I swiveled in my chair to see what the hell he was talking about and then stopped short when I saw Colin in my armchair.He was leaning back, looking at the shelf next to him with the small collection of books I kept there. I wasn’t much of a reader, but when there was something I loved, I could go back to it repeatedly. I was overdue to find something new to add to the repeatedly read books.
Colin blinked at him. “What? Am I supposed to stand while you babble away?”
“Ass,” Carter said, but he was grinning. Clearly, whatever issue they’d had was behind them. Which was good; if Colin was going to step up to be the man in charge occasionally, then it was probably best that he was on good terms with the guys. “Godspeed!”
I wasn’t going to bother getting pissed that Carter was being so flippant about my attitude. Half the time these idiots acted terrified of me; the other half I swore they would poke a sleeping bear for the sheer fun of hearing it roar.
“What the fuck are you doing in my chair?” I growled at Colin as Carter stepped out into the night.
“Sitting,” he said, and I narrowed my eyes when he leaned all the way back and spread his legs, making himself comfortable.
“I can see that. Why are you doing it inmychair?” I asked, turning toward him.
He shrugged. “What, should I not be comfortable while I wait?”
“That’s my chair.”
“Mmm, you’ve stated that.”
“Get out.”
“Sorry, should I sit somewhere else?”
He spoke quietly, but there was no denying the shift in his tone, a shift that irritated me, but I felt a familiar warm tingle in my groin. “Don’t start.”
Colin raised an eyebrow. “Really? You’re gonna call me in here, then play hard to get?”
“Hard to get,” I muttered. “I never said anything about…that. You did.”
“Actually, I said, since you don’t call people in here much, if you did call me, I would know what that meant,” he said, cocking his head. “And then you called me in.”
“I called Carter in here, didn’t I?” I pointed out gruffly. “You didn’t see him acting like?—”
“Like…what?”
“You know what.”
“You’re a grown man; you can say it.”
“Trying to act seductive.”
“I’m not sure he could be seductive,” Colin said in amusement. “I’m also choosing not to take offense at your insinuation that I’m ‘trying’ to seduce you rather than having proven I’m quite good at it.”
It was honestly impossible to tell which of us was more stubborn, which, as usual, was irritating. It didn’t help that he was making a decent point. I had known what I was doing when I invited him, just as I’d known that he would know why. I was pussyfooting around the reason, and he was right to call me out on it. I wasn’t known for being indecisive when I’d made up my mind, so it was frustrating to see I was being just that.
“And I don’t think you can use Carter as your excuse,” he said as I watched him pull his boots off and set them aside. “If I were to guess, you invited him or Mav here to give their report because then you could invite me without too much attention.”
“That so?” I asked, Christ, the only thing worse than his stupidity was his intelligence and perception.
“I think so,” he said, pulling off his jacket and draping it over the arm of the chair, leaving him looking right at home. In fact, he looked like he belonged right where he was, and the thought confused and annoyed me. “I mean, it already made everyone curious, but hey, since you invited multiple people, it was a littlething. Now, if it had been just me? That might have raised some eyebrows. Am I close?”
I was caught. “You’re an idiot.”
“On occasion,” he accepted gracefully, reaching into his jacket and pulling out a stack of condoms and a small bottle of lube. “Some would say what we have in mind for the night is idiotic, and yet here we are.”
“I still didn’t agree to anything,” I pointed out.
“You’re still not cute enough to pull off hard to get.”