Page 17 of The Sunday Brothers Novellas

CHAPTER TWO

THEO

I stood on my front porch in the unseasonable late-autumn cold and stared down at my new lawn ornament.

Some people decorated their grass with gnomes, or flamingos, or those garish inflatable Santas that belted out Christmas carols.

My mother, bless her Southern-transplant heart, was partial to twee blown-glass birds that her gardener arranged to peek out of her manicured flower beds.

But nothing so mundane would do for me! Oh, no, I’d just had to pursue a career in academia despite my father’s objections.

And now I had six-plus feet of partially frozen undergrad beefcake spread out like a welcome mat at the foot of my steps as a result.

At least he wasn’t singing “Jingle Bells.”

I sighed and picked my way down the steps to where Porter Sunday lay face-up and groaning on the crunchy grass. He’d managed to avoid landing in his own sick by mere inches. A few snowflakes were beginning to fall, landing and melting on his sweatshirt, his jeans, his thick, wavy hair.

I nudged him in the side with my bare toe. “Honestly, Sunday. Why are you here?”

He dropped the forearm he’d thrown over his head and blinked up at me, but his eyes—eyes I happened to know were a shade of green so deep and intense that the first time I’d seen them, last January, I’d assumed they were contacts—seemed to have trouble focusing on my face.

He frowned, and his full lips pursed in such a comically befuddled expression that I felt my own mouth twitch up in a smile before I ruthlessly suppressed it.

Porter Sunday was not adorable. He wasn’t.

He wrinkled his nose and garbled out something that sounded like, “Wanneda talktaya.”

I folded my arms over my chest and ignored the cold seeping into the soles of my feet. “Indeed? Then by all means, talk.”

“Well…” He watched a few white flakes tumble through the air as if perplexed by the concept of snow, then scowled at me.

“I forgot what I wanneda say now. S’your fault, lookin’ at me like that.

But it was fucking poetic ,” he assured me.

“ Frantic-mad poetic. An’ you were gonna feel bad . Like… super bad.”

I whistled through my teeth. “Judging by your current level of eloquence, I can only imagine. The mind boggles.” I shifted from foot to foot so as not to lose both extremities to frostbite.

“I am cold, and damp, and viciously annoyed, Mr. Sunday. I assure you, I have rarely felt worse. So, well done, you. You can leave anytime now.”

He sighed. “S’not fair, you know. Why you gotta be so…” He lifted one meaty arm, gestured at my body, and let it flop back to the dead grass. “… you ?”

“I could ask the same.” It was utterly ridiculous that this creature—this thoughtless, entitled, frat-bro man-child who’d invaded my peace to yell at me and hurled toxic sludge in my grass—should still manage to look so damn sweet and bewildered and make me feel like the villain of the piece.

“You should call your friends, Sunday. Get them to come back and get you. ”

“Can’t,” he mumbled. “Steve’s got a mother pig up.”

Only years spent listening to people butcher Beowulf enabled me to understand him. “If Steve has another pickup, order yourself a new Lyft.”

He gave an approximation of a nod. “Mkay. Will do. Jus needa minnit because… tequila. I have a bone to pick with fate .” He grinned wildly at the sky. “Bone,” he chortled like a twelve-year-old. Then he closed his eyes.

I snorted. “Was this the poetry you wanted to quote at me? Ogden Nash is rolling in his grave. Get up, Sunday.”

When the man didn’t respond, I nudged him with my toe once more. This time, he grunted and then emitted a soft, sleepy sound.

“Jesus Christ. Sunday?” I demanded, bending down to shake him and tap his cheek. He barely roused. “Sunday!”

My entire body was icing over from my feet up. I wanted desperately to be back inside my little cabin, in my nice, warm bed, curled up with my down duvet and the premium memory foam pillows I’d splurged on as an early birthday present, alone .

But I couldn’t very well leave the man lying out here in the cold.

I’d earned a bit of a reputation for being a hard-ass because I didn’t hand out easy A’s or tolerate students who tried to slack off in my classes, but I hadn’t achieved “leaving a student to suffer hypothermia so they’d learn natural consequences”-level heartlessness. At least not yet.

I growled impatiently and knelt by his head to grab him under the armpits and drag-carry him inside.

