Dirty Rumor: A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance(34)

I get out of the bed as carefully as I can and stand perfectly still, waiting to see if she’ll stir.

She doesn’t, and I take the opportunity to put my boxers back on. Doing this naked seems ridiculous.

For cover, I grab my own phone. I can always pretend to be making a call.

Then I go out to the living room, where she keeps her laptop.

I hesitate before I open the cover. This is f*cking wrong. Maybe the Ace Kingsley of the past who didn’t give a shit about what women thought might not have any qualms about this, but I do.

I open the cover of the laptop anyway.

It’s password-protected, the empty box hovering next to a stylized image of a blue flower.

My muscles go weak.

I have no idea what the password is, but now I’m halfway off the hook.

The second thing I want to see: her phone.

She had it in her hand when I came in. What did she do with it?

Yes—she shoved it into her purse. I can’t remember when.

I slide it out of the bag with trembling hands. Unlike the computer, it has no password.

I scroll through recent messages, not clicking on any of them—somehow that crosses the line to me—and none of them seem to mention my name. I’m just going to look at recent calls.

There are several going to a contact marked as her boutique, but several that aren’t…and I recognize the numbers as international ones. From Italy.

My heart starts to pound.

What the hell is she up to?

There’s a stirring from the bedroom, and I swipe open the camera on my phone, take a picture of the call list, and dump the phone back into her purse.

Jesus Christ.

Then I go quickly to the couch and drop into it, pretending to thumb through my phone.

It’s not thirty seconds later that Carolyn appears in the bedroom doorway, hair a mess, face still pink from sleep. My heart tears in two.





Chapter 31

Carolyn





I reach for Ace, the gentle afternoon light filtering in through my eyelids, but he’s not there. I still feel half-drunk on the hot f*ck that just happened—there’s no other way to describe it—but the cool, empty sheets put a damper on the warm buzz that I felt when I woke up.

Where is he?

I push myself up onto my elbows and peer over the foot of the bed. I can see one of the sleeves of his shirt from here, which means he hasn’t gone home, unless he left in a hurry and didn’t think about clothing.

Damn, he’s good.

I run a hand through my hair. I can feel how messed up it is, but I doubt he’ll care.

I just want him to get back in bed with me.

My heart picks up the pace a little, but I dismiss the tingling in my fingers. Why should I be nervous about the phone call I made just before Ace showed up? If he had a problem with it, he’d have said something. There’s no way he would have come in and pressed me up against the wall if he suspected that I’d just hired a private investigator in Italy seconds before he knocked on the door.

There’s just no way.

Right?

My shoulders start to tense up, but the memory of Ace’s hands on my back, on my ass, on the rest of my body, sends a flood of calm through me. It ends with a spark of need. I want more of him, and I want more of him right now.

But first I swing my legs over the side of the bed and move to the bathroom, where I take a few seconds to brush my teeth and corral my hair into something slightly more presentable. My face is pink from being pressed against the pillow.

There’s no sound from my bedroom, so I go to the doorway.

Ace is on the couch in the living room, looking down at his phone.

“Hey,” I say, and my voice is low, still fighting off the deep sleep.

He looks at me, and his eyes narrow for a split second, and then go wide. I’m still naked, and he can’t stop his gaze from traveling down the length of my body.

“Hey,” he says into the silence. His eyes are bright with what looks like lust, but there’s something else happening in his expression that I can’t quite place.

“Are you okay?” He looks more than fine to me, with all of his muscles on display, but I can’t help myself.

“Yeah,” he says, glancing back down at his phone before he turns off the screen. “Yeah, just checking in on some business stuff.”

Something doesn’t ring true about what he’s saying, and I open my mouth to say so, but then close it again.

Who am I to accuse him of lying? I’m the one who’s looking into his past instead of asking him directly.

Of course, I’ve tried that, but he didn’t have anything to say.

I go back into the bedroom and get a pink silk robe from its place on my bathroom door, tying it around my waist on the way back out to the couch. Then I take the place next to Ace, leaning down so that my head is in his lap.

His hand goes to my hair, running his fingers through it, though his eyes don’t meet mine. There’s a little wrinkle in his forehead that tells me something is on his mind, but I doubt pressing him is going to get me anywhere.

I close my eyes and lose myself in his touch.

“You’re gorgeous,” he says softly.

“You’re gorgeous.” It’s the absolute truth. He is the most gorgeous man I have ever seen in my life, and just being close to him sends a knife-like twist of guilt through my gut.