What the hell had he done?
* * *
“HOW MANY EGGS do you guys want?”
“Two.”
“Three.”
“Rosie,” Riley said with a long, exaggerated sigh, “what’s going on?”
Rosie Carrington glanced over her shoulder at Riley. He was a big man, so she cracked three eggs for him, same as Harris. “I’m just making breakfast, Riley. No big deal.”
“Yeah, right. Just making breakfast—at Ethan’s, dressed in his shirt, probably on the proverbial morning after.”
“You’re too smart to make assumptions, Riley.”
Harris and Buck looked at each other, then snorted. Oh, they’d made plenty of assumptions, all right. Not that she blamed them. It was a rather damning situation.
Riley paid them no mind. “Okay, so what are you doing here? Last I saw Ethan at the party, he was flirting with that sexy redhead and you were fuming mad at him for, as you put it, acting like an ass again.”
Rosie concentrated on not overcooking the eggs. Last night...well, she had been fuming mad. Come to that, she was still a little peeved. Most of the time Ethan was the best man around, easy to respect, easier to love. He was hardworking, levelheaded, conscientious. A firefighter with a moral code bone-deep. True, he’d become something of a hound dog, but a good-natured one nonetheless.
Yet whenever people brought up his ex-fiancée, he went from being a great guy to a shallow, chauvinistic jerk who grabbed the first available woman. Rosie assumed he did that to prove to everyone that he was over his fiancée, that he’d recovered. The opposite was true. It showed that he was still hurting—and that hurt her.
It had been over a year and a half, for crying out loud. She’d had enough. It was time to take matters into her own hands.
Rosie knew the men were uncomfortable to have found her here. If all went as she planned, they’d just have to get used to it. Besides, she was now decently covered—sort of—in a ratty old housecoat that she’d located in Ethan’s closet.
“You’re being evasive, Rosie.”
“Gee, Riley, I’m twenty-six years old. I thought that meant I didn’t have to answer to anyone for my personal life.”
Harris scratched his head, making his black hair more disheveled than ever. “You and Ethan have a personal life?”
She ignored him as she poked a fork at the pound of sizzling bacon in the cast-iron skillet. Four men, all of them big bruisers, needed a lot of food to maintain their energy levels. “You know, I’m amazed you guys planned to go fishing all day without breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day. You shouldn’t skip it.”
The men smirked at that ludicrous comment. As firefighters, Ethan and Harris kept in the peak of health. Their jobs allowed nothing less. Buck owned a lumberyard and physical labor was part of his daily work week. He had muscles on his muscles.
And Riley—Rosie peered at him again. Riley was an evidence technician for the police department. A former member of the SWAT team, he now owned a self-defense studio where he taught sparring, grappling, Jeet Kune Do and Silat knife fighting.
Next to Ethan, Riley was the most intriguing, appealing man she knew. He could break a person in two without effort. But more often than not, he was as gentle as a lamb—especially where women were concerned.
There wasn’t much call for a SWAT team in the small city of Chester, Ohio, thank God, but Riley had only lived here about five years. Before that, he’d evidently suffered some bad times, not that he ever spoke of it much. He tended to be a very quiet man.
Except for now, when he chose to badger Rosie.
“I think we’ll all survive fishing on an empty stomach.” Riley’s voice was dry, teasing.
“Now you won’t have to.”
Harris leaned forward, sniffing the eggs. “This’ll be better than the pork rinds Buck packed.”
Buck shoved him in the shoulder. “I’ll just eat them all myself then.”
“Hey.” Harris acted wounded by Buck’s selfishness. “You know I was just placating Rosie.”
After wrinkling her nose at the lot of them, Rosie began toasting bread. She had half a loaf out and hoped that’d be enough. Ethan wasn’t much on domesticity and therefore didn’t have an abundance of groceries. His apartment was a pigsty, his kitchen a disaster and his cabinets all but empty.
She glanced at the clock. She’d give the big coward two more minutes tops, then she’d drag him out of the shower whether he wanted to face them all or not. If he was still naked and wet—well, she wouldn’t cavil. In fact, the idea appealed to her.
Dragging him out proved unnecessary when not five seconds later Ethan appeared in the doorway. His mellow brown eyes were bloodshot, his blond hair still wet and only finger-combed, his feet bare. He’d pulled on clean jeans and a gray T-shirt, and to Rosie, he looked better than breakfast.
Her heart felt full to bursting. “You okay?”
He sent her a cautious sneer, hooked a chair, yanked it out from the table and dropped heavily into it. “I’ll live, if that’s what you mean.” His mean, red-eyed look moved around the room to encompass each of his friends. “I’m not going fishing today.”
“Of course not.”
“We understand.”
“You’re an ass, Ethan.”
That last was from Riley, of course. He seemed to love provoking Ethan. Rosie shook her head. They’d all known each other forever—with the exception of Riley who was late to the group, but had quickly become a good friend. They lived to give each other a hard time, so presumably, they were letting Ethan off the hook this time because of her. Since she and Ethan needed to talk, she didn’t object.
Without a word, she set a cup of strong black coffee in front of Ethan. He drank half of it, cursed when he burned his tongue, then glared at her. “You’re not my housekeeper or my cook.”
“With the way you live, you couldn’t pay me enough to be, either.”
Harris snickered. Buck held his breath.
Riley said, “You are a damn slob. When was the last time you cleaned?”
“What’s it to you, Mom?” He drank the rest of the coffee and Rosie silently refilled his cup. He muttered his grudging thanks.
Riley lounged back in his seat. Because his censure was so obvious, his silence was more annoying than chatter would have been.
Rosie served the men. When she started to take her own seat, Riley stood to pull out her chair. Ethan growled at him, and Riley growled back.
Men. They could be so unaccountably strange. “Dig in, fellas.”
The next few minutes were filled with sounds of appreciation as the men practically inhaled the enormous amount of food she’d set on the table.
In all the time she’d known Ethan, she’d seen him drunk twice—this being the second time.
It amazed her that Ethan could eat such a hardy meal after a hangover. Other than his bloodshot eyes and listlessness, you wouldn’t know he’d been so miserable just half an hour before.
Harris finished first. “Damn, that was good, Rosie.” He patted his flat stomach. “If I come back tonight, will you cook dinner, too?”
Ethan pierced her with a direct stare. Rosie smiled. “Sure, Harris. Come on by my house around six. I planned on making stew today.”
His brows shot up.