Instead of replying, Brian slid his attention over to Connor. “Skylar mentioned you might be here. Everything alright?”

“Never better.” Connor’s face was the picture of innocence. “Just checking in on Skylar’s guardian angel here, same as you.”

“Uh huh.” Brian nodded over at her kitchen. “Nice flowers. Who died?”

Abby drew out a forlorn sigh. “The perils of ordering flowers online. Small summer bouquet, my ass.”

Connor’s shoulders shook in silent laughter.

Brian rolled his eyes. “You suck at lying.” He turned on his brother. “What’d you do?”

“Nothing!” Abby broke in, cutting Connor off at the pass. “It was just a small misunderstanding. No biggie.”

Arms folded over his chest, Brian silently looked from her to Connor then back to her. “This misunderstanding wouldn’t have anything to do with you and me would it?”

Abby shot Brian her loudest shut the hell up glare, knowing that the power of telepathy she’d secretly wished for as a kid was still on back order.

“You did the big brother thing, didn’t you?” he sighed, shaking his head at Connor. “Did you grill her ‘til she broke?”

Connor pinned her with a dark look. “I tried. But Abby apparently keeps secrets extremely well.” Suspicion and something…weightier than distrust rolled off of him in waves.

Brian frowned. “Hey, ease up. I asked Abby to play along so you’d stop looking at me with such pity.”

Connor snapped his gaze back over to Brian. “What? I haven’t been doing that have I?”

“Yeah,” Brian said softly, “you have. Look, I get it—my wife died, I’m a single dad of a preteen daughter, and my last date before Beth was at a bowling alley when I was fifteen. If the shoe were on the other foot, I’d be a pain in your ass too. But it’s been a year; I’m doing fine. Better than fine. You’ve got to stop worrying so much about me.”

“Not happening,” grunted Connor. “It’s all a part of the sibling platinum package. And you have a lifetime membership.”

Brian grinned. “I wasn’t asking you to revoke my club card. Just…try to lay off the kid gloves around me, will you?”

Connor gave him another burly, noncommittal grumble that made Abby swoon just a tiny bit. If she were the type to keep a checklist for the dream-perfect guy, ‘being a protective brother’ would now be a top ten criteria. It was incredibly sexy.

And their manly bickering was just plain cute.

She smiled, half expecting a poignantly awkward bro hug at some point.

Unfortunately, she realized much too late to do any good that she wasn’t just smiling, she was staring. At Connor.

And he was staring right back.

A slow smile transformed his expression, right before he abruptly asked the inevitable, “So that means the two of you…”

“—aren’t really dating,” shrugged Brian.

“Interesting.”

Lordy, Abby had heard of a ‘wolfish grin’ before, but no one told her it’d make her panties catch on fire.

She quickly moved to usher both brothers out of her doorway. “Well, since that’s all settled, everyone can head on home and I can get back to that much-needed shower I never got to take.”

Great, there was that wolfish grin again.

You just had to bring up the shower didn’t you?

Connor was practically eating her up with his eyes. And she liked it. Far too much. So she chose to treat his heated stare like a solar eclipse and blindly push both men right off her porch back into the rain.

Eventually, they had no choice but to run back to their cars to avoid getting soaked.

And the very moment they were both out of sight, she rushed through her house to her bathroom, pulling her clothes off as she went.

Screw the shower, she needed a long, hot bath.

With some waterproof accessories.

She was stripped bare and just about done filling up the tub when her cell phone jangled from her bag in the bedroom.

Groaning, she hurried out to grab the phone, answering it on the way back into the bathroom without checking the caller id. “Hello?”

“That was a quick shower.”

Abby almost fell headfirst into the tub.

Luckily, she managed to hang on to her wits though. “You know, I’m really starting to hate your investigator.”

Connor chuckled. “Actually, Skylar gave me your cell phone number before I went to pick up the flowers. She figured I might need it in case you slammed the door in my face.”

“So blood really is thicker than milkshakes,” she grumbled as she stomped over to the tub to shut off the water before it overfilled. “What do you want, Connor?”

“Now there’s a loaded question.”

The sigh she aimed at herself bounced off the tiled walls in stereo. She’d walked right into that one.

There was a brief silence over the phone line and then a very curious, “Are you talking to me from the bathroom?”

Oh my, Miss Manners would have a conniption. “Yes. But to be clear, I’m not using the bathroom or anything.”

His quiet laughter was the stuff of bath-time fodder.

The deep sound went through her like whiskey as she perched on the tub edge and swished a lazy hand through the water.

She heard him suck in a soft breath. And every nerve in her body flared to life at the sound.

“You’re taking a bath.” His voice was a full octave lower, his tone almost reverent.

Startled, Abby looked around to check the walls for eyes. A pair of piercing blue eyes in particular…a distinctly sexy set that always looked deep in thought.

“No. Not yet, anyway.”

Another pause. “So what’s stopping you?”

“You.”

Was it possible to hear someone smile?

“So because of me, your water’s getting cold?”

“Exactly. Now if you’d hurry and tell me what you want, I could get back to my bath before it gets any colder.”

“Maybe what I want is to join you in the tub. What are the chances of that happening?”

“None to none at all.” Liar.

He made a disappointed sound, but didn’t give up that easily. “I promise I’ll behave. Unless…you’re going to do something in the bath that you’d need privacy for.” He put just enough goading in his tone to tick her off, but not enough for her to hang up on him. “Is that the case?”

Yes. And the jerk was being deliberately obtuse about it.

She maintained radio silence.

“Because if that is the case, I don’t have to behave. I could…misbehave.”

Her jaw locked at his audacity.

A firm believer that one should never negotiate with terrorists, she decided to instead fight fire with fire. “Since it doesn’t look like I’m getting rid of you anytime soon, I’m just going to go ahead and start…my bath.”

She grinned in triumph when a quiet groan came from his end.

Placing her phone on the counter, she dropped her towel and slid into the water. The slow, purring sound she let out wasn’t for his benefit.

But it seemed to affect him all the same.

“Am I on speaker?” The words were smoky, stilted.

“Mmm hmm.” Her eyelids drifted closed as she sank back against the tub, letting the hot water unravel the tension from this crazy day. “Connor, you have maybe a minute before I start dozing off so if you have something to say, you better say it now.”

“Have dinner with me.”

She bolted upright—to avoid taking in a gaping mouthful of bath water.

“Dinner? Why?”

“Because the next time you’re in that tub, I want to be there with you. And, well, I figure it’d be wise for us to eat beforehand.”

He was smiling again, she could hear it.

The guy had balls, she had to give him that. “What on earth makes you think I’d agree to take a bath with you?”

“Nothing but sheer hope.”

She resisted the urge to melt at that, reminding herself that this was a veteran player she was talking to here.

And she’d barely even cut it in little league.

“I don’t think dinner would be a good idea.”