Her hand rose to her own hair. There was really no question who he’d spent half the night fucking.
“Better than the picture,” Allie whispered.
Ben came right up behind May and shook Allie’s hand. He seemed not to mind about the dog, which was good, because Allie almost always had a dog somewhere on or around her person.
“I thought you might be gone by now,” Allie said. “I’m glad you’re not. I wanted to meet you.”
Ben flattened his hand against the doorjamb, his chest pressing into May’s back. “Here I am.”
A car approached slowly, and May noticed the blinker before it fully registered that she recognized the car. “No,” she said. “Oh fuck, no.”
“I told you, I tried to stop her,” Allie repeated. “I told her not to come. But she just kept saying, ‘Why isn’t May over here yet? I need her help with the macaroni salad.’ Then I said I would come and see on my way to the grocery store, but she was all—”
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“I tried! That’s why I’m here! It took you forever to come to the door.”
May whirled around and ran into Ben’s chest. She made a strangled sort of aaaah noise and tried not to notice that even in the midst of panic, she sort of wanted to bite him. In the sexy way.
“Your mother, I presume?”
“Get dressed, okay? This is going to be …”
What?
She actually had no idea. But it would definitely go better if Ben had a shirt on.
“Interesting,” Allie said, pushing past them both into the house and dropping the little dog onto the carpet. She whipped the throw blanket off the back of May’s couch and arranged it in a long, rumpled pile on the cushions. “Get a pillow from the bedroom,” she said to May. “Now.”
As May rushed from the room, the dog began to bark, and she heard Allie repeat, “This is going to be so interesting.”
“Why?” May called. “What did you do?”
Because Allie’s “interesting” was, so often, May’s doom.
“You know how you said I had to think of something to tell Mom?”
“I didn’t say that.” May took a pillow from the bed into the hallway and yanked the door closed behind her. The dog darted between her ankles, nearly tripping her.
“More or less, you did,” Allie said. “You didn’t want me to tell Mom you were staying with some guy you picked up at a bar.”
“Not in exactly those words, no, but—”
“So I told her that you were staying with Dan’s agent’s PA.”
“Andy doesn’t have a personal assistant.”
“Yeah, but Mom doesn’t know that.”
The doorbell rang, and the little dog went absolutely apeshit, yipping crazily and jumping three feet off the floor, over and over again.
“He hates doorbells,” Allie said. She scooped up the dog, making shushing sounds, and May looked at Ben.
He scratched his chest, on which no shirt had yet materialized. Chest hair. God, Mom was going to see Ben’s chest hair. It wasn’t right. His eyebrows were all worried.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
“Lie to your mom?”
“Um, yes. Any of it. I mean, if you want to take off, I guess—”
Allie interrupted her. “Do you have dog treats?”
“I think you left some. They’d be in the cabinet.”
“Good. He can’t take off. It’s too late. He can take off later. Right now, he’s a PA. Right?”
“So that’s a secretary? I’m a sports agent’s secretary?”
On a scale of one to ten, with three being his normal level of jadedness and ten being a full-scale Ben meltdown, he sounded like he was around a five. Maybe a six.
“Apparently.” May wanted to groan. Or die. “Please?”
Allie had a mad glint in her eyes. Ben had chevron eyebrows. He was going to get all yell-ish again, and then she’d have to explain, and—
He nodded decisively at Allie. “Okay. If that’s what May needs me to be, that’s what I am.”
“I like him already,” Allie said.
“This wasn’t my idea,” May clarified.
The doorbell rang again, and she wove past her sister, bracing herself for disaster.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Ben had never seen a mother and daughter as alike as Allie and Nancy Fredericks. They were both tiny, with brown hair and bright blue eyes. They both talked with their hands and tilted their heads like birds, moving with an abrupt, hopping intensity.
They both wore dark green, May’s mother in a Packers sweatshirt, her sister in a jersey like May’s, but tailored to fit and worn over jeans with a brown leather belt.