Read Love, Tussles, and Takedowns for Free Online

concerned, his ‘tower’ had felt unbelievably sexy. She was definitely a fan.
    “Not helping, Lia.”
    Dammit, who took control of her eyes and sent them drifting down south?
    All the female atoms in her body boldly raised their hands in reverence.
    She shot her gaze back up to his face.
    It occurred to her then that he was avoiding looking at her.
    Maybe he was embarrassed. Not about this but rather, the whole head-kicking thing. Most guys didn’t like it when she beat down on them. Funny, but she hadn’t pictured Hudson with that sort of ego. “Look, Hudson—” she began and took a step toward him.
    After which, he promptly slid a step away from her. Eyes still averted. With a hand holding the ice pack to his head and the other balled in a fist and shoved down his front pocket, Hudson’s voice graveled even more as he said, with what sounded like instant-jello-quick-dissolving patience, “Lia. Could you maybe put on a pair of shorts. A sheet. Something?”
    What was he talking about?
    She looked down and gasped.
    Grabbing an oven mitt, which was barely helpful, she tried her best to hide the evidence that she liked wearing low-rise boyshort panties and sprinted back to her bedroom to look for the jeans she’d probably shucked off sometime during the night. It wasn’t an uncommon thing. But it was extremely uncommon for someone to actually notice that she did it, seeing as how she hadn’t had a guy greet her right out of bed since her husband.
    And even he’d barely seen as much as Hudson had.
    She dismissed the irony of that thought to her mental bank of things she’d write in her can’t-make-this-stuff-up memoir one day.
    Finding a wayward pair of flannel shorts under her bed, she yanked them on and went back out to the kitchen, only to find Hudson had plopped himself onto the couch.
    Good Lord. Why did he have to go and sprawl out like that? Lia thought, averting her eyes upward as if in silent prayer. Hudson’s current seating posture just made her imagine him pinned under her, spread eagle with her legs wrapped around his in a ‘Saturday Night’ wrestling move—so appropriately named. She exhaled a hot breath.
    That’s when she realized he hadn’t had a pillow or anything to make his night comfortable. He’d stayed on her old couch while she’d been fifteen feet away. Bottomless.
    Well, hell. That whole melting at the knees thing from the movies was apparently a real thing. Tamping down the girly swoon factor she felt for the first time ever, Lia sat down beside him and checked the growing bruise on his face.
    Ouch.
    Bad night for her to have worn an anklet. She refrained from telling him that his bruising had rather, um, pretty decorative qualities. There’s no way she’d be able to pull that off without cracking a very ill-timed smile.
    “Hudson, I’m really sorry.”
    “Don’t be.” He gave her a lopsided grin that looked more self-deprecating than anything else.
    There it was. That lack of an ego she was certain she’d seen in him even. Another turn-on.
    “It was my fault for surprising you in the dark, sweetheart. I knew better.”
    That’s when she remembered what he’d said earlier about his coming over in self-defense. She must have heard him wrong, right? Feeling her cheeks flush bright red, she decided to ask straight out, curiosity never really being one of the things she could keep bottled up and all. “You mentioned you were trying to stop me from doing something earlier?” A passive question.
    ...That got one hell of a fired response from him if the darkening of his stormy gray eyes had anything to say about it.
    “I wasn’t trying to stop you per se. More asking for mercy. At least until I was out of earshot.”
    She blushed even brighter. “Hudson, I have no clue what you’re talking about. I don’t have…one of those.” Only because she’d never built up the nerve to buy one. Not even online. She could just imagine that plain brown box with the smiling arrow