Drop Dead Gorgeous (9 page)

"I didn't say I was
only
interested in your SDS."

"But you wanted access to it."

I batted my eyelashes at him, thinking it was time to throw him a hint.
"In a big way.
I thought you knew."

"How could I know?" His tone was even darker, like a thundercloud about to break. "I—" Then he stopped, his gaze narrowing on me as the fluttering eyelashes and big innocent eyes registered with him. "Just what the hell is an SDS?"

I went with just the big eyes, savoring the moment.
"Sperm delivery system."

Chapter Six

He stalked away from me and stood looking out the window, his hands on his hips as he took deep, controlled breaths. I watched him, almost fizzing with glee. Teasing him like this was almost more fun than teasing him the other way—almost, because the payoff was better with the other kind of teasing.

Finally he said, "You little shit," and swung around to face me. The glitter in his eyes promised retribution.

I grinned at him.

With deceptive mildness he asked, "You and
Siana
were discussing my dick?"

"Only because you were eavesdropping.
I thought you should hear something interesting, since you went to so much trouble."

He didn't look the least embarrassed at having been caught, maybe because snooping was his stock-in-trade. Instead he came to the bed, bracing his hands on either side of me as he leaned down. If he thought I'd feel uneasy being sort of surrounded and trapped that way, I wasn't. For one thing, this was Wyatt. For another, well, this was Wyatt; I liked being surrounded and trapped by him. Fun and interesting things usually happened when he was this close.

I didn't raise my head from the pillow, but I put my hand on his face, feeling the hard structure of jaw and cheek, the warmth of his skin, the prickles of his beard even though he'd shaved just a few hours before. "Gotcha," I said smugly. Yes, I know it isn't nice to gloat, partly because Wyatt isn't a grin-and-bear-it sort of guy. He'd think of some way to pay me back, even if it was something as excruciating as finagling me into making a bet he could make certain I lost and forcing me to watch the World Series. I
so
don't like baseball.

He gave me a smug smile in return, which put me on alert. "So you didn't sleep with anyone for the two years we were broke up, huh? You were waiting for me."

"Not really. I'm just picky." Damn the man, he
would
find some way to turn this to his advantage.

"You were impressed by my delivery system."

"I said that stuff because I knew you were listening."

"You wanted access to it. You wanted to use it, if I recall correctly."

That's one of the bad things about cops: they remember stuff. He could probably quote verbatim my conversation with
Siana
. Besides, in various ways I'd made it plain I was
very
fond of his SDS. Please. If

I don't like
something,
it does
not
go in my mouth— or anywhere else in my body, if you get my drift.

Okay, sometimes the only way to regain control of a situation is to completely and utterly surrender. I smiled at him and trailed my hand from his face down his chest, down his stomach, until I was cradling his SDS in my palm. I was delighted to feel that he already had a semi-erection. That's my Wyatt; mention sex and he's ready.
Great, huh?
"You recall very correctly. I wanted it, and now I have it." I shivered a little, because touching him was doing a number on me, too.

He leaned over me, his breathing faster, his eyes darkening as he pushed harder against my hand. There was no "semi" about him now, he was hard and ready. Then he said "Fuck" in a strained voice, straightening and moving away from me.

"Well, yeah," I said. Hadn't it been obvious?

He shot a burning glance at me as he turned back to the window. "You have a concussion," he said very tersely.

Groaning, I saw the problem. No jostling around for me, for the next few days at least, and if anyone has figured out how to have sex without even a little jostling I wish you'd let me in on the secret. No sex yesterday, no sex today, no sex tomorrow—no sex for as long as this headache lasted, which was probably several more days. Now I was
really
pissed at that psycho bitch in the Buick, for causing this unexpected deprivation—not that an expected deprivation would be any better, because it wasn't as if you could stock up on orgasms and keep them in the pantry until you needed one.

Which reminded me of something, and what better time to broach the subject than when I was hurt and he was in protective mode? It wasn't as if I had anything better to do. "I need to redo your house."

That brought him swinging around. The crotch of his pants was still tented, but his attention was riveted on me. From the wariness in his gaze you'd have thought I'd said, "I have a gun, and it's aimed at your heart."

