Sleeping Arrangements (Silhouette Desire) (18 page)

She barely heard him, although his words reassured her that he hadn’t noticed the tiny little stumble she’d made, the
brief hesitation before she’d managed to finish her sentence by saying “
like
you so much.”

She had been on the verge of saying, “God, I love you.”

Maybe she could have played it off. After all, people said “I love you” all the time and didn’t mean it. She’d said it herself yesterday to a co-worker who’d brought two dozen doughnuts to the office. And she certainly didn’t have any deep personal feelings for Susie LeClerc beyond gratitude for the snack on a day with no time for a lunch break.

But he would only have needed one look at her face, frozen with shock at the sound of her own words, to make the truth abundantly clear.

She was in love with him. In love with her husband, and that made everything completely and horribly wrong.

Spencer was still stroking the arch of her feet with his thumbs, kneading deep and then manipulating her heel. She wondered that it didn’t vibrate under his fingers with the tension that hummed through her. He seemed to think she had fallen asleep, which was fine. It gave her time to think.

She couldn’t think.

What the hell was she supposed to do now?

Sure, Spencer was the one who had brought up the idea of their staying married once or twice in the past, but that was a long time ago. And he’d meant it more as a matter of convenience between the two of them, since they’d both been burned before. She didn’t think he’d appreciate it if she sat up now and turned to him, saying, “You know, let’s do it. Let’s stay married. We share a house well enough, sex is clearly not a problem and by the way, do you love me?”

Yeah. Right. No way. Her heart was already racing with dread at the thought.

Calm down, girl, she told herself. Don’t go getting all agitated here. Just take a page from the book of the man himself. Spencer Reed’s Guide to the Calm and Reasonable Approach to Any Crisis.

There was no law requiring her to make any kind of im
mediate confession of her feelings to Spencer. She could simply tuck them away for now and let things just ride for a while. He’d said something similar to her once, she remembered, about the possibility of their hitting the six-month goal line and letting things go from there. So she’d crossed a line of her own, and considerably before the six months were up, too. So what?

She would just let it go from here. No expectations, no pressure. After all, the man liked her, she knew that. He made efforts to see that she was happy, although frankly she explained some of that away by picturing his mother as a dragon lady who’d locked him in a closet as a child if he’d failed to be polite. But surely there was a chance at least that someday it might be more than politeness that motivated his concern for her.

She knew she would never get the grand, overwhelming declaration of eternal love. Spencer just wasn’t the type. But there was something to be said for a man who brought her Ace bandages when she sprained her ankle and Diet Coke at any and all hours of the day. That kind of man would never wake up one day and decide that the grand-gesture thing was getting a little old, and leave.

The kind of man Spencer was would find little ways of making her happy every day, for all of their days, and maybe that was better.

Certainly it was better.

That resolved, she opened her eyes and found Spencer watching her. God, she loved the look of him. The dimple that showed up in one long, lean cheek when he smiled. The solid shape of muscles under his clothes that made it feel like a secret when she pictured him naked. His quick smile. The horn-rimmed glasses he used only for reading.

He wiggled one of her toes.

“Had a nice nap?”

“Mmm.”

She pulled her feet off his lap, rose to her knees next to him
and swung a leg over his thighs, straddling him. Bent her head and started working on the tiny buttons of his white oxford shirt.

“That must have been some nap.”

Addy pushed his head back until it rested on the couch, and leaned above him. His hands ran up the back of her thighs, up and under the hem of the khaki shorts she wore, as she lowered her mouth with torturous slowness over his. She kissed him, lips soft and open, first on one side of his mouth and then the other, and ran her fingers through his silky hair just for the pleasure of feeling it in her hands.

“I just thought I’d show you one of the benefits of what we Cubs fans like to call the ‘postgame blues.’”

His hands kneading firmly against her butt, he was grinning up at her before she finished.

“What’s that?”

