Page 40 of Foreplay on Words

Mental note: order an apron on Amazon.

“Baby...” My whisper went unanswered. She was out like a light. I wondered if she had trouble sleeping as I did sometimes.

My fingers skated down her sides, gently lifting her hips and attempting to ease her off to my side. She mumbled something and curled into the comforter as I finally freed myself. Lying on her stomach with her hair spread out around her, she looked sated.

Our chemistry—at least for me—was explosive.

I ached with the urge to climb back on the bed and slide into her from behind, but she was exhausted. And I wanted to look into her eyes the first time I was inside her.

With another person in the house, my fridge was depleting quicker than normal, so I’d need to make another trip into town this week. Maybe Chase would accompany me.

That’d get the town gossip chain going.

Feeling like I might as well do something productive, I found my laptop and worked on getting together a readable PDF of the latest re-draft of my manuscript.

My mind raced at the thought of her reading it, but I was also dying for feedback from someone other than Adrian. He was paid to be nice to me.

“Hey...”

Arms encircled my shoulders over the back of the couch as Chase kissed my ear and hugged me.

“Someone was tired,” I hummed, leaning back into her embrace.

“I know. You slept forever,” she yawned.

I could see what she was wearing when she walked around the edge of the couch. She’d obviously raided my closet, judging from the familiar blue plaid flannel shirt she wore. Her long legs were bare, but she also had a pair of my socks on.

“Someone is making herself at home.” I was sure my smile was ridiculous.

She tucked her hair behind her ear and suddenly looked shy. I wasn’t upset. She looked amazing in my shirt. It hugged her curves and hit mid-thigh, showing off a sizeable amount of bare skin.

“It looked soft,” she confessed as she rubbed one of the lapels against her cheek before she settled at the other end of the couch.

“I’m never getting that back, am I?” And I was okay with that one hundred percent.

“Probably not.”

This time when I stared across the space on the couch between us, it wasn’t awkward or uncomfortable. My staring had to do with the fact that I couldn’t and didn’t want to stop looking at her, not my sometimes-intense awkward behavior. It hadn’t seemed to bother her anyway.

“So, do we have a plan?” she asked as she nodded toward my computer.

“For?” I asked curiously.

“You’re telling me you haven’t planned the rest of the day in your head?”

I picked up the tablet from the corner of the couch and slid it into her lap. “Well, you’ve got some reading to do...”

“And what are you going to do?” Her soft smile warmed something inside of me.

“I skipped my run for you this morning, so I probably need to get that in.”

“Are you sure I can’t watch that instead?” she smirked.

“Fine,” I teased as I started to tug the tablet toward myself, “if you don’t want to read it then I guess I can take the tablet back.”

“No! This is mine.” She pulled it back and hugged it to her chest.

“I’ll be on the treadmill in the sunroom,” I told her as I stood up and went to find my running shoes by the front door.

---