Stopping Short: A Hot Baseball Romance (17 page)

“Haley?” he asked, and this time, the growl was gone from his voice, replaced by naked concern.

No. Not
naked
. She had to stop thinking of
naked
.

“Here!” she said, barking out the word at full volume. Then she cleared her throat and said, like a normal person, “I thought you might be cold. It’s a quilt. You know. In case you’re cold.”

Oh my god. She must be drunk. But she wasn’t drunk—she hadn’t had a sip of alcohol since that one beer with dinner.

He started to push back the covers, getting ready to stand and cross the room, but she wasn’t prepared to let him do that. Instead, she closed the distance between them, practically throwing the quilt onto the bed. She turned on her heel and fled back to the doorway, trying not to think about how hard her heart was pounding.

“Thanks,” he said behind her, and she thought she heard him laughing.

“No problem,” she said, and she hurried out the door, pulling it closed all the way and practically running to her own room. She hurtled herself into her bed and pulled the blanket up to her nose.

No problem
, she’d said. But she’d lied. There was very much a problem. For the first time in her life, she’d realized that Adam Sartain wasn’t one of the untrained puppies in the pack of the Thurman clan.

He was a man. A man who might very well be lying naked in the next room. A man who had given her a foot massage and made her moan like Hollywood’s idea of a woman in love. A man she’d known every single day of her life, but who she was suddenly considering in a new light for the very first time.

She had a hard time falling asleep. And that wasn’t because Bess jumped up on the bed and purred like a freight train beside her ear.

~~~

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