Along Came Trouble(57)

“I don’t want you here in the morning when Henry wakes up. It would confuse him.”

“So I won’t sleep over when Henry’s home, but I can sleep over on the weekends.”

“No.”

“You mean ‘yes,’ right? Because we’re negotiating, and that means you’re supposed to make some compromises. Plus, you don’t have a leg to stand on here.”

She sighed. This discussion was absurd, but as much as she’d like to pretend it wasn’t happening, it was. She’d have to bend on something if she wanted to come to an agreement with him. She had to come to an agreement with him if she ever wanted to have sex with him again. She had to have sex with him again, or she’d curl up in a ball and die.

“Fine. Yes. You can sleep over on the weekends, theoretically. You’re not sleeping over tonight, though.”

“Excellent. See, we can do this.” He grinned, and she looked around for something to throw at his head. Nothing available but her naked body. She’d save that for a later stage of the negotiations.

All business again, Caleb carried on. “Next point. I want getting-to-know-you conversations. You don’t. I’ll stipulate you can ask me any question you like, at any time, and I’ll answer it.”

“I don’t want to ask you questions.” She really didn’t. Much. She refused to be curious about Caleb. She didn’t want to hear all his stories, including the story of that scar on his hip that looked like it must have been horrifically painful to acquire. She didn’t wonder what he did to stay in such amazing physical shape or how he’d gotten to be so good with kids. Where he lived, house or apartment. She bet he had a house. He seemed like a house kind of guy. How he’d decorated it. If he’d ever been married. What his bed looked like.

Shit.

“Asking me questions is your prerogative,” he said. “But you have to give me a chance here. How about you let me ask you personal questions, but you only have to answer two out of three?”

“That’s ridiculous. I’m not a game show.”

“Or you let me ask them for half an hour a day, but that’s all?”

She crossed her arms. “No.”

“I can ask questions in the bedroom, but no other place?”

“No.”

“Really? I thought that was a good offer. Huh. Give me a second to think.”

She was already wavering. What was the harm in letting him ask a few personal questions? She wasn’t such a secretive person, after all. She’d told Carly her life story over a bottle of wine soon after they met.

“You can have one a day,” she offered.

“One per orgasm.”

“Yours or mine?”

“I was thinking yours.”

“You think I’m going to have more than one orgasm a day, on average?” What a heady notion. Three climax-free years followed by a veritable monsoon season.

“You’ve had three since I showed up with the pizza.”

Fair point. Three orgasms, three questions?

It would be worth it for the orgasms.

“One question per orgasm, but you can’t save them up.”

“The orgasms?”

“The questions. If you don’t ask your question within five minutes, your time expires.”

He stroked his chin, producing a delicious, piratey rasping noise. “I want longer than that. If you only give me five minutes, it’ll ruin the afterglow. I’ll have to lie there thinking about questions when all I want to think about is how you just blew my mind.”

She rolled her eyes. What sort of man talked about the afterglow and fought fiercely for sleepover rights? She’d question his masculinity, except . . . yeah. No. He could probably make her come from forty paces, just by saying her name the right way.

“You can have twenty minutes.”

“Two hours.”

“Half an hour.”

“Ninety minutes.”

“An hour.”

“Okay, an hour,” he said. “You want some pizza?”

“Yes.”

He left the room and returned with a box. They carried on, eating cold pizza while they argued. He’d said it would be easy, but he’d lied. It took them another forty minutes to hammer out the contract, and Caleb was absolutely ruthless. She never wanted to meet the man across a conference table. He pushed and pushed to get what he wanted, and when that didn’t work he tried to charm her into changing her mind, and if that failed he did his level best to outsmart her. She’d never come up against such a worthy opponent in her life. He put her University of Chicago classmates to shame.