Page 14 of One Bed

For the second night in a row, Bea didn’t sleep well. At all.

At around one a.m., or it might’ve been two, she sat up and looked at Gib on the other side of her Great Wall of Pillows. He lay on his stomach, his hands under his pillow, the sheet and light cotton throw barely covering his world-class ass. The moon was half full and bright, and beaming light into the room from the open window – she’d forgotten to lower the shade – and she could see him clearly. She took in his big arms, and his muscled back tapered into narrow hips. Because he went to bed with his hair wet, it resembled a bird’s nest, and the thick scruff on his jaw looked soft.

He slept silently, deeply, utterly relaxed.

At one point, almost in tears because she was so tired, she considered putting a pillow over his face and sitting on it. A judge familiar with the psychotic effects of insomnia would understand her struggle and would probably only sentence her to a year at a sleep clinic.

Now sitting at the small desk on the deck, her laptop in front of her and a blank Word document mocking her, she placed her elbows on the table, and wondered if a third cup of coffee was indulgent or necessary. It might make her feel reasonably human. But she couldn’t muster the energy to walk to the kitchen. Just like she couldn’t find the energy to write or check her emails. She’d spent the two hours since dressing zoning out by staring at the amazing view of the sea between the olive trees, doodling in her notebook and scrolling social media.

She’d had, maybe, two hours of sleep last night, three the night before and Bea felt like a walking zombie. She couldn’t spend another night inthatbed, not sleeping. She’d been super aware of Gib both nights. The room was five degrees hotter than normal from the heat rolling off him and images of his naked body – better than she’d imagined and she had, according to the professionals, a damn fine imagination! – kept flashing up on the big screen of her mind. Huge shoulders, ridged stomach, averyfine bum.

The jerk knew he had a good body and wasn’t afraid to show it off.

Unlike her. She’d never undressed in front of Gerry, and sex, back when they were both interested enough to bother, happened under the cover of darkness. Bea suspected Gib was a ‘do it in bright sunlight’ and ‘on the nearest flat surface’ type of guy.

Gib was the first guy, in a long, long time, to make her ovaries sit up and start chittering. Like over-excited meerkats, they were on their hindquarters, their heads swivelling, telling each other that their girls were desperate to meet his boys. Or, at the very least, that they wanted to see some action, of the naked, horizontal kind. Ofanykind.

She didn’t like feeling out of control, at the mercy of her sexual urges. Feeling like this made her wonder whether she was more like her mother than she wanted to be. In her weekly column, sex was one of Lou’s favourite topics, and she wasn’t shy about telling the world how much she loved it and how difficult it was to limit herself to one sexual partner at a time.We’re not supposed to be monogamous, people! We need variety!Was that something Lou learnt from Golly? Maybe.

Lou’s oft-stated position was that women who had hangups about the act (and their bodies) were weak, old-fashioned, and foolish. Bea was the exact opposite of her sultry, earthy, pleasure-seeking mother. And Gib was dangerous because he made her want to explore that hedonistic (albeit tiny) part of her personality, the side that she normally ruthlessly pushed down and away…

She, the thirty-year-old who hadn’t had sex for the last five years was desperate to roll around naked. With Gib. That was why he was dangerous, why having him around –sharing that blasted bed!– was problematic. She liked her life the way it was, she liked the normality of it, the ease of it, the worlds she controlled, both IRL and in fiction. She did not need a six-foot-something, sexy man to upend her carefully constructed apple cart!

But she was in deep danger of flipping tits over arse…

Would you please get a grip, Bea?The Urban Explorers, who’d unexpectedly returned to occasionally dance on the edges of her mind, stuck their fingers down their throats and gagged. Their hormones hadn’t kicked in yet and, thank God, never would.

Right, she’d been contemplating her lack of sleep, and she’d veered off into thinking about Mr Muscles again. Pride and stubbornness be damned, she couldn’t spend another nightnotsleeping next to him. So what were her options? She could drive to Fira and buy a camping mattress, or she could pad the fugly divan with blankets and sleep on that bed of nails.

Or she could rent another room…

What she wouldn’t be able to do was get Gib to move. Displacing him would require an SAS team and, possibly, a horse tranquilliser. Sleep was necessary for her to human and to adult, and she wasn’t going to keep sharing a bed with him. So –dammit, shit, and fuck – she was going to have to back down.

Not move out, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of doingthat. She still needed to be able to work at this desk, to escape here when Golly became too demanding, when she felt overwhelmed. Despite Gib’s presence, this cottage was still her safe space. But tonight, she’d spend the night on the floor on a mattress, or on the divan getting poked and prodded by God knows what.

Also, she couldn’t spend the next week trading barbs with Gib, fighting him every step of the way. Fighting wasn’t what she did, who she was, and arguing with him drained her mental batteries.

It took two to fight, and she could’ve been nicer, and less … abrasive. A lot less confrontational. More like her normal self.

She didn’t want him leaving Santorini thinking she was a bitch on wheels. Neither did she want Navy Caddell to hear that Golly’s niece had the personality of a rabid porcupine. That was something Gib’s agent cousin would remember and repeat.

That reminded her, she wanted to know more about Navy Caddell. Opening her computer, she banged his name into a search engine, added ‘literary agent’ and within seconds her screen flashed with results. She clicked on the link and landed on his agency’s website, her eyes raising at his profile picture. The Caddell men were attractive; it was obvious they’d hit the good-looks jackpot.

She skimmed through his bio, read his wish list, and whistled when she took in his clients. He’d managed to net some big names in a short time, and she was impressed. He was clearly a man who was making waves in the literary world.

‘Why are you stalking my cousin?’

Bea jumped a foot in the air and her elbow knocked over her mug, spilling her cold coffee over her open notebook, the one holding her notes on her new series and book ten.

She rushed inside to grab a dish towel to mop up the coffee and came back out to see Gib holding her notebook upright, coffee dripping from the pages onto the wooden deck and splashing his bare feet. He’d pulled on a pair of plain black, board shorts that hung low on his hips, just a fraction off indecent, and yet again he was shirtless.

Holy hotness. Hand her a fan!

‘God, your handwriting is terrible,’ Gib commented, peering at her scribbled notes.

Jerked back to her senses, she snatched the notebook out of his hand and grimaced when she read what she’d written.GMC, circled three times.Series arc.Riding the rapids. Hettie falls, Pip reacts!She’d also made a note to send out a newsletter. Thank God her writing was awful.

Seeing that her laptop was still open, Bea slammed it shut before wiping the coffee off her notebook, cursing when she saw several pages had stuck together. Normally, she’d be in tears, but her notes were drivel and most of the ideas on those pages were unusable.

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