to get comfortable as she closed her eyes.
It had been a long day and all she wanted to do was go inside her warm, dry apartment, soak in a hot bath, pull on her favorite tee-shirt, watch a movie, and get good and fat on a few pints of ice cream, but it didn’t look as though that was going to happen any time soon.
So instead, she resigned herself to sitting there in the hallway, wondering how this day could possibly get any worse. Her answer came from an unexpected source, letting her know that yes, yes, her day could get much worse than being stranded with an incredibly sexy man.
A lot worse…
Danny glared down at the burnt mess simmering in the kitchen sink, wondering exactly where he’d gone wrong.
“So much for a romantic dinner,” he said, sighing in disgust as he returned to the refrigerator and grabbed a pound of butter and tossed it on the counter along with a loaf of bread. “Grilled cheese, it is.”
That was fine. He still had a few other cards up his sleeve. He walked into his living room and-
“Oh, shit!” Danny grabbed a throw pillow off the couch and proceeded to beat the flames licking at the curtains until he was left with a ruined curtain and pillow and enough damage to the wall to guarantee that he’d be spending the weekend and about five hundred bucks fixing the wall, the molding around the window and possibly the window itself.
“Fucking great,” Danny said, tossing the ruined pillow on the floor right beside the puddle of wax that marked the final resting place of his dreams for a romantic night.
This was a lot harder than he’d realized. Maybe he should just suck it up and take the easy way out with a nice restaurant and a-
“Please, stop!” came a woman’s high-pitched scream.
Terror for Jodi had him jumping over the couch and across the room in seconds.
He tore the door open, ready to tear apart whoever was attacking her, only to stop abruptly when he spotted Tinkerbelle sitting across from him, unharmed and looking torn between amusement and horror as she watched as two of his cousins guaranteed their spot on another restaurant’s banned list.
“Help me!” the man wearing a Black Jack’s uniform screeched hysterically while his cousins stumbled over him as they tried to take each other down in a headlock.
Shaking his head in disgust, he walked down the hallway, grabbed the sobbing delivery man off the floor by the back of his shirt and shoved him towards the door while his cousins continued to fight over the stack of pizza boxes marked, The Monster.
Their food obsession was pathetic, Danny thought with a disgusted sigh as he reached down and picked up the stack of pizzas.
He walked back to his apartment, pausing only long enough to reach down and help his horrified neighbor to her feet and give her a gentle push towards his apartment.
Once they were inside, he shut the door behind him, dropped the pizza boxes on the coffee table and announced, “Dinner is served,” with a satisfied sigh.
“You can’t ban all of us!”
“This is bullshit!”
“I wasn’t even home!”
“You made a grown man cry!” someone, probably the cop, yelled.
“When will this night end?” Jodi asked no one in particular as she rubbed her temples.
“Probably not for a while,” Danny admitted, sounding oddly defeated as he sat there, staring at the destruction that had once been his living room.
“Probably not,” she murmured in agreement as she looked around the living room and took in the damage.
She toed the remains of his coffee table, still amazed over the amount of damage that three men fighting over pizza could do in less than a minute.
And yes, she was definitely sure that the damage to Danny’s apartment had only taken a minute because when the door burst open, she’d been looking down at Danny’s cell phone.
By the time she’d looked up, the door was falling off its hinges, the coffee table was in pieces, the television was smashed, the large leather chair that had actually looked pretty comfortable was in three pieces, a window had been smashed and there were five very large, and very noticeable, holes marring Danny’s living room walls and only one minute had passed.
“I’m gonna need a rain check,” Danny said, drawing her attention away from the electrical socket hanging by its wires from the wall.
“A rain check for what?”
He sighed heavily as he stood up and held his hand out to her. “For our date.”
“Our…date?” Jodi asked slowly, wondering if he’d hit his head when his cousins tackled him.
He nodded as he reached down and took the decision out of her hand. “I’m afraid that I’m going to have to regroup,” Danny said, taking her hand and gently pulling her to her feet.
“Regroup…”
“Mmmhmmm,” Danny murmured, entwining his fingers with hers as he raised their hands and pressed a kiss against the back of her hand. “Just a day or two to fix this.”
“A day or two,” Jodi repeated numbly as she allowed her gaze to run over the destruction.
