“You need to ask who it is,” he said.
“I saw you coming up the stairs,” she said reasonably. She’d taken off her coat while he scouted the grounds, and now had her hoodie pulled up over her hair. In jeans with the hoodie up, she looked both young and worldly wise, the dark circumference of her hood accenting her flushed cheeks, her lips, her big, bright hazel eyes.
“Where can I view the security camera footage?”
“Nowhere,” she said. “I don’t have any.”
Are you insane? “Why not?”
“It’s another level of security but it’s also another level of exposure. Feeds can be hacked. Images stolen. Right now I’m relying on the house being in a LLC’s name, and my car not being that well known.”
“My first recommendation is that you get security cameras installed. And motion detectors. We need to know who’s around the house while you’re gone. I’m only one person and I have to sleep.”
“No.”
Point blank. No room for argument. This was his first glimpse into Cady when she wasn’t willing to negotiate. He set it aside. Maybe, just maybe, if he kept moving, his body would forget its visceral, immediate reaction to Cady.
“Here’s what’s happening next. You’re going to give me a complete tour of the interior. Then we’re going to drive over to my place so I can pick up a few things. Then we’re going to take a look at the emails from the psychos folder and go over your schedule for the next few days so I can do any preliminary planning before we leave the house. Do you need to do any grocery shopping?”
“Mom and Emily picked up a few things for me before I arrived,” Cady said. On closer examination, her face was dark pink, her lips full and red, as if she’d bitten them, or better, as if he’d bitten them.
“Look,” he said suddenly, because the signs couldn’t be clearer that she was responding to the close quarters and instant attraction, “this can’t happen. We’re going to be in each other’s pockets for the foreseeable future, and getting physical won’t make it better. It will only make it worse.”
Those impossible green-gold eyes widened. “Excuse me?” she said.
He sketched a vague circle in front of his face while looking right at her.
Her brows drew down, then she laughed. “It’s not lust,” she said. “It’s the steamer.”
It was his turn to frown, confused. She pointed at the black granite countertops in the kitchen, where the steamer was hissing and popping gently next to a towel. “Dry air is hell on vocal cords. Cold, dry air is even worse. I have to keep my sinuses moist, because that warms the air before it reaches my throat. I use it a few times a day, depending on my schedule, how dry the air is.”
He flushed, shoved his hands in his pockets, and felt his shoulders crawl up to his ears. “Sorry,” he said. “I was out of line.”
“No, you were observant,” she said.
He looked at her, feeling a little of the heat drain from his cheeks.
“And you’re right. It’s not a good idea. I appreciate you stopping it now, before I really made a fool of myself.”
Her smile was a little forced, not quite reaching her eyes, and the color on her cheeks was now the dull red of embarrassment, not the bright flush of attraction. He reached out and snared her wrist, stopping her in the act of turning away from him.
“That’s on me,” he said, too rough, then moderated his tone. “I feel it, too. That’s why I said something. If it was just you, I would have ignored it. You’re savvy enough to read the signs. But this way…”
His voice trailed off, because he could feel her pulse skipping and thunking under his thumb, even through the thin fabric of her hoodie. A split second later he saw it in her throat. He wanted to back her into the wall, span her throat with his hand, and kiss her, measuring the strength of her response in her blood rising heated to her face under his fingertips.
She drew in a swift breath. He dropped her wrist, knowing he was over the line. No touching the star.
He wasn’t prepared for her fingertips to close around his. His gaze flashed to hers, and he could feel it happen, all the defenses drop, the stupid, dangerous, wide-eyed vulnerability he showed every single time someone wanted him.
“But this way,” she said, “we acknowledge it. It’s out in the open. We both know how we feel, where we stand. We’re both responsible for … managing it.”
“Managing it,” he repeated. Her touch had short-circuited his brain.
“Coming off tour is like coming off an eight-month adrenaline high,” she said. She didn’t drop his hand. “There’s a pretty predictable pattern. I sleep. A lot. Binge on TV shows. Eat all the junk food I couldn’t eat when I had to fit into a skin-tight costume. Stare into space. And I have all the sex I didn’t have when I was on tour.”