She was on her knees above his lap, her chest level with his face, as she crossed her arms, gripped the hem of her shirt and pulled it off, knocking off her ball cap on the way and spilling her hair out of the loose ponytail she’d pulled through the back of the cap. His blue-sky eyes clouded and narrowed as she ran a hand down her own bare skin, fingers stroking her own throat, trailing between her breasts, falling, falling, until her hand rested on the top button of her shorts.

She felt a little bit wicked as she popped the button out of the buttonhole and answered him. “Comfort sex.”

Their mouths met, mated, and he slid his hands farther up her shorts. The wet readiness of her wrung a groan from him as he plunged a finger inside her. His other hand streaked up her naked back to tangle in the ends of her hair, pulling her head back and pushing her bare breasts forward.

When the frustration grew to be too much, Spencer pushed her off his lap to stand up and rapidly tugged her shorts down. She pulled him up off the couch and his clothes were gone in a moment. His skin was hot against her as she curled one arm around his neck and stroked a hand over the
hard, smooth surface of his chest and the flatness of his stomach. She ran her hand down his side, his hair-roughened outer thigh with its long muscles and then back up the inside until she cupped him in her hands.

Her fingers stroked the length of him, and the force of will that let him stand still as she touched him made him tremble against her.

His hand tightened on the nape of her neck and his forehead pressed against hers as she drew a low moan from him with her fingers.

When she pushed him back down on the couch, he tried to pull her with him, but she dodged his hands. She had something else in mind.

She dropped to her knees and took him in her mouth. Felt him shudder beneath her hands as she loved him. When his every muscle bunched and she felt the energy near to exploding under his skin, he hauled her bodily up over him and pushed her hips down, burying himself inside of her. She curved above him, one knee on the couch, one foot braced on the floor, and felt his hands touching her where their bodies joined, his thumb stroking her until she trembled and shoved herself in strong, rolling thrusts against him.

When she came and cried out, he lifted his hips beneath her, once, twice, until his climax overtook him and he groaned, his breath mingling with hers under the dark curtain of her hair as it fell around them.

She was still panting to get her breath back as he scooted over and tucked her against his side in the space between his body and the sofa back. She lay on her side, threw a leg over his and draped an arm across his. Her fingers dangling over the edge of the couch found his arm and began tracing random patterns on the soft skin on the inside of his elbow. Her head rested on his shoulder.

When she felt him shake his head after a moment, she made a little noise of inquiry.

“So,” he began, and the laugher was so full in his voice that
she tilted her head back to look up at him. “Do you feel better about the Cubs’ loss today?” He threw his head back and laughed out loud. “Jeez, I sure do.”

Since he was laughing already, it seemed the perfect time to poke him in the side with a stiff finger. That she managed to tickle him was completely an accident, she swore, as Spencer dumped her on the floor, grabbed her wrists and threatened to tickle her until she peed.

The doorbell rang insistently and she gasped with relief as he let up. They both remembered about the pizza at the same instant.

“Oh, damn. Oh, damn.” She hopped about until she got both feet out of the same leg of her shorts and managed to yank them up over her hips. Spencer was sitting naked on the floor in the middle of the room, laughing uproariously at her and wiping tears out of his eyes.

“You are not helping,” she informed him, and abandoned the search for her top as the guy at the door gave up on subtlety and just leaned on the buzzer. She grabbed Spencer’s discarded shirt and the wallet from his pants and sprinted down the hall, shoving buttons through holes any which way.

By the time she yanked open the front door, she’d managed two buttons, but the shirt was barely hanging on one shoulder and she was pretty sure the teenage delivery boy could tell that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

Who was she fooling? By the look in his pubescent eyes, he knew perfectly well that she’d just been having sex.

She thrust an extra twenty at him out of sheer embarrassment, grabbed the pizza box out of his hands and closed the door in his face. Then she sagged against the door in relief.

When she heard a muffled, “Man, what a babe” through the door, followed by footsteps trailing away, she was only marginally consoled.

Spencer had his pants back on by the time she returned to the library, and a contrite expression on his face that lasted about three seconds when she frowned at him. He dissolved
into laughter again, walked up and wrapped his arms around her. She balanced the pizza box on one hand, out of reach.

