In Bed with the Bachelor (Bachelor Auction Book 5)(7)
And if this morning were anything to go by, her cousins and aunts would do nothing but talk about Jesse until he’d achieved mythic status in her head, colonizing everything. Which meant, as strange as it sounded even in her own mind, that among all the other reasons she needed to get home ASAP, the quickest way to be rid of Jesse Grey was to go with him.
“I’m not packed,” she said, like the idiot she was in this man’s presence and nowhere else.
And that marvelous mouth of his curved then, as something that might have been humor, if much harder, moved through his gaze.
“You have five minutes.”
Michaela took more like twenty-five. She confirmed her flight out of Bozeman that evening really was likely to be cancelled, she texted Amos to inform him the weather might keep her away from the office longer than she’d planned and he should try not to freak out, and she threw her things into her small, carry-on roller bag. Then she paused to make the usual series of mild death threats to her meddling, irritating, cackling relatives, gathered around her aunt’s kitchen table, until her mother cut her off midstream. Bonnie Townsend sipped at her coffee in that delicate way of hers that made Michaela feel like some kind of lumbering wildebeest in comparison, the perfectly-shaped eyebrows Michaela had been envious of all her life high on her forehead.
“My goodness, Michaela,” she murmured in repressive tones. The same way she’d chastised Michaela for her impatience with her family’s inability to understand every last one of her life choices only last night. They want to know these things because they love you, not because they want to annoy you. I don’t think it would hurt you to try to remember that. “If you’re not interested in having a favor done for you, I’m certain there are more gracious ways to say so.”
Feeling suitably chastened and about an inch tall, as ever, Michaela buttoned her lip and wheeled her suitcase out into the hall, where Jesse Grey was making like a column of granite. Except less approachable and far less sunny of disposition.
“Okay!” she chirped like some kind of psychotic kindergarten teacher, as if that might soften him up. “I’m ready!”
He exuded grittiness without seeming to do anything but stand there, and she felt that tugging thing low in her belly again, even more insistent today than it had been the night before.
There was human, she thought then, and then there was straight up destructive, and she wasn’t sure she could tell the difference. It had never been an issue before.
“Are you sure?” he asked in that low rumble of a voice. “Maybe you want to say goodbye to everyone down on Main Street, too? The outlying ranches? The whole of Montana while you’re at it?”
“What’s interesting about you, Jesse,” she said, and it was a bit of a fight to keep hold of her not-entirely-polite smile, “is that you’re possibly the most unfriendly man I’ve ever met. Why did anyone think you’d make a good bachelor auction item?”
“Must be you,” he replied, with an almost-smile that didn’t ease the bite of his words at all. “This is the friendliest I’ve been in years. To anyone.”
“Childhood trauma?”
His mouth went lethal then. “Something like that.”
“What fun,” she said, and beamed at him like she meant it. “And we have hours upon hours trapped in a car together! Hooray!”
He moved then, which was something a little more than surprising, or at least that was how she interpreted that liquid thing that washed through her and that jolt that catapulted from her heart to her feet and back up again.
“Be nice,” he growled. “Or I’ll make you carry your own damned bag.”
She couldn’t breathe. Or process that.
“I always carry my own bag,” she informed him, on autopilot. “I’m a liberated woman, thank you. My partner isn’t a bellhop. What does that even mean?”
He muttered something that sounded filthy, which Michaela told herself was further evidence he was terrible in every way, but that wasn’t what the swirling, heated thing inside her felt about any of this. Definitely not.
“It means your man is a douche,” he growled at her.
He reached over and hefted up her heavy, rolling suitcase as if it weighed about as much as a feather pillow, then turned and stalked out of the house, leaving Michaela no choice but to follow after him.
The air outside was razor sharp and viciously cold, a far cry from the softer wet of the Pacific Northwest winters Michaela had grown up with and even loved. She shuddered out a breath but kept going, following Jesse down her aunt’s carefully shoveled front path and out to where one of those Range Rover-type half-jeep/half-truck vehicles sat at the curb, gleaming black and powerful and as irritating as its driver. Jesse threw her bag in the far back, slammed the door shut, and then jerked his head toward the passenger side.
“Let’s go.” It wasn’t an invitation. It was an order. Another order. He clearly liked issuing them.
“Did you just call my—” She couldn’t call Terrence her man. That made her sound… something. A possessive, jealous hoarder, to start. “Did you call Terrence a douche?”
Jesse managed to give the distinct impression of rolling his eyes skyward and sighing heavily without actually doing either of those things. He rounded the side of the SUV and opened the passenger door for her in a stark, annoyed manner that stripped the act of any possible chivalric content even as he did it.