If I’d ever contemplated what it would be like to have Porter Sunday’s enormous, incredibly muscled body under my hands—and I definitely hadn’t, certainly not more than once, in the shower, with my dick in my grasp—it would not have involved me trying to haul his corporeal sack around while breathing through my mouth to keep the stench of vomit from causing a sympathy-puking event that would be difficult to recover from.

Fortunately, by the time I’d dragged him the few feet to the stairs, he’d woken up enough to turn over and crawl the rest of the way.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “So sorry. I didn’t mean…”

I push-pulled him to his feet and led him over to the kitchen area of the one-room cabin, where I propped him against the sink and grabbed some paper towels.

“Sunday, what in the world caused you to show up at my house at two in the morning?” I scrubbed at his nose, lips, and chin with the wet paper, and he lurched away as violently as if I’d been waterboarding him. “How did you even know where to find me?”

“Internet?” He groaned the word like a question, reaching for the tap so he could rinse out his mouth. “Dr. Hancock. Hannabury. Boom .”

Boom was right, I thought sourly. Porter had dropped into my quiet evening like a shrapnel bomb.

“If I let go, can you stand without me?” I demanded. “No puking on my floor, Sunday, and I mean it, or I will kick you out, and I won’t care if the fucking ‘autumn snowpocalypse’ the meteorologists have been salivating over will bury you until spring.”

With that dire warning, I left him just long enough to retrieve a spare toothbrush and toothpaste from the bathroom cabinet.

When I returned, he was bent over on the counter by the sink with his eyes closed, resting his face on his bent arms. I tried not to notice the muscular ass on display in his wash-worn jeans.

Eyes up here, Professor.

I blinked into the bright kitchen light to punish my eyeballs for straying. Only the creepiest of teachers got visible hard-ons for their students. Especially students they weren’t even sure they liked much on a personal level .

I cleared my throat and nudged his cheek with the toothbrush package.

“Here. Clean your teeth, and then I’ll drive you home myself.

” I retreated to the living area, trying to put as much physical distance between myself and that ass—I mean, that man —as I possibly could in a twenty-by-twenty-foot space.

After taking three scream-inducing minutes to get the brush unwrapped, another four to puzzle out how to apply toothpaste to it, and ten full minutes brushing every surface of his teeth at least twice, Porter finally turned to me.

“I’m done,” he said dully. “My head hurts. Can I have a glass of water? Please?”

Impatient as I was, I couldn’t say no when he tacked that polite little please on the end.

“Yeah. Of course. There’s a glass on that shelf,” I said, pointing. But then I recalled all the very good reasons I had to be annoyed and scowled as I added, “You have precisely one minute to hydrate while I get my parka out of the closet, then you can wait by the door.”

Unsurprisingly, Sunday ignored my firm command. He was not waiting by the door when I’d unearthed my heavy winter coat a few minutes later. Instead, he’d collapsed into my reading chair by the roaring fireplace and propped his big feet on my footstool, looking entirely too comfortable in my space.

I folded my arms over my chest. “Is now a convenient time for me to drive you home, Mr. Sunday?” I asked. “I’d hate to rush you.”

“You shouldn’t be nice,” my uninvited guest informed me. “It’s confusing.”

“I wasn’t being nice. I was being sarcastic?—”

He rolled his eyes tiredly. “I’m not talking about what you said.

I meant, like… bringing me inside. And lending me a toothbrush.

And giving me a ride home.” He squirmed, unable to meet my eyes.

“You were a grumpy, life-destroying je rk all last semester for no reason. Now, when you actually have a reason to be mean, you’re not . It’s weird. And wrong.”

I opened my mouth to inform him of all the ways he was wrong in that little diatribe—not to mention insulting and impertinent—but then I remembered that despite having the body of a fully grown person, Porter Sunday was still a Hannabury student.

A drunk student. Whereas I was not only a sober thirty-four-year-old, but I was a Hannabury professor.

One of us needed to show a little sense tonight, and it was clearly not going to be him.

Professional distance , I told myself. Do not engage.

As if in agreement with my thoughts, the wind picked up, pushing icy snowflakes against the window. It was an audible reminder that I had a limited window to get my interloper safely away from here before the situation got worse.

Which was why I was mystified to find myself propping my hands on my hips and smartly retorting, “Excuse me if I refuse to take criticism from a man who drives around hurling poetry at people in the middle of the night, without so much as a winter coat on him, when a fucking snowstorm is coming.”

So much for not engaging. I shut my eyes and blew out a breath.