Cady’s gaze flicked to the open duffle, then back to Conn’s alert face. She spent a solid six to nine months a year on the road. She knew how much a person’s packing could tell about his personality. Most people didn’t travel like she did; a few days away from home hardly warranted homey touches like pictures or mementos. She had a picture of herself, Emily, and her mom, a casual pose taken in SoMa the last time she was home, just as winter was surrendering its grip on the city. Tulips and crocuses bloomed in big circular planters. Chris had taken the picture with his phone, surprising them in the middle of a cheerful argument about the best ice cream flavor. No matter how cramped the tour bus, how dingy the hotel room, she put that picture on her nightstand. And she always wore her Nana’s bracelet.
Conn had no pictures in his apartment. Not a single one. The only thing on the walls was a gigantic television. What was in that bag?
“What?”
His tone was brusque, making her question her decision. By rights she should be blissfully dreaming by now. She’d sat on the tiled bench in the steam shower until her throat felt liquid and the last of the stage makeup and crap road food seeped from her pores. She’d slathered her face in moisturizer, her body in lotion. She’d braided her hair, gotten into the big bed, arranged the pillows into a down-filled burrow. She was past bone-tired, into a profound exhaustion that was more mental than physical.
But she couldn’t sleep. Not with her mind replaying Conn’s every glance, his eyes guarded under the black watch cap, his every movement. She wanted to know what the planes of his chest looked like under the soft gray T-shirt, wanted to smooth her palms over his thighs and buttocks.
She should have been able to sleep. She couldn’t. And yes, she could take matters into her own hands, but that was for the tour bus, a quiet release to burn off enough energy for her to sleep.
She was home. In her own house. With a man she wanted as badly as she’d ever wanted a man before. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t feel like managing it,” she said. “There’s no reason to manage it. I want you. You want me. We’re both adults who understand the situation.”
“You don’t hook up on tour.”
A statement, a question, or a deflection? “Tour doesn’t work for me like that. Guys on the road, a groupie is just a release.”
“Keeps them from getting SRS?”
“What’s that?”
“Sperm Retention Syndrome.”
“If the main symptoms are a bad temper and a total inability to think straight, then yes.”
“But not you.”
“It’s a risk that isn’t worth the reward. It’s too complicated.”
He huffed a laugh, private, darkly amused.
“What?”
He took two slow steps across the floor, closing the gap between them. “I packed a dress shirt and jacket because I thought I might have to wait in the bar of a really nice restaurant while you seduced some hipster into your bed.”
He was close enough to touch, close enough to smell, and he smelled like all the best things: hot male skin and barbecue, with a hint of sweat.
“I can do that,” she said. She reached out and rested her fingertips against his hipbone, jutting above his belt. “If it turns you on. And if you find me a hipster. At the moment I’m fresh out of bearded guys in skinny jeans and black-rimmed glasses.”
His eyes were stormy blue now, dark with an intent desire that sent sparks crackling along her nerves to pool in her core. “Over my dead body,” he said.
Her gaze locked with his, she tugged his shirt up and settled her palm over the bare skin of his hip, stroking the hard bulge of muscle above it. “Let’s add that to the list,” she murmured. “No lawyers. No dead bodies. Just live ones. Very, very live ones.”
She slid her hand from his hip to his back, fingers dipping into the groove of his spine before flattening at the base. Moving him was impossible; pulling only brought her body up against his. She inhaled quickly. He smiled, a wolfish, predatory smile that was mostly about his lips and not at all about his eyes, and she mentally revised her theory of what he’d be like in bed to include words like “implacable” and “hard” and “domineering.”
Oh, yes, please.
She went up on tiptoe and pressed her mouth to his, feeling the plush of his lips, the way he parted them obligingly enough. Heat trickled through her, lit up her entire skin. But other than a quick inhale when her tongue touched his, a tensing of muscles, Conn didn’t respond. His eyes were still stormy blue, waves churning on the surface but there was movement in the depths. Something else was going on inside him, something long buried and deeply emotional. Her gaze searched his while she waited, leaving space for him to respond.
Or not.
“Message received,” she said, remembering his comment that she could read the signs if he didn’t want her. “My mistake.”