“Are you going to repeat everything that I say?” Danny asked teasingly with a sexy smile that had her revisiting that whole brain injury idea.
“Yes,” Jodi said, nodding as she allowed him to lead her to his apartment door.
He was forced to release her hand so that he could grab the door and move it aside so they could go into the hallway where his cousins were still arguing with the cops and the manager from Black Jack’s, “And this wasn’t a date. ”
“Yes, it was,” Danny said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out-
“You stole my keys?” Jodi demanded when he proceeded to unlock her door and open it for her.
“Of course, I did,” Danny said, smiling down at her.
“And why exactly did you do that?” she asked, shaking her head in disbelief.
“It seemed necessary at the time,” he said sheepishly.
“Uh-huh,” Jodi said, staring up at him as she tried to make sense of this man. After a minute, she decided that it was simply impossible and gave up.
“I’m going to bed. Have a good night,” she said, suddenly feeling exhausted.
“Good night, Tinkerbelle,” came the response that had her shaking her head and resisting the urge to remind him that her name wasn’t Tinkerbelle, but she was too tired to argue with him right now.
She walked into her room, grabbed her favorite pair of sweatpants, a tee-shirt and headed to her bathroom.
She tore her clothes off along the way, tossing them aside as she headed for her sanctuary.
Five minutes later, she was soaking in a hot bath, savoring the moist heat seeping into her bones and the scent of lavender surrounding her as she closed her eyes and fantasized that she lived in a world where men didn’t ditch their fiancées the day before their wedding, destroy their credit, steal their life savings, humiliate them, leave them destitute, and jobless and with no other choice but to move in across the hall from an incredibly sexy ex-Marine who went from getting a kick out of screwing with her head one day to undressing her with his eyes the next.
In this fantasy, she still had her job at the museum.
The promotion that Jerry stole behind her back was hers.
Her credit was still perfect, her bank account healthy and her biggest problem was deciding between sleeping in on the weekend or spending the day reading, curled up on the couch.
She’d never accepted Jerry’s invitation for coffee and had seen the prick for the jerk that he really was.
Things were the way that they were meant to be.
But all too soon, she was forced to come back to reality.
Her bath water had long since gone cold, she was exhausted and all she wanted to do was to crawl in bed and pretend that getting up at six in the morning was her choice.
Yawning, she reached over and pulled the drain as a slight shiver shook her.
Freezing, she stood up and grabbed a towel, quickly drying off, eager to crawl into her warm bed.
Biting back another yawn, Jodi got dressed and opened the bathroom door. She couldn’t wait to-
“Romantic comedy or a horror flick?” the bastard lounging on her bed next to a large bowl of popcorn asked as she stood there, staring dumbly at him while she tried to make sense of what she was seeing.
This couldn’t be happening.
It just…couldn’t.
She closed her eyes, counted to ten and opened them only to close them again, counted to a hundred, praying that he would just take pity on her and take a hint and get out of her apartment before she opened her eyes again.
Nope, still there, Jodi realized as she opened her eyes to find him holding up two DVDs and sending her an incredibly sexy smile that had her shaking her head.
“You need to leave,” she said, ignoring his smile as she gestured for him to get his ass off her bed and get the hell out of her apartment.
He sighed heavily as he tossed the DVDs aside. “You’re canceling another date.”
“Another date?” Jodi repeated back, realizing that she was starting to sound like a parrot thanks to him.
Danny nodded, looking boyish as he explained, “Our third date.”
“Our third date…” she repeated, wondering how she’d missed the first and second date, but she didn’t have to wonder for very long.
“Our first date was last night when you kicked me out for work. Then, earlier tonight, we had to call off our second date early because of the incident,” he said with a shrug as though that horrifying experience that she’d somehow survived was no big deal.
“Those weren’t dates,” Jodi pointed out between clenched teeth. “And neither is this.”
“Wow,” Danny said, shaking his head as though he just couldn’t believe what he was hearing, “I can’t believe that you keep leading me on like this.”
“I never led you on!”
“It’s really not nice leading guys on, Tinkerbelle,” Danny said with a sad shake of his head as he climbed off the bed.
“Oh, my God! Are you insane?”
“Probably,” came the unconcerned answer as he walked up to her and cupped her face in his large, warm hand and caressed her cheek with the pad of his thumb. “Now, why don’t you tell me why you’re afraid of me?”