Snow White and the Seven Hunks editedbymegan .wps (30 page)
“The one you had before.”
I turned to look at Gabe, who’d responded, as he strode in with my suitcase. He passed me. Shaking my surprise, I followed him up the stairs and found that Basil had set down a couple of boxes in the room and was heading out again. We waltzed at the door for a moment and he finally stepped back to allow me to enter.
It gave me the strangest feeling when I stepped into the room—as if I’d come
home. It was the same. I couldn’t see any sign, anyway, that they’d changed anything.
Setting the box I was carrying down, I headed to the dresser than had held my wardrobe and pulled the drawer out. My heart skipped several beats when I saw everything was still there—everything had been laundered and returned to the drawer.
When I turned around, I discovered Gabe had paused and was watching me. I
smiled at him. “I always liked this room.”
Some of the tension went out of him. He lifted his head and looked around. “It was mine when I was a kid.” He made a wry face. “We redecorated, of course. I didn’t sleep in the four poster.”
I chuckled.
He hesitated. “Just so you know, the cameras and microphones have been
removed.”
I glanced around again. “What a shame,” I murmured.
He looked a little startled and then frowned doubtfully, as if he was wondering if he’d heard me wrong or if he suspected I was being sarcastic. I didn’t remove the doubt.
I headed to the bed and unloaded the box I’d brought up. Beneath the pillows, I discovered all of my lingerie that I hadn’t packed. I carried it to the dresser and put it in the same drawer with my slutty wardrobe from the shoot, wondering as I did if there was any significance I could place on the presence of my old wardrobe that might even come close to reality.
I decided there probably wasn’t any significance at all. They’d probably just
stuffed it in the drawer because they didn’t know what else to do with it—and that beat the hell out of the possibility that they might’ve decided to save it to see if they could get their girlfriends to wear it.
When I’d finished putting everything away, I decided to take a bath and wash my hair before I got rid of the boxes and went in search of the box of ice cream I hoped they’d removed from my refrigerator and brought. It was probably half-melted if not worse, but I liked soupy ice cream, too. There didn’t seem to be any sense in letting it go to waste.
I discovered the men were all in the kitchen when I got downstairs in my favorite sleep shirt—my ugly old worn sleep shirt—with my hair wound up in a towel on top of my head. The guys sent me a startled look.
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I narrowed my eyes at them and headed for the refrigerator to check the freezer.
“It’s melted—probably isn’t any good,” Shaun volunteered.
“I like it soft.” I got a dish out of the cabinet and poured mostly melted ice cream in it and then found a spoon. “You guys mind if I watch TV? I have to wait for my hair to dry.”
Gabe cleared his throat. “Sure. Help yourself.”
Smiling at them, I headed into the living room, found the remote and sat in the middle of the couch with my legs folded tailor style. Flipping through the channels until I found something that interested me, I put the remote down and stared at the screen, slurping melted ice cream. The guys came in a few minutes later carrying various snacks and settled around the room to munch and stare at the TV.
“What’s this?” Gabe asked curiously.
“Pictures of the universe … taken with the Hubble. It’s called ‘A trip through the Universe’ or something like that. I missed the beginning. You can change the channel if you want to.”
Finished with my ice cream, I unwound the towel from my head, figuring it had
absorbed all the water it was going to, and began to finger fluff my hair to help it dry.
They actually surprised me by staying to watch until the conclusion. “I’m
heading for bed,” Gabe announced, getting up and stretching.
“Do we still have that meeting tomorrow with Glenda?” Hunter asked.
Gabe frowned. “I guess so.”
“I guess I’ll go to bed, too, then.”
Discovering an exodus from the parlor, I decided to go up to my own room, dry
my hair a little with the blow dryer and then go to bed. It was still pretty early, but I hadn’t slept all that well for a while. I checked the doors since everyone else had already gone up, turning out the lights as I moved from room to room and then went upstairs.
I paused at the door as I went into my room, my hand going automatically to the lock. After a moment’s thought, I decided against it—just in case.
I was drowsing on the edge of sleep when I heard my door open and footsteps
cross the room. When I opened my eyes, I saw Gabe standing beside the bed.
I couldn’t read his expression. It was dark in the room and his face was in
shadow, but I didn’t need to to know why he’d come. I heard him swallow. “You don’t need to do this if it isn’t something you want. It isn’t part of the package.”
I lifted my arms to him instead of replying.
He dove at me, finding my mouth almost before he’d settled. That was when I
really felt as if I’d come home, when I felt his mouth on mine, found myself adrift in his essence and drunk with the pleasure of it.
He was hungry, ravenous, and I felt it with every touch as he peeled my night
shirt off and stroked and caressed me and brought my desire to fever pitch.
I
was starving for his touch. I didn’t need to be teased to reach my zenith. It was just a pure pleasure to be luxuriating in the way he made me feel.
I’d begun to pull him at him demandingly before he finally nudged my legs apart and settled in the cradle of my thighs. He paused, gasping hoarsely as he searched beneath the pillow. I hadn’t seen him bring the tube he’d shoved beneath it and it flickered through my mind that he hadn’t been too uncertain of his welcome if he’d come prepared.
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On the other hand, I loved a man who was always prepared!
Someone tried the doorknob just about the time he finished stroking the lubricant over himself. He planted his mouth over mine and bore me back to the pillow when I lifted my head to look toward the door. Whoever it was had left by the time he broke the kiss—or he broke the kiss when he heard them leave.
