Just for Fun (13 page)

“Not just eating,” he said. “I need you to be a regular girl for awhile. I think
you
need to be a regular girl for awhile.”

He stopped in front of a building with neon signs in the window and big heavy red double door. But it wasn’t a bar.

“Bowling?” she asked looking up at the flashing yellow arrow that read
Bud’s Bowl
.

He was grinning when she looked at him. “You ever been bowling?”

“Sure. At a birthday party in third grade.”

“Well,
this
is regular. Let’s go.” He pulled the door open and nudged her inside.

It was a typical bowling alley. To her right was an arcade, to the left a snack bar. In front of the counter where they offered hot dogs, pizza, nachos and drinks was the counter where they rented shoes, and in front of that were the racks of balls of all sizes and colors.

“Why here?” she asked just as she heard, “Dooley! Over here, man!”

It was the guys from the hotel. Well, that answered that.

Dooley waved at them then turned to her. “You’re gonna have to lose the heels.”

To exchange them for red, white and blue bowling shoes.

“I’ll just watch.”

He looked at her for a few seconds. “We’ll just hang out for awhile.”

She glanced over at the other guys where they were high-fiving, calling out good-natured insults and laughing. She sighed. “Okay.”

Before heading for the guys, Doug stopped at the snack bar and ordered a super nacho and two sodas. He took the tray to the tall round table just behind the Britton guys’ lane and helped her up onto the high stool.

“You bowling, Dooley?” one of the guys called.

“Maybe next game.”

He faced Morgan again and picked up a chip. Then he stopped and stared at her.

She sat up quickly and wiped her mouth. “What?”

“Were you just singing?”

Oh. “Maybe.”

“This is Lady Gaga.”

“So?”

“You know all the words to ‘Poker Face’?”

She frowned. “I’ve got a radio.”

He chuckled. “I’m glad to hear it.”

She picked a chip from the plate and licked the cheese from the edge, thinking about how it seemed Doug had some preconceived notions about her too. And how it shouldn’t matter.

They weren’t dating. They weren’t going to date. She was working on getting a job that was going to take her to California. He had a life in Omaha. They barely knew one another. She didn’t care what he thought of her.

Except she did.

She loved finding out more about him. She was fascinated he’d been in the Guard and wanted to know more about what it was like to be a paramedic. She wanted to know what his friends were like and what his girlfriends were like. Probably that last one more than she should.

She started to ask him but found him watching her. “What?”

“Um.” His gaze dropped to her mouth. “I’ve never gotten hard while eating nachos before.”

She looked at her chip, then back to him. Then she slowly licked at the cheese again. His quick intake of air made her smile. It was fun to affect him too. “This makes you hard?” she asked. She dipped a fingertip in the cheese on the plate and put it on her lower lip, then slowly licked it off. Then she picked up an olive and sucked it clean of cheese before pulling it into her mouth.

“You’re killing me,” he groaned.

“This was your idea,” she reminded him. Not that she was complaining.

“Just eat, for God’s sake,” he said, pulling his eyes from her. “You’re gonna need your strength.”

Grinning, she crunched on the chip. Then she sipped soda for the first time in over a year. She closed her eyes and sighed. God, she loved sugar and fat.

“What are you doing now?” Doug almost sounded annoyed.

“Drinking non-diet soda.”

“Do you have to make it pornographic?” He shifted on his seat.

She stared at him. “My drinking sounds pornographic?”

“You moaned,” he said.

“I did?”

“Yes. And it makes me want to make you moan a lot more…and louder.”

She smiled. “Feel free.”

He shook his head and ate three chips at once. “We’re relaxing.”

She looked around the bowling alley. No one here was trying to impress anyone else. No one here cared that the paint on the walls clashed horribly with the flooring. They were still having fun even though there wasn’t a thing on the menu that cost more than five dollars and there was a strange smell in the air.

She leaned an elbow on the table and asked. “So what’s a regular girl?”

He grinned as if he’d been expecting the question and leaned back. “A girl like I regularly date.”

Oh, she wanted to know about this. She wanted to know what girls attracted Doug Miller. Obviously he was physically attracted to her, but she wanted to know what he
liked
, what he looked for in women he spent time with, not just the ones he took to bed.

