Page 13 of Claimed by Him

I turned to look at Clay. “What?”

“Your ceiling.” He pointed. “It’s nice.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That is possibly the weirdest post-coital comment I’ve ever heard.”

He reached over and pulled me to his side. It felt strange for a moment since we’d never really…cuddled before, but then the familiar scent and feel of him registered and I relaxed again.

“Would you prefer to talk about what happened? About why you never take your shirt off when we’re together?” Clay’s voice was strangely gentle. “There are a lot of other things we could talk about, but I meant what I said, Rona. I’m not going to push. I just don’t want you to kick me out of bed right away.”

I didn’t look at him, but I shifted so that I could trace patterns on his bare chest. I had to make conversation, get his thoughts off what I was hiding. It shouldn’t have been hard. It wasn’t like Clay and I hadn’t talked before. Even back at Quantico, after we’d started sleeping together, it hadn’t been difficult to talk to him.

“Mind if I ask what you’ve been doing since I last saw you?” Asking him about himself seemed like a good way to steer the conversation.

“I finished up my lecture series,” he said, “and then I asked to be assigned somewhere as a field agent.”

“Really?” I was genuinely surprised. “I thought you loved teaching.”

He shrugged. “I did, and I might enjoy it again, but I wanted a change.”

“To field work?”

“Working as a profiler isn’t exactly the same as starting off as a junior agent,” he pointed out. “Though I’m going the ‘pair up and investigate’ route rather than the ‘sit in the office’ route.”

“You didn’t get in any trouble over me, did you?”

He looked at me now, his fingers playing with the sleeve of my shirt. “No.” His eyes widened. “Please tell me that wasn’t why you left.”

I shook my head. “As far as I know, they have no idea we were…you know.”

He chuckled and kissed the top of my head. “Haven’t you ever heard that if you can’t say it, you shouldn’t do it?”

I rolled my eyes, but I secretly enjoyed the fact that he was teasing me. It made the fact that we were laying here together seem less intense.

“Anyway, it took a while for things to go through since it’s more of a specialized position, but I’ve been officially assigned to the Denver office for the past two weeks.”

Denver. That was only a couple hours away.

“Did you request Denver?”

“No.” He looked down at me again, expression serious once more. “But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like the fact that you’re not far away.”

“Is that how you knew where I was?” I asked, keeping my tone light. “Inappropriate use of agency resources?” His cheeks turned red, and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing. “Really, Clay?”

“That’s not exactly how it was,” he said. “The agency generally monitors trainees who have left the program, especially ones who…” The sentence trailed off, and he looked away.

“Who got kicked out,” I finished for him.

He nodded. “All I did was ask Alphonso to keep me in the loop if your name popped up. He called me back at the beginning of last month to say that you’d applied for a PI license here in Fort Collins.”

If Clay had just been some random hook up, it would’ve been creepy. Hell, if he’d been someone I’d been in a relationship with for two months, it would’ve been creepy. But after Anton died, he’d looked out for me. It was a completely Clay thing to do.

It could’ve been more than that, but I wasn’t about to venture down that rabbit hole. I stuck with what was safe.

“How’s work going?”

“Great,” he said brightly. “I’ve been partnered with Raymond Matthews. He’s a great agent, responsible for taking down dozens of child pornography and human trafficking rings in the past few years.”

The name sounded familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it. I filed it away to check in the future and focused my attention back on Clay and the new problem I’d just realized.

No timetable meant no specific time he had to leave. I’d never had to think about how to ask a guy to leave before. Most of them couldn’t wait to get away after we were finished, as if they were afraid I’d read more into it than sex. Or I’d been the one to leave before things became awkward.

I’d enjoyed the sex, and I was glad to see Clay again, but now I was wondering if it was such a good idea, making him think that we were going to pick up where we left off in Virginia. Or that we had something to pick up other than casual sex.

“I’ve got to head back,” he said with a sigh.

“I understand.” I tried not to sound too pleased with his statement. I really didn’t want to risk my friendship with him, which meant I needed to figure out how to handle things before we did this again.

Ifwe did this again.

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