Page 19 of Dirty Like Me
At that, he grinned again. “You got a minute?”
For you?Um, yeah. Pretty sure I could find the time.
“Uh-huh. Want to come around back? I have to drop Max off.”
“Lead the way.”
We headed around the back of the house, Jesse’s bodyguard remaining out front, but it was Max who actually led the way, bounding down the side lane and through the backyard gate. The fence was overgrown with trees and the entire yard was a maze of sometimes competing shrubs and gardens; my sister and her husband had dueling green thumbs. The yard said comfy chaos, and I loved it. It was one of my favorite places in the world.
And now Jesse Mayes was standing in it.
Trippy.
My niece and nephew came screaming in our direction.
“Katie!” Owen screeched, hurling himself at my leg.
“You’re late,” Sadie announced.
Great. Owen and Sadie were four and six years old, respectively, and had zero concept of time. Which meant my sister had been looking for me.
I bent and kissed Owen on his blond head, tussling his unruly hair. “Go tell your mom I’ll be in in a few minutes, please.”
“Yeah!” Owen dashed into the house, happy to have a job to do.
“I’m going to talk to, um, my friend,” I informed Sadie, who was standing by, playing with the hem of her sundress and staring at Jesse. “Can you go play with Max?”
“Okay,” she said, and steered Max over to the play area in the corner of the yard.
I watched them go, giving myself an extra few seconds to take a breath. Sadie watched Jesse over her shoulder the entire way, reminding me of the young girls who came up to me now and then demanding to know what Jesse Mayes was like. I usually told them he was super nice, because it was adorable when they got all giggly and starry-eyed. But the truth was I had no idea whether or not the guy was nice.
All I knew was that he’d paid me a hell of a lot of money so he could grope me, kiss me, and thrust his hard cock against me until I almost saw stars, then he’d tossed me to one of his big biker-looking security guards, who drove me home.
And now here he was, and I was pretty sure he was checking out my ass in my jean shorts… because they were that small, and honestly, if I was a cocky rock star, that’s what I’d be doing.
I turned to face him and smiled. Like it was no big deal that he was standing here on the cobbled path between Becca’s rose bushes and Jack’s hydrangeas looking at my ass.
“Cute kids,” he said.
“My niece and nephew.”
I blinked up at him, wishing I’d put on some makeup to cover up the sangria-induced circles under my eyes, instead of just planning to whip on some lip gloss and mascara once I got to work. Because the man was nothing short of dazzling, the sunlight catching in his eyelashes and glinting off his rings, blinding me as it bounced off the white T-shirt stretched over his hard pecs.
“Did you enjoy the pie?” he asked, all innocence, showing a flash of perfect white teeth.
Right. The pie.
Even though I hadn’t seen him since the video shoot, I had heard from him. Once.
Kind of.
The morning after the shoot, he’d sent me a pie. Which was kind of cruel, since it just got my hopes up that I might actually see him again, or that sending me pies might be some kind of regular thing. It wasn’t. There was only the one, sent to my apartment from Stella’s Pies. A delivery guy had shown up with it, with a card that said,I hear they’re the best in town. J.
The pie was cherry.
“It was good,” I said.
“Just good?”
