Just in Time (19 page)

Will heaved her suitcase onto a low dresser and sighed. “Tell me you’re not going to be passing out in three hours max. Believe it or not, I very rarely make moves on unconscious girls. Besides, it’s just for tonight. And there’s no way my family is going to believe that my girlfriend, the woman I’m madly in love with, is making me sleep on the couch the first night.”

As she continued to stare at him, her hands on her hips, he sighed again. “Right,” he said, then moved to the bed, threw the comforter back, and took the pillows out. “Barrier.” He laid three of them lengthwise down the middle of the bed. “You have your side, I have mine, and never the twain shall meet. Even though you’re beautiful.”

Really?
She almost said it, but caught herself. Instead, she just looked at him and said, “Good.”

Her mother had been so right. “The better you look over there, the stronger you’ll feel,” she’d promised. “Take it from somebody who worked mostly-naked and faked a smile for almost twenty years. Knowing you look good is about a woman’s best ammunition.”

“I like to think that’s my mind,” Faith had said.

“And your mind’s just wonderful,” her mother had assured her. “But your mind doesn’t always help if a camera’s on you, or when you’re trying to remember that you’ve got the upper hand over a good-looking man.”

Especially a man who had had his picture taken all day long, nodded politely at calls of, “Oi! Will!” from people he clearly didn’t know, stopped to sign autographs for a couple of kids on the way out of the airport, and signed them again over breakfast.

“I mean,” her resident star was saying hastily now, “not that you weren’t beautiful before. Just that you’re
more
beautiful, or I’m noticing it more, because you’re dressed differently, or maybe it’s your hair, or…” He stopped. “I’m stuffing up,” he said helplessly as Faith started to laugh, and he was the Will she remembered again, not the polite stranger she’d spent the day with.

“Yes,” she said, “you are. But it’s pretty cute. This is boot camp you’re looking at.”

“What? You joined the army? Then…why are you here?” He looked totally confused, and she had to laugh again.

“Of course I didn’t join the army. Boot camp is fitness classes. I decided it was time to change some things in my life, and this was part of it. Six o’clock every morning, for six long weeks. So if I look better? Well, thanks. Boot camp, hair, makeup, and some new clothes, that’s all.” Which she’d had the money to buy because of everything else she’d changed about her life, but he definitely didn’t need to know that. “And the same me underneath,” she added. “A me who thinks it would be a
great
idea if you explained why your mother hates me before I go downstairs and she tries to kill me with her withering glare again.”

He sat down on the end of the bed, so she sat down, too, the pillow-wall between them, and waited for his answer. “Same reason your mum hates me. You’re chocolate cheesecake. Well,” he amended, “you’re
vanilla
cheesecake. And, yes, you are. Although I’ll just say, I love cheesecake.” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Off the point,” he muttered. “Yeh. My mum. You’re the brazen hussy who lured her innocent boy into a life of pornography. And the more beautiful you look, the more she’s going to think so, so I’m afraid you’re stuck.”

“Wow. Me?” She actually felt pretty happy about that. “I tempted the player, huh? With my wicked ways?”

He smiled at her, and her heart did a funny little flip.

“You did,” he said, “and you know it.”

Faith woke to blackness. She pulled her phone off the bedside table and blinked at it. Four o’clock. She set the phone down, rolled onto her side, and tried to fall asleep again.

It wasn’t working. She could hear Will’s breathing in the quiet, could sense his warmth across their pillow-barrier, and that was way too distracting.

He’d fixed her a sandwich the day before after she’d taken a shower and somehow managed to unpack, and then she’d gone upstairs to take a nap at four o’clock and hadn’t woken again, just as he’d predicted. She hadn’t even known when he’d gotten into bed beside her, which was kind of a disappointment. She’d slept with Will Tawera, and she hadn’t even remembered it. And now it was a whole twelve hours later, she was awake, and she couldn’t sleep any longer.

She stole quietly out of bed and felt her way across the room in the dark towards the closet. She’d just reach in there and grab her robe.

Instead, she let out a squeak of surprise and pain as she stubbed her toe, then lost her balance and fell forward, her hands coming out to catch herself against something low and hard.

“Faith?” The voice came from behind her. The light went on, and she shoved off what turned out to be Will’s dresser. She hadn’t even been close to the closet. She turned to find him sitting up in bed, a white T-shirt stretching across his chest, his jaw dark with stubble. His hair wasn’t even mussed. It was cut too short and sharp to be mussed. In fact, he looked absolutely terrific, and she probably looked…

His gaze flew hastily back to her face, and she realized he’d been staring, too. “Nice jammies,” he said.

