Darla made a choking sound. “Excuse me?”
“Get your mind out of the gutter, Darla Josephine Jennings. Not that kind of pie. Jeddy’s may have some weird things on the menu, but they haven’t come up with a flavor that savory.”
“Pussy Pie has a ring to it,” Darla said through laughter.
“People would think they were baking strays from the alley behind the restaurant.”
“I’ve eaten in some dive joints here in Boston that probably are,” Darla muttered.
“Quit stalling!” Josie insisted. “Get Joe and Trevor to meet you there. Laura’s doing the same with Mike and Dylan, and then we’ll—”
Two strong, muscled arms wrapped around Josie’s waist as Alex appeared from behind, her ass nuzzling up to an alarmingly large sign of how happy he was to see her.
“Hey there,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve missed you. And I can feel how much you’ve missed me.”
“You coming on to me, Josie? ’Cause that’s a new low.” Darla’s voice had gone flat.
“Hi, Darla!” Alex called out, then kissed a trail of little pecks from Josie’s ear to her shoulder. “How’s it going?”
“Josie’s crazy!” Darla shouted.
“Oh. Good. Everything’s normal,” he said, hands sliding up Josie’s front, finding her br**sts like they were made of iron and he had magnets in his palms.
“No, I mean crazy!” Darla insisted. “She wants me to get Trevor and Joe together with Mike and Dylan!”
“Quit screaming,” Josie said, distracted by what Alex was doing and by Darla’s shouts through the tinny phone speaker. “I’ll put you on speakerphone.”
Darla came through loud and clear as Alex spun Josie around for a deep, warm kiss. “Together! The four of them!”
“You’re setting the four guys up?” he murmured in Josie’s ear. “That’s…inventive. Good things come in fours?”
Josie hit his pec through the stained scrubs he wore. After a typical twenty-four-hour shift he showered and changed at work, but had come straight home this time. She looked at the clock. More like a thirty-three-hour shift.
“Why are you covered in—ah, God, is that blood? And you smell like rancid amniotic fluid.”
“How do you know what that smells like?”
“You two have the weirdest conversations,” Darla added.
Alex and Josie both stared at the smartphone. “Like you don’t?” Josie snapped. “You are the queen of weird discussions.”
Darla backed off, voice sheepish. “Fair enough. But c’mon—you know how hard it will be to get Joe and Trevor there? And what the hell will they talk about?”
“Double penetration positions?” Alex suggested. “Best sex practices for threesomes? How to make a schedule on Google Calendar to balance it all out? What to do when—”
“Stop!” Darla and Josie shouted at the same time.
“You just managed to offend both of us,” Josie said, laughing and trying to look stern as he lifted her shirt and kissed her belly. A flood of heat pooled between her legs and her fingers wove through his hair, then down his muscled back.
Except he smelled funny.
“Off to the showers with you!” she ordered, regretfully pushing him toward the bathroom. Her bathroom.
Um, their bathroom. Alex had moved in two days ago.
His lease had been up and his roommate was long gone on some fancy residency fellowship, again, leaving Alex with a tough choice of either finding a new roommate or getting a smaller, cheaper place.
She’d expected him to suggest moving in with her, but to her surprise, he hadn’t. As days had turned into weeks of watching him scour Craigslist and roommate sites, she’d finally caved in and asked.
This was an experiment. A testing period. It was not permanent.
At least, not for now.
He gave her a big, sloppy, sexy kiss and stripped his shirt off over his head, leaning forward as he peeled the v-neck scrubs over his neck and head, the ripple of muscled layers like soccer fans doing the wave. Only this was better.
“Earth to Josie? You there? Alex still there making pervy comments about my sex life?” Darla’s voice startled her.
“No,” she sighed, watching him untie his scrub pants and shake out of them, leaving him in boxer briefs that outlined every vein, every curve. Thumbs hooked into the waistband, he gave her a big, sultry wink like a stripper, and then he pulled them off, giving her a mouth-watering view.
“Is he doing sex things to you right now? On the phone? Because that’s just plain rude.”
“No, Darla, he’s not doing—‘sex things’? You have the vocabulary of a twelve-year-old boy.”
“It’s about all I need to have a conversation with you.”
The sparring normally would have made Josie laugh, but watching her boyfriend’s ass stride toward the bathroom to take a soapy, steamy shower rendered her quite speechless.
And intolerant of being on the phone.
“Do whatever you need to do to get Joe and Trevor to Jeddy’s.”
“You make it sound life or death.”
“No—but I think it’s worth a try.”
“Why is it so important to you?”
“Come here!” Alex shouted as the distinct sound of the water being turned on filled the walls. Josie scrambled to get out of her clothes while talking with Darla.
“It’s important because I see my niece and my best friend in really unique relationships and sometimes it’s nice not to be the only freak. If it turns out there’s another freak just like you, you’re not a freak anymore. You’re a tribe.”
“A tribe of two?”
“Oh, oops! I dropped the soap!” Alex called out from down the hall. “Josie, can you come pick up the soap for me in the shower?”
Darla giggled. “You two play games, too? Me and Joe and Trevor have this one game we call the ‘Tortured Romance’ game, where Joe is the Russian hit man who is ’sposed to kidnap me, and does, and then Trevor is the Special Ops dude who has to rescue me. But then the hit man and the Special Ops dude find—”
“I do not want to hear about your sex games!” Josie screeched. Her excited cl*t made a face of horror worthy of an Edvard Munch painting. Or worse, Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
“Like I wanna hear yours!” Darla huffed.
“Just—goodbye!” Josie stabbed her phone screen repeatedly with an angry finger and fell over as her foot caught in the hem of her pants. Might as well strip on the ground, she thought, and she made quick work of it, completely na**d in seconds, ass cold on the hard tile of her kitchen floor.