She tried to get more comfortable on her stool. It was completely silly that she didn’t like thinking about him taking other women to bed. Of course he did. He certainly didn’t act like a guy who was unfamiliar with the whole seduction and sex thing. He’d go right back to it after they got back to Omaha. It was completely stupid that that bugged her too.

She still couldn’t stop herself from saying, “What kind of girl do you usually date?”

He lifted a shoulder. “A girl who has simple tastes, who just wants to have a good time. No bells and whistles.”

“Bells and whistles?”

He tipped his head to one side. “You know what I mean. I don’t usually wear jackets to dinner, and dinner usually has one course and includes French fries. I date women who spend like twenty bucks on earrings, buy their sheets at Target and who have better bowling averages than I do.”

Ah. She understood. Too well. He was warning her off. The girls he usually dated were nearly opposite of Morgan.

“So you only hang out with regular girls?”

“No. I said I only
date
regular girls. I hang out with…well, yeah, mostly I hang out with regular girls too. Jessica and Danika are regular girls. But Sara’s not. She’s a princess. Though she tries. Since she’s married Mac she’s a little more regular. But she doesn’t bowl worth a crap. Too worried about her nails.”

Morgan huffed out a frustrated breath. He had a definite look of affection on his face when he talked about these women. She’d already heard about Sara. The one with the romance books with the word clit in them. Great.

“Wow, you have a whole harem of regular women,” she said, tossing a jalapeño pepper off her chip.

“Oh, they’re not mine. Not like that. They’re friends. Married to my best friends. But they are the best women I know.”

Oh, really? “What makes them the best?”

He seemed to think about that. “They’re beautiful, sexy, funny, intelligent.”

“They sound downright perfect,” she said with a frown. It also sounded like Doug had a few crushes.

He chuckled. “Nah. Jessica’s too bossy. She’s a nurse, super practical, willing to get bloody and dirty if needed. But she likes to be in charge. She’s more like an older sister.”

“What about Sara?” He’d already said she was married but Doug clearly had a soft spot for her.

“Sara’s like a little sister to all of us. Except Mac, obviously.” He laughed. “She’s a lot of work. But she has a heart of gold.”

How wonderful. Morgan picked a chip loaded with cheese, beans and salsa and took a huge bite.

“Then there’s Dani. She’s probably the closest to my type.”

Even better. Morgan took another chip. It was one thing to hear about what he liked in women. It was another to have specific examples. That he spent a lot of time with.

“She’s not too girly, likes to fix things, is more comfortable in T-shirts and jeans than anything. She’s low maintenance for sure.”

Right. There was the hint again, which wasn’t very damned subtle, that
she
was not any of those things.

“But you do the not-regular thing well,” she said. “You were a natural tonight at dinner with Jonathan.”

“I
can
do it,” he agreed. “I just prefer not to. I like things simple. Real.”

And her life, her world, wasn’t real. At least not to him. He
could
fit into it, but he didn’t want to. Got it.

“You date a lot?” she asked.

“Enough.”

“Lots of regular girls in Omaha?”

The corner of his mouth curled. “Enough.”

“How come you haven’t married one of these real regular girls?” she asked, breaking a chip into little pieces.

His eyebrows shot up. “Marriage isn’t in the plans. I date girls who know that, who feel the same way. I don’t date anyone exclusively, or too many times, for that matter. Things get complicated if you get to know a girl too well and vice versa.”

“But you do have sex with them?”

“Of course.”

She rolled her eyes, irritated by the conversation. Which made no sense. “You just keep things at sex and a few laughs and that’s it?”

“Right.” He said it more emphatically than was needed.

Okay, already. She got it. Hell, it was what they were doing—casual, sex, fun, period. He didn’t have to act like she was getting too close for comfort. This was more or less a business arrangement. Even
more
straightforward than the relationships he apparently had all the time.

“So,” she said, selecting another chip. “You worried about some performance anxiety or something?”

He set his glass down hard. “What?”

“You need to dress me down and take me bowling before we go to bed because that’s what you’re used to? You can’t perform under different circumstances?”

