Lovely Trigger (Tristan & Danika #3)(48)

I chewed my lip, not wanting to tell him.  It was embarrassing, but oh well.  “It’s the neighbor’s cat.  I just let it hang out here when I’m around.”

He set Ginger down, laughing so hard that he stayed doubled over.  “Oh my God!  You stole your neighbor’s cat?”

I was defensive.  “Borrowed.  And she has, like, thirty cats.  I doubt she even misses her.  I travel too much to get any of my own pets.”

He just kept laughing.

After a while, I was laughing with him.  Even I could see that it was funny as hell, and that was with the joke at my expense.

“See, this is why it’s handy to have a man,” he finally said, moving to sprawl out in the chair behind my desk.  He looked ridiculous in it, it was so small, and he was the opposite.  In fact, the whole room suddenly looked as small as a closet, with his larger than life presence dominating it.

“I’m not following,” I said wryly.

“Well, I’ll just throw this out there.  Crazy cat lady next door is single, right?”

I nodded.  “What, you think the cats scared all the men off?

“She’s not single because she has thirty cats.  The one happened after the other, I guarantee it.  And if she had a man, he would have stopped the crazy cat train after, like, four, five tops.  So you see, men can be handy to have around.”  He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively, sending me into peals of helpless laughter.

“That’s an interesting way to look at it,” I gasped.  “Are you getting at something in particular?”

“Yes.  You should let me live with you.  I know you love pets, and I’ll stifle the crazy cat urges before they even start.  And I cook.”

I shook my head at him, still smiling, as I backed out of the room.  “You’re impossible,” I called out to him, as I moved down the hall, towards the next stop in the tour.

I didn’t even have to look, I could feel his presence behind me.

My mouth twisted as I showed him my room.  I hadn’t cleaned it, hadn’t made my bed.  I wasn’t messy, but it was messy tonight, due to all of the wardrobe changes and the mast***ation session.

His eyes were glued to the bed from the second he stepped in the room.  I looked with him and knew instantly what had him transfixed.

They were cheap cotton sheets, but the wonderful thing about cotton was that, if you abused it with enough washing it got really, really soft.

And I loved those sheets.  I’d been using them for years.  Just how many years, I refused to think about.

I had other sheets, nice sheets, much nicer sets, in fact, than these, but those were only used when I laundered the good stuff.

Unfortunately, the cheap ones were also distinctive sheets, white and patterned with bleached out yellow rosebuds.

I’d known when he said he was coming over that we’d end up here at some point.  Why hadn’t I changed the sheets?

And of course, he’d noticed right away, the overly observant bastard.

“I remember these,” he said, reverence in his tone.  He moved right to the bed, running his hands over the fabric, bending down to bury his face in it.  “We were on these the first time we…” he trailed off.

“I know.”  I sighed.  I should have put the sheets away.  Now he was going to want to talk about things that I wasn’t ready to talk about.

“Come here,” he said huskily.

I shook my head, but he wasn’t looking at me, his cheek pressed to one of the yellow rose pillowcases.

“Come here,” he said again.

Biting my lip, I went to him.

Slowly but firmly, he pulled me down to lie beside him, both of us on our backs, the sides of our arms touching.  “Remember these sheets?”

I swallowed.  “Of course I do.  They’re my sheets.”

“Remember the first time we made love?”

I shouldn’t have indulged him in this, I knew it, but my mouth refused to listen to my brain.  “I remember being on top, and it pissed you off.”

He smiled, rolling on his side to look at me.  His eyes were so soft that my whole body went soft with them.   “I remember that.  God, you were riding me so good, and I knew that you were just trying to drive me wild, but even knowing it, it f**king worked.  Best f**king ride of my life.”

I blushed and started smiling.  I couldn’t help it.  And I also couldn’t help asking, “Yeah?”

“Up to that point.  You weren’t done blowing my mind, though, and you know it, because the next time was even better.”

“We put these things through their paces.”

He tensed suddenly.  “Have you been using these the whole time we’ve been apart?”

I knew what he was asking.  “Only when I was by myself.”

I’d kept the sheets faithful to Tristan.  Bully for me.

We were so freaking screwed up.

So freaking screwed.

His hand moved to my stomach, stroking with a light touch through my thin shirt.  “I love these sheets.  I’m going to steal them from you when you’re not looking, or, you know, when you are.”

I laughed.  “They wouldn’t even fit your bed.  They only fit a queen.”