Love On Her Terms. Jennifer Lohmann

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СКАЧАТЬ hard to ignore a woman who seemed to think every beverage should be drunk on her front porch.

      This evening, as she had for the past two weeks, she sat in the rocking chair with her feet up on the railing and a coffee cup in hand. The hems of her loose cotton shorts gapped. If he were at a different angle, he could follow the line of her skin down to her panties. She had nice legs. Not overly long, but shapely. He had no interest in women with thin legs.

      She set her cup down and stretched her hands over her head. Her shirt lifted, and a little line of skin appeared between the elastic waistband of her plaid shorts and the bottom of her T-shirt. It was the type of movement he imagined her doing first thing in the morning, as she swung her legs over the side of the bed and welcomed the day. Intimate. Personal.

      And he was staring out his window at her like a creep.

      Levi jerked at the hem of his shirt, as if the movement could do anything to erase the image of his young neighbor with hair mussed by a long day. Not that that particular mental image was so bad, but he also imagined his hand slipping under the back of her shirt, her skin warm and soft on his cool palm and a glimpse of her face as she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him.

      He reached up and closed the blinds.

      He had to pick up his niece for soccer practice. Since he’d taken over coaching her youth soccer team two years ago, watching those girls tear up the field, fight, celebrate, fail and succeed had become the highlight of his fall. Solstice, his niece, seemed to have grown another three inches over the summer and would be all limbs. Helping her figure out how to manage all the new length in her arms and legs was a challenge he looked forward to.

      * * *

      THE NEXT FRIDAY, Levi climbed into his truck and looked next door with resignation. If he didn’t want to watch his neighbor move about his life, he had to learn to ignore her better. That and keep his kitchen blinds closed. Actually, all the blinds on this side of the house. Today she had come home from work, disappeared only long enough to change into shorts and grab a glass of what looked like iced tea. Now the ice in her tea was melting as it sat in the sun on her front porch while she was elbow deep in soil, shoving mums into the dirt. When she leaned forward, she stretched like a cat, her back long and her ass high in the air.

      God, he definitely had to learn how not to watch her, because he didn’t want to shutter his entire house. He liked the sunlight coming in through the windows, especially the afternoon summer sun. The big, south-facing windows were one of the reasons he’d bought this house.

      He shoved the gearshift into Reverse, looked over his shoulder with barely a glance at his neighbor’s ass, backed out of the driveway and sped down the street.

      * * *

      “YOU’RE LATE,” DENNIS SAID, lifting up his eyebrow and his phone at the same time. Both pointed comments on the time.

      “Barely.” Levi slid into the booth and motioned to Mary for a beer. The two of them had been coming to O’Reilly’s and sitting in this booth every Friday night for three years. The first six months, she’d come over to ask what beer he wanted. He’d said “whatever” enough times that she brought over whatever she or Brian, the bar’s owner, felt like bringing to him. Sometimes he drank the entire beer and sometimes only a sip or two.

      A little adventure, in his otherwise boring life.

      A safer adventure than watching his neighbor.

      Dennis coughed, a bad one that collapsed his shoulders in on his ears and shook the table. The kind of cough that would have his sister rushing to her husband to see what was wrong and Dennis struggling to both catch his breath and shake off Brook.

      If he and Dennis were being honest with themselves, a surprise beer was probably the only adventure either of them needed, since the mine accident. And Dennis didn’t even seem to need that. He always got the same bottle of Bud Light with a Jameson chaser. Had for years. Since before Missoula. Since before everything.

      “You ain’t been late since the day you were born,” Dennis said, his bottle resting against his bottom lip. “And this ain’t a big city, so you can’t blame traffic.”

      “I’ve got a new neighbor.”

      Levi hadn’t meant the comment by way of explanation, but he could tell by how Dennis lifted his eyebrows that it was the way his brother-in-law took the information. “He park in your driveway?”

      “No. My neighbor’s not why I’m late,” he said, though he didn’t have a better explanation for his tardiness, because “No matter how close I am to my new neighbor, I want to take at least one step closer, so it took me a while to drive away” would sound pretty stupid.

      “Why’d you mention it, then?”

      She was on his mind. “I’m not used to having a neighbor. It’s distracting.”

      “So, not a sixty-year-old with a gut. You wouldn’t be distracted by that.”

      “Ha!” Levi rubbed his own stomach. It was still flat but, at the age of thirty-seven, he was starting to think more about carrots and less about French fries and beer. “We’ll both be lucky not to be that in twenty years.”

      “I’ll be lucky to be that in twenty years.” Dennis took a long pull on his beer, draining the bottle and signaling for another one. It was going to be one of those nights. Levi and the dishwasher would be hefting Dennis into the passenger seat of Levi’s truck, and sometime around noon tomorrow, Dennis would text him for a ride back to get his car because Brook refused. And Brook would be texting him about letting Dennis get that drunk, because not only did she still think it was her job to monitor Levi’s behavior, but she considered it Levi’s job to monitor Dennis’s behavior.

      His sister had gotten taller over the years, but inside she was still a bossy twelve-year-old playing Mom while their dad worked in the mines.

      But neither Levi nor Dennis would drive home drunk, so that was progress since their reckless younger years. At least they’d learned something.

      Proof that stupidity wasn’t guaranteed to kill you young.

      “So, you gonna introduce yourself to this distracting neighbor?” Dennis asked, his second bottle of beer already half-gone. At least the whiskey was untouched.

      “What for? To get roped into helping her with home renovations?” Levi shrugged. “That house needs a lot of work, and I’m already too busy as it is.”

      “So, she’s cute.”

      “She’s a child,” he said, yanking his mind away from her legs and her nose and her ass and everything else about her he’d tried not to admire over the past couple of weeks.

      “She bought a house, so I’m guessing she’s at least twenty-five. Hmm. Might be more than cute—hot, even.”

      Levi shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t have time. Or interest. I’ve been married already. You should know. You were my best man.”

      Dennis shrugged. “Only ’cause no one else would do it.”

      A couple of beers between them helped them both laugh at the joke. At the time of Levi’s actual wedding, Dennis—and everyone else—had been dead set against it. Kimmie had been СКАЧАТЬ