Page 35 of Caught from Behind

Then he gives me something absolutely beautiful.

A gorgeous smile and dancing brown eyes.

His hand slides from beneath mine, moving away from my cheek as he braces himself on my pillow. He reaches over me for my cell phone again, silencing the alarm—one of many that work in tandem to get me up in the morning.

But, funny story, a sexy hockey player in my bed, smiling as he tugs the covers off my body and I don’t seem to have a problem staying awake.

“You really aren’t a morning person, are you?”

I scowl. “I get where I need to be when I need to be.”

“And how many alarms does it take for you to wake up enough to get there?” he teases.

I feel my cheeks go hot—probably because the plethora of alarms I use in the morning is one of the few things that has Knox and Nova plotting murder when we spend the night in the same place.

“None of your business,” I mutter, trying to snatch my cell so I can conceal the evidence.

But he beats me to it.

And proves that he knows me too fucking well because he promptly unlocks it and scrolls to the Clock App.

I start to sputter, but he doesn’t miss a beat, just snags his phone from the other nightstand and tosses it onto my lap. “5-2-5-6,” he tells me.

Stunned by the sudden turn of events—and the phone in my lap—I don’t process that he’s given me the code to unlock his cell, not until he nods at it and says, “Don’t have anything to hide,” he says. “Feel free to check out my own alarms…” A wink. “Or anything else.”

“Or an-anything el-else?” I sputter, holding his phone like it’s a bomb in my hand that’s going to explode.

He’s given me permission to snoop?

Just like that?

Who does that?

Riggs Ashford apparently.

I shake my head at myself, and then…

Well, and then I take advantage of the glimpse behind the curtain this man is giving me.

First, I look at the alarm app.

“Five AM?” I ask. “Jesus Christ, are you a glutton for punishment or what?”

He just holds up my phone screen in response…with all my alarms—each set ten minutes apart—showing on the screen. “I don’t think you have room to talk, chérie.”

French Canadian coming out.

I shiver.

Yeah, I love the way it rolls over my skin, settles between my legs.

He grins, as though he knows precisely how that makes me melt.

I want to look through the rest of his cell—emails and social media, pictures and text messages…but I don’t.

Partly because…privacy.

But mostly because he’s snagging his phone from me before I can, tossing it aside?—

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