Nope.
No need to have that pointed out. I pivot to go past him, but my sudden stop has him right behind me and I’m brushing against his large, hunky body. His strength, his heat, are like a wall up along my side. Zing. A bunch of dormant parts of me light up and wave.
I clear my throat, the sound jarring in the quiet of the room.
I wave behind him. “The bathroom’s next,” I squeak out. Seriously, who is this woman?
He cocks an eyebrow but turns and heads there. My body relaxes by degrees as his steps take him from my side.
When the bathroom light hits his gorgeous face, my breath catches. Not at his gorgeous face. That’s not a surprise. Nope, it’s because the light just reminded me what I left in there. Shit.
I sprint forward and hip-check him as if we’re opposing players on the field. He grunts, but barely moves. That doesn’t stop me, though. I squeeze past his large frame and whip the undies I left hanging to dry over the glass shower wall.
That would be embarrassing enough. But more embarrassing? These are boring white cotton panties.
Maybe I am a dork.
I quickly glance sideways at him. He’s got too much of the look of feigned concentration on some other part of the wall—yep, he saw.
Oh well.
One night. That’s all I have to get through without revealing my feelings for him.
One. Damn. Night.
Conor
Bollocks. All I’m doing tonight is punching feckin’ pillows. First, it was my rucksack at the airport as I tried to make it and the floor into a bed for myself. Now, I have a goddamn real pillow and a surprisingly comfortable sofa bed and… I’m wide awake, staring into the darkened ceiling like a bloody muppet.
I mean, what the fuck?
Is it nerves for my presentation? Yeah, a bit of it, but that doesn’t usually prevent me from falling asleep, especially after playing hard over a weekend. I’ll get that bonus and secure my sister’s farm, yeah.
But as I flip to my other side and picture Claire and how awkward it was when I arrived and we were both readying for bed, I think I know why. And I’m regretting coming here. Because a thread of unease is winding through me at the idea of getting with Claire.
The bleeding truth is, I’m not one for long-term relationships. I left Ireland to escape the disaster of my personal life. When your only girlfriend is someone who knew you your whole life, and the entire village was thinking you were getting hitched, it fucking guts you when she finds you lacking, yeah. Up till that moment, I was telling myself that my mam leaving when I was a lad wasn’t on me. But it’s hard-going to convince yourself of that after being unceremoniously dumped. Hard-going not to question everything that’s happened to you leading up to that moment.
Just the idea of opening myself up to Claire has me tied up in feckin’ knots.
Jaysus. What a whiney man-child I’m after being. I’m spinning what-ifs in the air like it’s my life depending on it. My brain’s knackered to be thinking Claire has any interest in me for the long term, much less for some riding in the sheets.
I’ve set the alarm for five a.m. When that alarm rings—and Mother Mary do I pray it snatches me from a deep sleep and doesn’t find me still staring at this dark ceiling—we’ll be gone away from each other and getting on with ourselves.
Conor
My mobile’s blaring an obnoxious, repetitive sound, waking me from sleep. I groan and lean over to the end table. The room, shrouded in the dark gray of pre-dawn, slowly swims into focus. Slapping my hand around the table finds me the hard shape of my mobile.
“Enough with it, yokes,” I mumble at the sound, desperate to end the noise. Through the bedroom door, Claire’s mobile is making the same blaring sound.
At least I’d fallen asleep.
It’s an emergency alert. The words are staring up at me. The hurricane made landfall north of Savannah and is heading…to Atlanta?
I have some text alerts too, one from Delta. I pull that one up first.
“Fuck,” I groan. The airport is after shutting down all flights in and out. We’re stuck in Atlanta for the day at the least.
Through the bedroom door, Claire grunts the same word of frustration. I smile. Just then my five o’clock alarm rings, and I shut it off.
What the effin’ hell am I going to do now? I pull up the weather app. The whole Southeastern United States is covered in a big spiral. Well, there goes Idea Number One—it’s not a rental car we’ll be driving straight through a hurricane.
We. My mind’s going straight to we.
Christ bleeding on the cross.
The bedroom door snicks open, light from her room bleeding in, and Claire pokes her head out, her brown hair sticking out in tangles. She has a crease along one cheek. She blinks at me and rubs an eye. “Did you see the news?” Her voice is groggy, and she looks adorable in her sleep-rumpled state.
I sit up. “Yeah.” I run my hand over my scalp. “I thought hurricanes only hit your coastal cities?”
She leans against the doorframe. She doesn’t realize it, but the action pulls her baggy shirt up, exposing a sliver of smooth stomach. My dick chubs up a little.
“Yeah, this is a little unusual. It’ll probably lose strength, but it’s happened once before that I know of—Hurricane Opal back in the 90s. Hit Atlanta just after being downgraded to a tropical storm, if I remember right.”
“Ain’t that savage,” I say as I make sure my blanket is covering the important—growing—bits. I must have been out of my bleeding skull to be thinking last night that she was uncomfortable because she was attracted to me.
“Yeah.” She looks back to her mobile and rubs the sleep from her eyes with her other hand. “I’m booking the room for two more nights just in case.”
“Grand idea, that. I’ll see if some have opened up.”
She looks relieved. That shouldn’t bother me, but it’s doing just that. It’s not that I’m thinking I’m some great catch or such a magnetic and fine personality that everyone wants to be near, but the usual lot just find me neutral, not repellent.
“I’ll just be ringing work then. My boss’ll be needing as much time as possible to rearrange schedules.”
I heave out of the bed and fold it up, setting the furniture to rights. I yank the curtains open. While it’s still dark out, I can see that it’s already bucketing down. The first squalls have hit us. I pull in a deep breath and hit the number on my mobile for my boss.
Conor