Now, if that wasn’t the cutest damn thing ever. He’d made Jolene blush. He scooped her up and rolled onto his back so she landed on his chest. “Whatever you say, sweetheart.” He gave her backside a playful tap. “You hungry?”
“For what?”
“Dinner this time. We can get back to this later.” He needed some steak.
“Yes. I will never turn down a meal.”
“Let me up and I’ll grill those steaks for us. I’m starving.”
She yawned and lifted her head from his chest. “You have to pull out. I’m not moving first. I could lie here like this forever.”
So could he. That was the problem.
Chance shifted her off of him carefully and climbed out of bed, his chest tight for reasons he absolutely refused to think about. “You just relax, sweetheart. I’m going to whip up dinner.”
Jolene pouted. “You owe me a cuddle.”
That made him even more tense, because while it was a casual nothing of a statement, it did imply a future. Or maybe she was talking about while they were here, in the cottage, and he needed to not overthink the damn thing to death. “Oh, I’ll give you a cuddle, don’t you worry.”
She stretched out a shapely leg and pushed him in the chest with her curled toes. “Then git to it, mister.”
God, she was so adorable. He gave her a hard peck on the forehead, then got the hell out of there before he said something stupid.
—
“I think we screwed the songwriting skills out of me,” Chance said, hitting a bad note and dropping his hand. “This is ridiculous. I’ve never drawn such a blank in my whole life. We’ve got zip on a whole album.”
Jolene had to admit it was a little disconcerting. They weren’t fighting. They weren’t distracted or upset. They were just…blank. Three hours after dinner and not a single usable lyric was written on her notepad. It was definitely abnormal for them to be at it so long and come up with absolutely nothing. “Maybe we depleted our enzymes or something. Maybe we need Gatorade.”
“Maybe I’m just too goddamn content.” Chance set his guitar down on the sofa and shook his head. “My mind is just empty. You sucked me dry, woman.”
He didn’t look particularly upset by that fact. If anything, he looked like he wanted a nap and another round of naked wrestling.
“Sorry, not sorry.” She wasn’t. The words would come. Who knew when she’d have another chance to snag this many orgasms in short order?
“Me, either.” His eyes were hooded and he yawned. “I wish we had a hot tub.”
“I don’t. It would be outside, and then we’d end up making a video that would land on the Internet.” She crossed and uncrossed her legs, feeling restless. Reaching out to Dolly, she rubbed the dog behind the ears. “Maybe we should throw in the towel for today.”
“One song in two days isn’t going to cut it. We have a whole album to write.”
Every time he said that, her determination not to be concerned eroded a little more.
He rubbed his jaw absently. “Maybe we need a field trip. Maybe we should go back to Nashville.”
Jolene shrugged. “Ginny does want us to leave here, but I’m not sure going back to Nashville is what she has in mind.” Nor was she sure what that would accomplish.
“Ginny is not the boss of me.”
Nobody was the boss of him, which was kind of his problem in general. But she couldn’t say much. She had her own set of control issues, and she knew he was joking. Sort of.
“Don’t be stubborn. Just explain why you think we should go back,” she said.
“Change of scenery. Go back to where we were successful in writing together.”
Her anxiety kicked up another notch. He made it sound so…dire. “Maybe we should revisit some of the pivotal places that influenced our relationship to spark some emotion.”
“Like the bathroom of the record label’s jet?” he asked, giving her a wink.
Oh Lord. Jolene laughed, her cheeks heating. She’d forgotten about that particular rendezvous. “No! I meant like your old house in East Nashville and my pool. The studio. The Bluebird. The diner.” Anything would be better than sitting around feeling frustrated. “I’m not going to lie, I’m panicking. What if we’re dead, Chance? What if the music has died?”
Bad enough to go down in flames because she and Chance had been too stubborn to collaborate, but much worse to have her career end simply because they had run out of ideas. She was twenty-five years old. How in the hell could she be out of ideas? It was downright terrifying.
So much for being rational. But this was the culmination of low-grade worry over her career that she’d been experiencing ever since she and Chance had broken up.
“That is the most melodramatic thing I’ve heard in a good long while. Calm down, darlin’, we’re just worn out from knocking boots. We probably need a good night’s sleep.”
Jolene glanced at her phone. “It’s only eight o’clock. This is the longest day ever.”
“But not a bad one.”