Aligning his body with mine, he penetrated me without hesitation, rocking his
hips as he thrust a little deeper each time. The feel of his slow claiming, the strain of my body to accept him and the delightful abrasion of his cock, drove me closer and closer to release. I came almost as soon as he’d filled me to my limits, but I’d learned not to allow that to disappoint me. I enjoyed it to the fullest and then focused again on the feel of his body moving in and out of mine, strumming my hands over his broad back as I met his thrusts. I began clutching at him a little frantically as I felt my body gathering toward my second climax, urging him to move faster. He caught my feverish desperation, gasping from time to time as if he was holding his breath. I felt his cock jerk inside of me. It touched off the explosion of rapture I’d been waiting for. Shuddering with the force of it, I struggled to maintain the rhythm, fought to catch my breath as the spasms ripped through me. He followed me to glory, shuddering and gasping as he pumped his seed into me, sinking heavily against me in the aftermath.
Dragging in a deep, shaky breath, I lifted upward enough to kiss his chest and
throat. “I missed this,” I murmured, stroking my cheek over his chest before I collapsed against the pillows.
He bent his head, shifting downward to disengage our bodies. “I missed it, too,”
he said huskily against the side of my neck. Releasing a deep sigh of contentment, I turned to snuggle against him and drifted off to sleep when he moved to the bed beside me.
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It was an understatement, Gabe thought wryly. He hadn’t thought when she’d left that he was going to have a real problem waiting a week or two to go after her. The business of trying to wrap everything up and trying to get their new project in line and started kept all of them busy.
Wrong! The truth was that he’d been so preoccupied with trying to plan his
campaign to get her back—for real, and for good—that he hadn’t been able to focus on business with more than half a brain.
The truth was that he’d leapt at the excuse to sweep her up and bring her back so that he could keep her safe because he’d just been looking for a reason, any reason, to get her back.
And that complicated the hell out of his plans to wait until the others had focused elsewhere.
He’d landed himself in the same situation, pretty much, as he’d been in when she left—fierce competition to stake a claim. Of course, they’d ditched nearly half the
‘hunks’, but he’d never considered the other three much competition to begin with.
He shook the wandering thoughts. She was safer with all of them to keep an eye on her. That was the important thing at this juncture—making sure some psycho didn’t get his hands on her. He didn’t entertain a lot of doubt that he could handle the son-of-a-bitch if he managed to find her, but they had to carry on with their lives. They were going to be coming and going. At least with four of them, they could make sure she was always watched by one of them—without making her feel like she was in prison or, hopefully, scaring her by letting her know how worried they were that there was a maniac stalking her.
* * * *
bedrooms upstairs—but I saw that it wasn’t nearly as crowded as I’d thought. It was a large room, nearly as big as the front parlor.
And filled with equipment. Beyond the fact that I could see that some of it was computers, and all of it electronics, I had no idea what the equipment was or what it was intended for. It looked expensive, though.
Each of the guys had workstations and all of the workstations looked like disaster areas. Gabe gestured at the room. “See if you can organize this stuff—just don’t touch the equipment and don’t lose anything.”
I nodded, but he’d already turned and strode to his workstation. I moved to the middle of the room, or the eye of the hurricane, turning slowly in a circle and surveying everything. My honest assessment by the time I’d taken it all in was that it was hopeless.
Heading into the kitchen, I searched until I found a box of plastic trash bags, deciding SNOW WHITE & THE SEVEN HUNKS Kimberly Zant 137
that was the place to start since their trashcans were overflowing.
The trashcans were full of notes—snack wrappers and empty soda cans, too, but
lots of notes. I’d crouched down to empty to Basil’s trash when I noticed the notes, some of them wadded up, others not. I found several envelopes that looked like bills, too—
unopened. Uneasy when I discovered unopened mail in the container, I settled on the floor and began sorting it carefully.
“What are you doing?”
I looked up and discovered Basil frowning at me. “There’s mail here. I thought I should just check before dumping everything out.”
“Let me see!” he demanded, holding his hand out.
I placed the envelopes in his hand and he flipped through them. “I found the light bill!” he announced to the room at large. “My cell phone bill ….” He handed the envelopes back to me. “Don’t lose that stuff. It’s bills.”
I wasn’t comforted at the discovery that Basil had a tendency to file everything in the trashcan. I had a feeling he wasn’t the only one either. When I’d finished sorting possibly important from obvious trash, I looked around for a safe place to put them until I’d gone through everything else. There weren’t any filing cabinets and every surface, including most of the floor, was covered with equipment and wires. I went back to the kitchen and grabbed a couple of the boxes that had been used to carry my stuff.
When I’d searched the studio from one end to the other for a pen to write with and come up empty, I discovered Gabe had a pen over each ear and stole one of them. “I need my pen!” he growled.
“Then use the one over your other ear!”
He looked startled, felt both ears and found the pen. Shrugging, he stuck it over his ear again. When my stomach started grumbling, I went into the kitchen. Discovering it was past noon, I inventoried the food in the house and finally found enough to put a meal together.
“Do you guys want to eat at your desks or in the dining room?”
They all stopped and turned to stare at me blankly for a moment and then bailed out of their chairs and raced each other to the door. Shaking my head in amusement, I carried the food to the dining room and, while I had them trapped, made them look through the notes.
That was when I discovered that their handwriting was so bad that they had
trouble reading their own notes.
Which was probably why the notes were in the trashcan.
* * * *
Fine, he thought! They needed to clear the air anyway. He didn’t like fucking sneaking down to her room. They might as well settle everything now.
“What’s up?”
They folded their arms. “I think we should move the discussion downstairs,”
