I took a deep breath to calm myself down and gingerly picked myself out of the broken glass minefield so I could get a towel and the broom to clean up the mess. “Why aren’t you asleep, Poppy?”
I knew the answer. The old Victorian I bought just a few weeks after relocating to Denver was huge, had three different levels, was made of sturdy wood and had heavy, solid doors on each room. None of that was enough to keep the sounds of this young woman’s screams of terror as she had nightmare after nightmare from reaching me. They weren’t as frequent as when she first moved into my home. In fact they hardly ever pulled me from my own troubled dreams anymore, but every now and then I would hear her voice through the walls, hear heartbreaking sobs echoing across the rafters, and my brittle heart wanted to snap in two for her.
She pushed some of her long caramel-colored hair behind her ears and lifted an eyebrow at me. “Bad dream. How about you, Sayer? Why are you still up?”
I cleared my throat as I bent down to sweep the glass up.
It was late.
I was really tired.
I had a full day at work tomorrow and I needed to be up early enough so I could swing by the gym before I went into my office.
I had also agreed to have drinks with a fellow attorney after my final court appearance of the day. It was a semi date I had already rescheduled twice, so I couldn’t reasonably back out again without looking like a complete jerk. Doing any of that on a few hours of sleep was less than ideal, but I was getting used to running on fumes lately. I too was having dreams that woke me up in the middle of the night, that left me shaken, heated, and too wound up to stay in bed.
Only my dreams weren’t terror inducing—-they were good. Oh so fucking good. They were better than good. They were the best dreams I had ever had. Hell, the dreams were better than any kind of actual sexual experience I had ever had while wide awake. They were the kind of dreams that had me jerking up from a dead sleep while I panted and sweated. I woke up twisting in my sheets and touching myself because the man that starred in each and every single one of them was nowhere around.
Control was everything to me, and Zeb Fuller made me want to lose it even when he was sound asleep in his own bed all the way across Denver.
I’d paid him a fortune to turn this broken down, sagging, sorry excuse for a house into a stately, soaring, and magnificent home, and so Zeb had his hands all over my real-life dreams, not just my naughty midnight ones. He had finished the last of the remodel a couple of weeks ago and ever since, I found myself missing the sounds of hammering, drilling, and the rumble of his deep voice. All the dirty, sexy things I secretly wanted him to do to me were chasing me into dreamland, making for rough mornings and some serious dark circles under my eyes. I was pale anyway, so there was no hiding the evidence of Zebulon Fuller’s effect on me.
It was stupidly simple. I had a crush that I couldn’t shake, and it terrified me.
It made me feel off-balance, unsure, and so damn sexually frustrated I wanted to pull out all of my long, blond hair by the roots just for a distraction.
I swore softly as a piece of glass slid across my fingertip when I bent down to usher the mess into the dustpan. I stuck the bleeding digit into my mouth and grunted in annoyance at myself. I had learned before I could walk that showing any kind of emotion was a weakness, a fatal flaw that would end with you in tears as the victor stood over your broken, weeping form with a look of pity and disgust on his face. I shouldn’t have jumped when Poppy startled me. I was supposed to be honed of more glacial stuff than that. I didn’t react to anything—ever. Poppy was still staring at me with wide-eyed curiosity so I pulled my finger out of my mouth and wiped it on the yoga pants I had worn to bed.