Page 31 of Never Say Yes To A Stranger

He walks up the stairs at nine, each step sounding like a clap of thunder as he gets closer and closer. I freeze in the bed and drop the book I haven’t been able to read a single word of all week. He knocks on the bedroom door even though it’s wide open, causing me to double-freeze. My body is pulling a frozen-in-time ice block trick, but my heart is racing madly.

This man has been up in my space, but seeing him dressed in that tight black T-shirt and those dark grey sweats remindsme he’s human. Also, he looks even more intensely muscled in this than he does in his suits. When he takes that off and puts on these casual clothes, he looks more human and less like a bodyguard slash agent from some organization he’s barely explained to me. He’s far less of an unfeeling professional who’s here to do his job and far more just a regular guy who wants to sleep in my bed.

Not that it makes him regular. In fact, it makes him highly irregular.

I’d like to say that seeing him in street clothes makes him seem vulnerable, but they don’t. Nothing about this man is vulnerable.

“I was wondering if you—” he begins.

“Remembered about tonight?” I fill in for him. I pat the other side of the bed, pretending to be all casual, but I probably look like a hyperactive penguin flapping flippers around all over the place. Because I’m not casual, and I’m not controlled. My heart is running a marathon inside my chest. “Yup. Sure did.”

“And it’s still alright?” he clarifies.

“If it weren’t, you’d just hold me to paying out something or other, yes?”

His dark eyes go from slightly guarded and a little pensive to immediately stormy. I’ve provoked something in him, and I should probably back off, but instead, it just makes me go for it while I pretend the rest of me isn’t abnormally excited about even slightly annoying a man who refuses to show any emotion.

“While we’re on the topic of what I’m okay with, yes, this is fine. We made a contract, I agreed, and I’m good with this arrangement. It’s the other contract that needs some fine-tuning.”

He stares me down with the usual impassivity he’s perfected. But I refuse to let it bother me anymore. I refuse to keep looking for emotion where it should exist. It does, I’m sure. He’s just a master at not showing it. “Fine-tuning how?” He leans againstthe door frame. It makes his abs flex hard against his T-shirt, and lord, I think I can see his nipples sticking out just a little in two tiny marks because the fabric is so soft and high quality.

Of course, he’d have super expensive T-shirts, and double of course, they’d make him look like a rock-hard bad-ass god.

“I need air without you breathing down my neck,” I state.

He does exactly what I expected and gives it zero consideration. “That’s not my job. You signed the damn contract. If you’d read it, you’d know.”

“Hmm.” I fling the book on the nightstand aggressively while trying to pretend I’m not pissed off. There’s pretty much no point. I should just skip straight to losing my mind so we can have this out and just go the shit to bed. “Great powers of observation there, butt floss.” Whatever. I never said I wasn’t annoyed to the point of total immaturity.

“Butt floss is not a thing.”

Gah! Does this man have to be so rational? Does he have to be so calm and infuriating and just freakingdead-faceme all the time? “Oh yeah? What do you think a thong is?”

He’s way too good at this for me to get one up on him. “I want to know why you have such an unhealthy obsession with butts.”

He’s right. I do use butts way too much in regular conversation, and when it comes to insults, I’m right there. It’s just natural, is it not, to compare people we don’t like to rear ends? The more inventive, the better it is. Just calling someone an asshole isn’t nearly enough. “Who says it’s unhealthy?” I snap. I refuse to admit to him that he’s maybe got a point. I’d like to tell him to go to hell, aka the guest bedroom, but I can’t even do that. He’s got me bound right up with these stupid contracts. Not that I didn’t agree. Because I did. I fucked myself over, and I am well aware of the irony in that. “Ugh. Can you just get into bed and turn the lights off, please?”

He does. Silently. He complies like everything is hunky fucking dory. He switches off the lights and gets into bed as neatly and silently as he can while I flop back against the pillows. Then, we both lie there like that. He seems fine on his back. I don’t want to break first and look at him. It would be a kind of surrender, and that is not happening. He obviously doesn’t let things get to him. This argument probably didn’t mean a thing, and he likely can’t even understand why I’m angry or why I’m feeling any other emotion since he’s a freaking stone. Rock hard on the outside, rock hard on the inside.

Whomp! Rattle, rattle, bang!

We both shoot upright in bed at the same time. Beau is fast. While I immediately reach for my pillow to try and grasp—everyone knows that in an emergency involving night horrors, a pillow and a bed will clearly provide the best protection—Beau leaps out of bed and goes racing down the stairs. I hear his bare feet thumping and thenflying. I dive under the blankets, shivering and shaking until approximately five million years, I mean a few minutes, have passed, and I hear him coming back upstairs. He doesn’t flick on the lights. He stands at the end of the bed, outlined in sexy moonlight shadows from the window like he planned for them to do him all the favors and make me steam up in the few places that even had some steam left.

“It was just a raccoon trying to get the lid off the trashcan. I scared it away.”

“What? You didn’t grab it and sit it down and have a long conversation with it about why trashcans aren’t a thing in this yard and then slap a contract on its ass?”

“Not at all. Those things are rabid, and to boot, they can’t read.”

The worst part? I’m not even sure if he’s deadpanning or serious. His eyes are a little shiny like he’s amused with himself,but it could just be the light from the yard and the moonlight doing him more favors.

“They’re not all rabid,” I say with a sniff. At least I know the wildlife out here better than he does. Beau is a city boy. He probably can’t survive five minutes in the country if he has to.

Really? He’s been here all week, surviving like a total boss.

As he climbs back into bed, I make myself comfortable on my back again. I don’t look at him. And he doesn’t look at me either. The room is so silent, and it’s honestly the most uncomfortable thing in the world.

Rattle, bump.

---