Dark Sexy Knight (A Modern Fairytale)(46)

Yeah, she thought as her toes curled. That sounded just about perfect.

But she sighed again, this time mournfully, because she’d already decided that sex needed to wait. No matter how much she wanted to ride Colton Lane like a rodeo queen, sex had the potential to make things really goddamned tricky.

And neither of them needed to add more tricky to this situation.

They lived in the same house.

They worked at the same place.

Since neither of them was looking for a casual fling, there was no point in rushing things, right?

Right.

Wrong! screamed her libido.

She huffed in frustration. It was going to take all her willpower, and then some, tonight because, Lord, the things she wanted to do to that man and let him do to her . . .

“We home, Ver’ty?”

“We’re home, Ry.”

“Okay,” he said, opening his door and trudging into the house.

She followed him in and up the stairs, where she freshened up and changed into shorts in Melody’s room while Ryan took his evening shower, put on his pajamas, and brushed his teeth.

“Floss too!” she called from her bedroom.

“Aw, I hate it.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “Mama broke the bank for that pretty mouth.”

A few minutes later, he poked his head into her room. “You ready to tuck me in?”

“I don’t know,” she said pertly, just as she did every night. “You ready to go to sleep?”

He grinned at her, showcasing his sparkling-clean, white teeth. “Yes, I am.”

“Then what are you doing still awake?” she asked, shaking her head with wide eyes and pursed lips.

He cackled with laughter as he rushed to his bed and jumped under the covers. Verity pretended to run after him, arriving in his room just as he pulled the red, white, and blue plaid quilt up under his chin and beamed up at her.

“Who loves you, Ryan Gwynn?” she asked, sitting beside him on the bed and reaching forward to tousle his hair.

“My sister, Ver’ty.”

“Yes, she does.” She leaned down and kissed his forehead. “’Night, now.”

“’Night, Ver’ty,” he said softly, already half asleep. “I love it here.”

“Me too, Ry,” she whispered, pulling his bedroom door closed, leaving just a crack of light so he could find his way to the bathroom. “Me too.”

Taking a quick look at her face in the hallway mirror, she reached down to turn on the little airplane night-light and headed downstairs.





CHAPTER 11


Colt had put a bottle of white wine in the fridge before leaving for work that morning, and it was nice and cold when he opened it and poured two glasses. He didn’t have a proper ice bucket, so he filled one of his aunt’s larger flowerpots with ice and wedged the bottle in the middle. The saucer attached to the bottom could collect the melted water.

After he placed the wine on his bedside table, he returned to the kitchen, took out the pot his aunt had used for boiling spaghetti, and placed it on the stovetop. He scooped out two tablespoons of coconut oil from a glass jar, shook it into the pot, and turned up the heat. After a minute or two, he added a cup of popcorn kernels to the melted oil, covered the pot, and listened to them quickly fill the pot. He’d sprinkle it with salt and sugar as he poured it into a bowl.

He’d straightened and vacuumed his room this morning while Verity and Ryan were upstairs getting ready for work. His bed was made, and his weights were neatly racked. The couple of old Playboys he had on the bottom of his nightstand had been taken out to the trash, and he put fresh hand towels beside the sink in his bathroom.

He’d added a couple of extra pillows to his bed so they could sit back comfortably, but his bed looked massive and obvious in the middle of the room, and suddenly he wished he had somewhere else to sit, like a couch or beanbags or something—anything—that didn’t seem as suggestive as his bed.

Before, in the car, when he’d told her that he had no expectations, he’d been telling the truth . . . but he couldn’t deny that the thought of Verity in his bedroom made his imagination run wild. He had it bad for her—of course he wanted to f*ck her. Hell, touching her was his current favorite pastime. But he was also falling for her. Falling hard, just as he’d forbidden himself to do. And there wasn’t a single f*cking thing he could do about it. And frankly there wasn’t a single f*cking thing he wanted to do about it—not a cell in his body that wasn’t ready to surrender to the addictive, adorable woman upstairs.

He was in unfamiliar waters, not ever having had a serious relationship with a woman, but that didn’t seem to matter to his mind or his heart, both of which were gunning for her to stick around indefinitely. In fact, his heart had fixed on her so fiercely that, in such a short amount of time, he felt like all he could do was hold on for dear life and see what happened next.

And “next,” as it turned out, was seeing her beautiful face peek into his bedroom, dimples denting her cheeks as she grinned at him.

“Hi,” she said, leaning against the doorway in bare feet with her hands shoved into the back pockets of denim cutoff shorts. On top she wore a simple white tank top with thin straps and a scoop neck, and her long blonde hair, which she’d been wearing in a ponytail at work today, was draped over her shoulders, the ends resting just over her breasts.