Page 67 of Bolo's Curveball
That was another sign of Relay’s current mindset. No normal man would pass up a meal from Camila. If we didn’t already have a gym on the compound, we’d have to build one just to work off the extra calories that woman insisted on putting in front of us. Not that we complained. The food was what dreams were made of.
Striding away from him, I went into the apartment complex and took the stairs instead of the elevator. Taking them two at a time was faster and I needed the extra exercise anyway.
“Hey.” Devyn smiled as I came into the apartment.
“How was work?” I asked, eyes sliding over her. She looked damn good. She was wearing a pair of jean shorts, a t-shirt that left a section of her stomach exposed, and was painting her toes a summerish-blue kind of color. I didn’t know the name of the color, other than blue. Dad was in charge of picking all the paint colors during renovations because Mom had trained him over the years to know their names.
She looked up at me, worry creeping into her gaze. “It was fine.”
“Just fine?” I asked, going over and sitting on the couch next to her.
She turned toward me. “I’m not sure what I should do.”
“About?”
“Nothing,” she sighed. Shaking her head, she stared down at her toes.
“Talk to me, Sweetheart.”
She sighed again, seeming resigned to some sort of outcome that I wasn’t aware of yet. “Well, I can take time off, though it will mean I have less time off once the baby is here.” She went back to swiping polish on her toes. “But my blood pressure is starting to worry me. I’m not even sure if Ishouldbe worried, yet. I’m glad we’re going back to the doctor tomorrow because this can’t be right.”
She waved a hand over at the notebook she was keeping track of her numbers in. She was doing that so that I could see them easily as well, which I appreciated. This way I didn’t have to pester her every time I wanted to know how things were going. I could just check the book. The numbers weren’t wrong though, because a pattern was forming. It didn’t seem to matter what time of day it was, her blood pressure was staying in the higher range. Not a worrisome range yet, Drifter had told me when I’d asked him, but it wasn’t a good sign of what was to come. This was just starting earlier than it usually did, according to him.
“You could quit,” I suggested. When she stilled, staring down at her toes and not looking my way, I started to get the feeling I’d said something wrong. “I mean, I make more than enough to take care of both you and the baby.” I waded forward even though my instincts were screaming at me to stop. Sometimes I was a dumbass. Relay would definitely agree. Hell, Mom would be agreeing with that assessment right now, too.
Her eyes flashed angrily as she met my gaze. “You want me to give up the career I’ve worked so hard for?”
“Uh… If you wanted to. Sure.” I wasn’t so sure why she seemed to be going from zero to one hundred right now.
She narrowed her eyes at me. If looks could kill, I’d be on the ground writhing in agony. “I’m not quitting!” She set the bottle of polish aside on the coffee table and jumped up, pacing back and forth. “I’ve worked too hard for this. And I love my job.” She jabbed a finger in my direction.
“Okay.” I bit back anything else stupid that I might have been thinking about saying. “It was just a thought-”
“A stupid one! And a thought I’m tired of hearing!” She spun away from me and went into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
My mouth started to form the word ‘what’ so I could ask the empty room what the fuck had just happened, but I just kind of got stuck there because I had no answer for myself. I hadn’t brought up her quitting her job before. Someone else must have though, because if she was tired of hearing it, that meant someone was saying it.
I wasn’t dumb enough to say that more than once when that was her reaction though. My only other guess was maybe her family? Or was it the ‘bad idea’ voice in her head? Dad had warned me about this, warned all of us. Women had this voice in their head giving them bad ideas, the type that made them angry. At you. The voice, Dad warned us, was extremely dangerous, because in her head itsoundedlike your voice. So when you speak that same bad idea out loud, now you’ve been badgering her with it, making her very, very angry.
I didn’t even have a ‘maybe this is something we shouldn’t be doing’ kind of voice. Fuck, that would’ve been super useful to have growing up. Any kind of voice in there helping out would be great. But nope. Nothing. I didn’t even have a damn cricket hanging around to tell me when a decision I was making was a dumbass one.
Though I wasn’t sure, in this case, whether that little voice in Devyn’s mind was helping me out. It seemed like maybe itwas a hindrance this time. Kind of like when she had a dream at two A.M. where I was mean to her, so she wakes me up, yells at me, then ices me out for three days. Yeah, that had already happened. That had left me bemused for a full twenty-four hours, then frustrated as I tried to figure out how to fix shit I hadn’t even done. Being with Devyn was a trip. But a fun one so far. She made life interesting and I wouldn’t want her any other way.
I got up and got a beer out of the fridge, then sat there, wondering how the hell I was supposed to make this better when I’d pissed her off so damn bad? And I didn’t even fully know why. I drank the beer slowly to kill some time. I was just about to go remind her about dinner when she slammed her way back out of the bedroom. She’d changed.
My eyes were glued to her. Jesus. She was in some black short…things. They were a bit fancier than the jean shorts from earlier and made her legs look longer. She had on some kind of…sequin tank top-style shirt that plunged down between her breasts. And she was wearing a pair of stilettos that made my dick harder than a brick.
Was she trying to fucking kill me?
“You look…great,” I gulped, trying to keep my tone neutral and my body under control.
She glared over at me as she fussed with her hair, which was up in a high pony tail on top of her head. The ends were curled and she’d put make-up on. She’d been in that room for maybe fifteen minutes while I’d had that beer. Had she shape shifted? That had to be the only possible answer, right? She’d gone from relaxed and comfortable looking to…sex kitten. Like she’d plucked that image right out of my fantasies and was planning to torture me with it.
“You need to change,” she informed me. Her tone was cold enough to freeze water.
I looked down at my t-shirt, cut, jeans, and boots. “The dinner is here at the clubhouse.” And we had about forty-five minutes until we needed to be down there. Sitting around in uncomfortable clothes while we waited sounded like hell. But again, I didn’t want to rile her up further.
“I know, but Camila asked for us to dress up.”