“I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you, I promise.” He buried his face in the crook of her neck and snorted. “I’ve just never seen anyone move that fast.”

When she felt the hands at her side twitch on her ribs, she gave in.

“No more tickling! You can
have
the pizza!”

He swept the box out of her hands and smacked a kiss on her mouth.

They sat cross-legged on the floor on opposite sides of the coffee table, munching away and talking lazily about what they had to do tomorrow. Addy discovered that she finally had an appetite again and plowed her way through several slices.

Spencer asked her what her plans were for the following evening.

“Finishing the bathroom,” she mumbled around a mouthful of cheese before licking her fingers. “It’s going to be too nice out this weekend to be stuck inside painting trim.”

“The paint job turned out great, by the way.” He handed her a napkin.

“Thanks. And thanks.” She took it. “I love messing around with that stuff. It just never seemed worth it before in a rented apartment.”

“Well, you’ll certainly have your chance now.” The flick of his gaze at the ceiling encompassed the house that surrounded them.

“Yeah, thanks to you.” At his shrug of denial, she reached across the table, grabbing his fingers and squeezing his knuckles together. “I mean it. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually said it, but thank you. Thank you for marrying me. This is more important to me than you could know.”

As usual, he didn’t let her get away with stopping short of the full explanation. Pushing the coffee table to the side, he scooted around until he faced the same direction as her. Then he slung an arm around her shoulder and pulled her back to
lean with him against the front of the couch. He pressed a kiss on the top of her head as he settled back with a comfortable exhale.

“So tell me why it’s so important.”

To her surprise, she found herself doing exactly that. Although her voice halted at first, she told him about her childhood after her father died. How at eight years old, she’d been the only person her mother had to depend on for help with the three younger children. How the toes of her gym shoes had had holes worn in them for months because she hadn’t wanted to tell her mother that she’d outgrown them, knowing that each new expense pushed her mother closer to the edge of being unable to make their rent payment.

“By the time I was in high school, things were pretty stable. I was a fairly normal teenager, with a pitiful allowance and babysitting duties at home after school, but I knew that at least we were safe.” She shifted her upper body so that she rested more securely against Spencer. “God, it’d kill my mother to know that I still think about those days. That my definition of safety is knowing I have a roof over my head that no one can take away from me.”

“That must have been a scary way to grow up.”

She shrugged, not willing to admit that. She slid the crust of her last slice to Elwood, who’d snuck into the room at the scent of hot food. “Maybe. But I wanted to help her. And it was nice sometimes to feel needed.”

“And now you have this house.”

“Are you trying to jinx me?” she asked, looking up at him. She rapped her knuckles lightly against his forehead. “Knock on wood. Nothing’s for sure until it’s over. We could get overrun by a plague of termites tomorrow that chew the house down to the foundation overnight.”

“Unlikely in the extreme.”

“It happened to a woman in Tennessee last summer.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“It was on the Internet.”

“You
do
know that not everything on the Internet is true, right?”

“What?”

When Spencer began lecturing her on evaluating the reliability of information sources, Addy shut him up with a kiss that led to her proving that she knew how to retrieve reliable information from some sources very well indeed. Her research was exhaustive and ended with their naked bodies sprawled crosswise on her bed.

Spencer conceded that in some areas she was indeed very well informed.

The room was dark when she woke out of sound sleep hours later, unsure of what had awakened her. A sudden surge of nausea answered that question with emphasis. She bolted for her bathroom.

Torn between trying not to wake Spencer and trying not to lose her dinner on the floor, she didn’t waste time closing the door but didn’t turn on the light, either. Reaching the toilet, she lost the contents of her stomach in gut-wrenching spasms that left her stomach muscles sore when at last she finished, panting in the dark. She closed the door and switched on the light before stumbling to the sink to rinse her mouth and brush her teeth. Her face was pale and sweaty in the mirror, her eyes enormously dark.