“I wasn’t planning to be sharing my bed,” she managed, “or I’d have worn a muumuu.” She’d thought the pinstriped pink shirt and shorts with their black piping were cute, and that they’d be lightweight for packing. But the V-necked collar plunged deep into her cleavage, the shorts were short, and they were riding low, she realized with a hasty glance downward, sitting inches below her navel, their black ribbon untied and dangling down her thighs. She grabbed for it and tied it hastily into a bow, and he watched her do it.

“Did I mention,” he said a little huskily, “that you looked good?”

“Go back to sleep. It’s four.”

He lay back against the pillows, crossed his arms behind his head—which was just way too much bicep for her peace of mind—and grinned at her. “I’m used to odd hours. And I need to keep the light on if you’re going to get out of here without bodily injury. But if you’re going to be changing, I’ll close my eyes. How’s that?”

“Humph. I don’t trust you.”

He sighed. “Wounding. But probably wise. I’d
want
to be virtuous, don’t get me wrong, but it would be so bloody tempting to peek just a wee bit.” He sighed again. “I’m weak. I’d probably succumb.”

She opened the closet door, grabbed her clothes from their hangers, then got her underwear, bra, and tights out of their drawer, trying to be inconspicuous about it. And then, of course, dropped her underwear and had to bend to pick them up.

“Your undies have a hole in them,” he said.

“Will you stop looking at my underwear?” she said crossly.

“Another of those weakness things. Seems I just can’t help it. Come on. Show me. Give me something to think about, if I’m going to have to lie here the rest of the night without you.”

“Not part of the deal.” She could feel herself beginning to blush. “Giving you something to think about.”

“But how am I going to hold your hand and kiss your cheek when I take you out today, otherwise, so we can get our photo snapped?” he complained. “I need to get in the mood.”

“You? You were
born
in the mood.”

He laughed, strong white teeth flashing, and she couldn’t help smiling. “Too true,” he said. “You going to show me or not?”

She heaved a sigh.
The better you look, the stronger you’ll feel
, she reminded herself. She would put herself in the power seat, that was all. She sat on her side of the bed, crossed her bare legs, dumped her clothes into her lap, and held her pale purple lace underwear up, draped over one finger.

“Bow in the back,” she told him, then slowly reached for them with the other hand, held them up, and showed him. “With this little diamond-shaped cutout underneath it. It’s supposed to be sexy.”

She could see his Adam’s apple moving in the muscular column of his throat as he swallowed. “It works, too. Work even better on, eh. You want to
really
inspire me…”

“Ha.” She uncrossed her legs, scooted off the bed, scooped up her clothes, and wiggled just a little bit extra as she flounced—yes, flounced—towards the bathroom. “You’re going to have to work with what you have,” she tossed back at him over her shoulder, “because that’s all you’re getting.”

After that, and after she’d come out of the bathroom again to find him still awake, still watching her, it wasn’t very hard at all to write her next chapter.

She’d stolen downstairs and curled up on one of the black leather couches that stood before the fireplace in the soaring space of the living room—the lounge, she remembered. And had begun to work. If you could call it that.

I sat up and stretched, satisfaction running like warm liquid through my veins. I’d never been as aware of my body as I’d become these past few months, or as happy in it. I felt Hemi’s hands and mouth on me even when he wasn’t touching me, and all he had to do was look at me to set me quivering.

He wasn’t looking at me now, though. He was lying on his back, the white sheet pushed all the way down to his waist, one muscular arm flung over his head, still sound asleep.

I loved to look at him, at the powerful sculpture that was his body, the fierce, proud lines of his warrior’s face. And now, for once, I could look my fill, because he was sleeping. Because he was helpless.

The happiness rose in me like bubbles in a glass of champagne, and I got out of bed, stole around to his side of it, and picked up the silk ties he’d used the night before. I’d been moaning then, straining against them, begging him to finish, to put me out of the delicious misery he’d kept me in for what had felt like hours, until every nerve in my body had been stimulated to its aching maximum, until I’d been shaking with need, panting with frustrated desire.

But that had been last night, and this was a whole new day, the first morning of the rest of my life, and I was a strong woman who needed to see just how far she could push a strong man.

I paused all the same when I’d laid the tie gently over his outflung wrist. Could I really do this? Could I take the consequences?

Yes. I could. I could take anything he gave me.

“Working already?”

Faith jumped a full two inches and slammed the laptop shut. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.” She twisted on the couch to see Will coming down the spare open treads of the staircase, light-stained planks against stark white walls broken by one tall rectangular window, glowing pink now with sunrise.

He looked so athletic loping down the stairs in navy-blue shorts and a gray T-shirt. He looked like Hemi, but he wasn’t. He was Will, and he was grinning at her. Her life was so confusing.

“What?” he asked. “Writing down all your naughty thoughts?” And she very nearly jumped again.

“Just doing a little work.” It was the truth. It was just that some of her work, these days, was downright…pleasurable. If you couldn’t do it, you could at least think about it, and she was spending a
lot
of time thinking about it. And writing about it.