The Love Hypothesis (Love Hypothesis #1)(84)

Chapter Seventeen



HYPOTHESIS: When I think I’ve hit rock bottom, someone will hand me a shovel. That someone is probably Tom Benton.



Olive drifted off after the first time, and dreamed of many strange, nonsensical things. Sushi rolls shaped like spiders. The first snowfall in Toronto, during her last year with her mother. Adam’s dimples. Tom Benton’s sneer as he spat the words “little sob story.” Adam, again, this time serious, saying her name in his unique way.

Then she felt the mattress dip, and the sound of something being placed on the nightstand. She slowly blinked awake, disoriented in the dim light of the room. Adam was sitting on the side of the bed, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear.

“Hi.” She smiled.

“Hey.”

Her hand reached out to touch his thigh through the pants he’d never managed to take all the way off. He was still warm, still solid. Still there.

“How long did I sleep?”

“Not long. Maybe thirty minutes.”

“Hmm.” She stretched a bit against the mattress, arms above her head, and noticed the fresh glass of water on the nightstand. “Is that for me?”

He nodded, handed it to her, and she propped up on her elbow to drink it, smiling in thanks. She noticed his gaze linger on her breasts, still tender and sore from his mouth, and then drift away to his own palms.

Oh. Maybe, now that they had sex—good sex, Olive thought, amazing sex, though who knew about Adam?—he needed his own space. Maybe he wanted his own damn pillow.

She returned the empty glass and sat up. “I should move to my bed.”

He shook his head with an intensity that suggested that he didn’t want her to go, not anywhere, not ever. His free hand closed tight around her waist, as if to tether her to him.

Olive didn’t mind.

“You sure? I suspect I might be a cover hog.”

“It’s fine. I run warm.” He brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. “And according to someone, I look like I might snore.”

She gasped in mock outrage. “How dare they? Tell me who said that and I will personally avenge you—” She yelped when he held the icy-cool glass against her neck, and then dissolved into laughter, drawing up her knees and trying to twist away from him. “I’m sorry—you don’t snore! You sleep like a prince!”

“Damn right.” He set the glass on the nightstand, appeased, but Olive remained curled up, cheeks flushed and breathing hard from fending him off. He was smiling. With dimples, too. The same smile he’d smiled into her neck earlier, against her skin, the one that had tickled her and made her laugh.

“I’m sorry about the socks, by the way.” She winced. “I know it’s a controversial topic.”

Adam looked down at the rainbow-colored material stretched around her calves. “Socks are controversial?”

“Not socks per se. Just, keeping them on during sex?”

“Really?”

“Totally. At least according to the issue of Cosmopolitan we keep at home to swat cockroaches.”

He shrugged, like a man who’d only ever read the New England Journal of Medicine and maybe Truck-Pushing Digest. “Why would anyone care one way or the other?”

“Maybe they don’t want to unknowingly have sex with people with horrible, disfigured toes?”

“Do you have disfigured toes?”

“Truly grotesque. Circus-worthy. Antithetical to sex. Basically a built-in contraceptive.”

He sighed, clearly amused. He was struggling to hold on to his moody, broody, intense act, and Olive loved it.

“I’ve seen you in flip-flops multiple times. Which, by the way, are not lab compliant.”

“You must be mistaken.”

“Really.”

“I don’t like what you’re insinuating, Dr. Carlsen. I take the Stanford environmental health and safety guidelines very seriously and— What are you—”

He was so much larger than her, he could hold her down with one hand on her belly as he wrestled her out of her socks, and for some reason she loved every moment of it. She put up a good fight, and maybe he’d have a couple of bruises tomorrow, but when he finally managed to take them off, Olive was out of breath from laughing. Adam caressed her feet reverently, as though they were delicate and perfectly shaped instead of belonging to someone who ran two marathons a year.

“You were right,” he said. Chest heaving, she looked at him curiously. “Your feet are pretty hideous.”

“What?” She gasped and freed herself, pushing at his shoulder until he ended up on his back under her. He surely could have unseated her, giant that he was. And yet. “Take it back.”

“You said it first.”

“Take it back. My feet are cute.”

“In a hideous way, maybe.”

“That’s not a thing.”

His laugh blew warm against her cheek. “There’s probably a German word for that. Cute, but exceptionally ugly.”

She bit his lip just enough to make him feel it, and Adam—he seemed to lose that grip he always had on himself. He seemed to suddenly want more, and he flipped them until she was underneath him, turning the bite into a kiss. Or maybe it was Olive herself, since her tongue was licking his lip, exactly where she’d made it sting.