He stared at me for several seconds, running our conversation through his mind. Finally he said, "I give up. How did we get from talking about my SDS and your concussion to you wanting to redo my house?"

"I was thinking about pantries." That wasn't all I'd been thinking about, but I didn't want to get into the whole stocking up on orgasms thing, when I was temporarily on the sidelines. Besides, he didn't need to know every little detail of how I got to where I was, conversationally speaking.

He gave up on trying
to make
the connection. "What about pantries?"

"You don't have one."

"Sure I do. It's that little room off the kitchen, remember?"

"You have your office in there, so it isn't a pantry. And your house is all wrong, anyway. Your furniture is all wrong."

His eyes narrowed. "What's wrong with my house? It's fine. It has good furniture."

"It has
guy
furniture."

"I'm a guy," he pointed out. "What other kind would I have?"

"But I'm not a guy." How could he be so oblivious to something so obvious? "I need girl stuff. So either I re-do your house, or we'll have to move somewhere else."

"I like my house." He was beginning to get that digging-in-his-heels expression that men get when they don't want to do something. "I have things just where I want them."

I gave him a speaking look, which made my head hurt more, because you sort of have to roll your eyes to do a proper speaking look. "At what point is it supposed to become
our
house?"

"When you move in."
He said it as if that were the simplest, most obvious conclusion in the world. For him, I guess it was.

"But you don't want me touching anything, buying a chair that fits
me
, fixing up an office for me, or anything like that?" My raised eyebrows told him what I thought of
that
idea—and again, raising my eyebrows hurt, but when you don't use
Botox
it's really hard to talk without any expression. For the next few days, though, I thought I might try really hard to imitate Nancy Pelosi.

He scowled. "Shit." He saw the point of the conversation, which was that no way in hell was I satisfied with the status quo regarding his furniture, and if he wanted me living with him some adjustments had to be made, but he didn't like it. His eyes did that narrowed, piercing thing again. "My recliner stays where it is. So does my television."

I started to shrug,
then
stopped when I remembered that moving was not a good thing. "That's fine. It isn't as if I'll be in there."

"What?"
He not only wasn't pleased to hear that, he was getting pissed.

"Think about it. Do we watch the same things on television? No. You want to watch baseball; I hate baseball. You watch
all
sports. I like football and basketball, period. I like decorating shows, and you'd rather have splinters shoved under your fingernails than watch a decorating show. So if you want me not to go mad and kill you, I'll have to have my own television and a place to watch it."

The truth is
,
I don't watch much television, except for college football, which I'll actually go out of my way to catch. For one thing, some nights I don't get home until after nine o'clock, and even when I do
I
usually have paperwork. There are a couple of shows I'll
TiVo
and watch on Sundays, but for the most part I don't bother. That doesn't mean I'm willing to fight Wyatt for use of the television whenever I
do
want to watch something, and even less does it mean I'm willing to give up those few shows. Not that he needs to know how little I watch; it's the principle of the thing.

"All right," he said grudgingly, because after all fair is fair.
"Though I'd rather have you with me."

"We'd have to watch what I want to watch half the time."

And what a disaster
that
would be. He knew it as well as I did. After a pause he abandoned that idea and gave in. "Which room will you use?
One of the upstairs bedrooms?"

"No, because then I'd have to redo it again and move everything in a few years when the kids get their own bedrooms."

His expression didn't soften, but it filled with heat—the I-want-to-get-you-naked kind of heat, not the mad kind. "There are four bedrooms," he pointed out, thinking of the process of making babies to fill those bedrooms.

"I know. We'll have the master, we'll have two kids—I'm not ruling out three, but I think probably two—and we'll have a guest bedroom. I'm thinking the living room will work out best. Who needs a formal living room? Oh, and I'll need to redo all the window treatments. No offense, but your taste in window treatments sucks."

The hands were back on his hips. "What else?" he asked in a resigned tone.

Huh. He was giving in easier than I'd thought.
Took some of the fun out of it.
"Paint.
Not that you weren't smart to go with neutrals, since decorating so isn't your thing," I added hastily. "It's just that decorating
is
my thing, so now you can relax and leave all those decisions to me. Trust me, a little color on the walls will do wonders for the house. Plants will, too." He had
no
houseplants, a point I'd already made. How could any sane human live without houseplants?