Penmort Castle (Ghosts and Reincarnation #1)(47)

Except for the toilet, the room was gutted. Bare floorboards, no tile, no tub, no sink. The back wall looked like it had been set with new plasterboard, the floor underneath had new boards.

Clearly Abby was having some work done on her house.

Leaving those unappealing facilities, he turned out the light and walked up the stairs to the top floor. The house was huge, there had to be another bathroom.

He located it but discovered that the only thing that worked was the light.

He walked back down to her room, pulled on his boxers and headed down passed the ground floor, where he knew from his movements last night there was no bathroom, to the garden level.

He found another bathroom, as ancient as the one on the top floor.

It, too, was not functioning.

“What the f**k?” he muttered, annoyed. He retraced his steps, using the only facilities available to him and went back to her room.

He got fully dressed and sat on the edge of her bed. Her cat’s head came up and he gave an enquiring meow but kept his place.

Sometime after Cash’s departure from the bed, she’d moved up and curled into Cash’s pillow, her arms tight around it.

Cash shifted the hair off her neck and bent to her ear.

“Abby, I’m leaving.”

She stirred slightly and her head turned toward his voice but she stayed silent.

“Abby,” he called when she didn’t have a further response.

She sleepily got up on her elbow, her hand pulling her hair out of her face holding it there as her eyes moved to the clock.

Then her head turned to him.

“Do you always get up this early?” she murmured in her soft, sexy, very effective, early morning voice.

“Yes,” he replied, his mind doing a scan of his schedule and finding, to his disappointment, that he didn’t have time to do what he very much wanted to do to Abby before he needed to be at his first meeting.

Dropping her hair, she fell back to the pillows and told him, “That would suck.”

He smiled at her quiet, amusing words and then asked, “Abby, what’s going on with your bathrooms?”

He felt rather than saw her body go still.

And he also thought this was an unusual reaction to a simple question.

Then her head turned on the pillow to look up at him. “I’m having a few problems with the plumbing.”

It would appear, even to someone who knew nothing about such things, with three bathrooms out of commission, she was having more than “a few problems”.

She was back to withholding from him and Cash didn’t like it.

“Do you need me to call someone to come and look at it?” Cash enquired, attempting patience in order to control his irritation that after all they’d shared last night she’d fallen back to earlier habits.

She got up on her elbow again and replied, “No, it’s under control.”

“Under control is having at least one working shower,” Cash returned. “Not under control in a house this size, or any house for that matter, is having only a working toilet.”

“It’s being taken care of,” she told him.

“When?” he pressed.

Abby sat up fully holding the covers to her na**d body and replied, “They’re working on it.”

Cash was finished with the conversation. “I’ll make a call,” he declared. “I’ll send someone to have a look at what’s happening and keep them on target. You’ll have a working bathtub by tomorrow night.”

When she spoke again, her voice had lost that early morning sweetness and he knew she was getting angry. “Cash, I’m taking care of it.”

“No, you were taking care of it. Now, I’m taking care of it.”

“Cash!” she snapped.

“I’m not discussing this,” he finished.

“Well I bloody well am,” she retorted.

“Abby,” he stated in a way that made it clear this conversation was over.

“Cash,” she mimicked his tone.

At her words and her tone, Cash wanted to laugh at the same time he wanted to shout.

She was quite often unbelievably adorable, even when she was angry.

And there weren’t many people who would go head-to-head with him. In fact, at that moment he couldn’t think of a single soul who would be that stupid.

Or that brave.

Instead of laughing or shouting, he decided to try a different tack to get her to submit.

His hands went under her arms and he pulled her na**d body out of the bed and across his lap. She pressed her palms against his chest and tried to pull away but his arms wrapped around her, crushing her to him, her hands caught between them.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she snapped right before he kissed her.

At first she struggled. It took awhile for him to break through but finally she started melting. Her hand forced its way from between them up to his shoulder, his neck and into his hair, her other arm going down and around his back. She pressed her torso to him and kissed him back.

He reacted instantly to her capitulation, his body started to heat and he felt himself begin to get hard.

His lips slid from hers to the expanse of skin on her neck below and just behind her ear that he knew was highly sensitive. He wasn’t disappointed. She trembled in his arms and he liked the feel of it.