In Bed with the Bachelor (Bachelor Auction Book 5)(11)

Her smile toppled from that ruinous mouth of hers, and the sparkling thing in her gaze changed, but what replaced it wasn’t any better. Awareness, feminine and hot. It made the snow and the wind fade. It made the scent of cold that came off of her jacket and the melting snow against her cheeks seem to echo in him, making him want things he refused to acknowledge, here in a motel parking lot somewhere on the wrong side of Missoula.

“I have good news and bad news.” Her voice was husky again, and this time, Jesse knew it had nothing at all to do with any nap, pretend or otherwise. He only watched her, aware of the way that hunger in him sat there on his mouth, in his face, deep inside of him, like a great weight. “The good news is that they have a room. The bad news is that they only have the one.”

The fifteen-year-old in him turned an exultant cartwheel. It was humiliating. The grown up version of Jesse, the one who could have any woman he liked and often did, gazed back at her. Calmly. Cartwheels be damned.

“Are you worried?” he asked her, and he couldn’t seem to keep himself from leaning closer to her. Though he was wise enough to keep his damned traitorous hands to himself. “Think you might lose your mind and jump me in my sleep?”

She looked as if she almost smiled, but thought better of it. “Does that happen a lot?”

His mouth curved and he saw the way she swallowed. Hard. “You can’t be that surprised. Can you?”

“You can rest easy, Jesse,” Michaela told him, and he imagined she meant that to come out easy and light. Funny and maybe a bit charming. But it didn’t, and something dark and distinctly aware moved through her hazel eyes, and then through him, too. “Your virtue is safe with me.”

*

It was one thing to decide to share a single motel room containing what had to be the smallest, most claustrophobic king-sized bed in the entire universe with a man who practically reeked of sex and dark, needy things, because it was utterly irrational to do anything else and they were adults who made choices, not animals.

It was something else, Michaela was finding out fast, to actually do it.

“Are you saving yourself for your June wedding?” Jesse asked in that voice of his that sounded insulting even when the question itself was mostly innocuous. Or maybe that was the look in his sinful eyes. “All dressed in white and accompanied by an entire defensive line of bridesmaids and some Snow White-type doves cartwheeling around your head?”

This was all Michaela’s fault, she was aware. She’d started the discussion of virtue, out there in the cold. She’d understood that was a mistake pretty much as she’d said it, which was why she’d also been the one who’d ended that odd, endlessly fraught moment that had swelled between them in the SUV by announcing they needed to hurry up and get inside before they froze to death where they’d sat.

“They’re expecting another ten to fifteen inches overnight,” she’d said, admiring how cool and unbothered she’d sounded, despite the heat she could feel stomping through her, all temper and fire. But then, she’d long ago learned how to appear calm and cool under pressure, no matter how she might have felt inside. It was one of the major benefits of her job. “The storm is only getting worse.”

“No kidding,” Jesse had muttered.

And Michaela had assured herself there was absolutely no underlying meaning to their exchange. No confusing, dangerous metaphors. None whatsoever.

Then they’d driven across the howling tundra of the parking lot and around the back of the modest two-story building to park in front of their room. Jesse had curtly ordered her inside while he’d wrestled with the luggage—and ‘wrestled’ in the Jesse Grey sense meant he’d simply scooped it all up and brought it in with a minimum of fuss—and she’d obeyed him because she hadn’t known what else to do and she hadn’t much liked the hard, glittering look in his dark eyes anyway. And he’d kicked the door shut behind him when he’d come in with all the weather around him like a force field and then… there they’d been. Here they were. In a motel room in the middle of nowhere, in what appeared to Michaela to be a terrifying blizzard, but which the man behind the counter in the motel office had laconically called ‘some winter weather.’

It was getting to her, she thought now, as Jesse waited for her answer with a darkly expectant look on his face, as if he could wait as long as it took if he had to. This single room thing was messing with her and she hated herself for it. It seemed so beneath her—so insulting, somehow, to Terrence and to herself and even to Jesse, even if she rather doubted he’d appreciate her concern—that she was treating this as if she really was some kind of latter-day Victorian miss. It all seemed so suburban minivan-ish, as Terrence would have said, that proximity to another man was making her hands shake and her knees feel weak, and worse, that her reaction to that was to clutch at her proverbial pearls and keep some distance between them rather than explore this strange reaction the way Terrence would have done.

Who makes all these silly rules? he would have asked in his languid way. Who says we have to follow them? Sex is only love when we cage it and ration it. Sex is supposed to be fun. Why put all that baggage on it?

Michaela had always agreed completely. In theory.

And she was letting Terrence down, Michaela knew she was, by allowing the fact she had to share a bed with this man—or maybe just the room itself, if he slept on the floor as she wouldn’t suggest he do, though the tiny little part of her that was far more conservative than she liked to admit hoped he’d do anyway—affect her like this. Or at all.