He narrowed his eyes. “You think I need to see you with your hair down and eating nachos before I can get it up?” He laughed. “Uh, no.”

“Then what is this? This wanting me to be a regular girl?”

“Regular girls have more fun. They’re not uptight. They don’t have big business deals nagging at the back of their minds keeping them from focusing on me. They don’t have fancy lingerie so they don’t care if I rip it getting it off of them. They don’t worry about what other people think so they don’t hold back on orgasms the neighbors can hear.”

She swallowed hard. Having Doug rip her panties off sounded damned appealing. Even if they were expensive. “Is this wisdom based on experience with regular girls or…not-regular ones?”

Morgan could admit business was never far from her mind. But she wasn’t sure she held back on the orgasms exactly. It was more… Oh hell, she didn’t know. Maybe she did hold back. She had orgasms but she didn’t lose her mind.

“I’ve been with enough of both to have formed an educated opinion,” he said.

Of course he had. Why did she keep bringing this subject up?

“Meaning you’ve pegged me as high maintenance and too much work?”

“Pretty much,” he admitted. “Life’s short. Best to spend it doing things I love. I’m not going to wait an hour for a woman to fix her hair to go to the grocery store or paint her nails or try on a hundred dresses. The best look for any woman is a rumpled old T-shirt, no panties and her hair in a ponytail.”

He was talking about all the reasons he didn’t think he’d like being with her and yet she couldn’t help her smile. “You’ve put some real thought into this.”

He nodded and shoved a chip into his mouth.

“What are some of these things you love that you want to spend your time doing?”

They were wrong for each other and that was wonderful. This was a weekend thing and the more reasons they had to cheerfully part ways at the end of it, the better.

“Being with people I care about and who care about me. Working a job I love and I’m good at. Sports, camping, being my nieces’ favorite uncle.”

“You have nieces?” She wasn’t sure why that surprised her.

“Yep, three of them. One of my sisters has two girls and the other has one.”

“What makes you their favorite?”

He gave her a grin that made her stomach flip. “I like to play. I’ll get on the floor, get loud and messy and silly with them.”

She had no trouble believing that. But all at once his childish tendencies were a lot more attractive. Plus, she knew now that he could turn it off. At least for long enough to eat dinner with her boss. He was interesting. And very, very hot.

“I’ll admit I’m a little concerned about the ripped lingerie,” she said casually, sipping from her straw.

He blinked as they changed topics. “Oh?”

“These were expensive.”

“You can buy more.”

She smiled. No promises of being careful or gentlemanly. “I have another idea.”

“I’m open to suggestions as long as they come off.”

She glanced around. Everyone in Bud’s Bowl was otherwise engaged. Most had their backs to them anyway as they concentrated on the alleys.

Through her dress she felt the strip of her panties where they crossed her hip. The dress’s material was thin and she was able to roll the edges of her panties down by sliding her palms over her hips through the dress. She had to lift her butt off the seat of the stool and wiggle but she was able to work the tiny bikini panties to mid-thigh. Then she crossed one leg over the other, grabbed the edge of the panties and pulled them to her ankles where she kicked them free.

Then she handed them to Doug. “Now there’s no worry about ripping anything when we get back to the room.”

Doug stared at the silky scrap in his hand. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

“Maybe regular girls don’t do stuff like that,” she said with a lift of her shoulder. She picked up her soda again. They wouldn’t work out long term, but she was going to show him other girls could be fun too.

“I have to say, I’ve never had a woman hand me her underwear in a bowling alley before,” he admitted.

“Stick around. I might surprise you again.” She slid off her stool and headed for the Britton guys. She just didn’t want to talk to him any more right now. She wasn’t his type. Fine. Outside of this weekend he wouldn’t want to hang out with her. Fine. Jessica, Sara and Dani were his favorite women. Fine.

But they were stuck with each other for the next two days and she still needed him. Todd was here and it was messing with her mind. She wasn’t attracted like she had been before, but there was still a little…something there. Or maybe it was just a good excuse to keep Doug close. Either way it just seemed safer to stick with Doug—while
not
talking about how not his type she was.