Page 16 of Fractured Dreams

And now that the initial shock of realizing he was attracted to her had worn off, he’d have much better command of himself. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been around plenty of beautiful women in his life. He wasn’t an animal; he could control his thoughts.

Most of the time.

Tex picked up his guitar and left the room, heading back into the main part of the house. He wondered where Eden was, figuring he should apologize for leaving so abruptly and ghosting her for most of the morning.

“Eden?” He called her name but didn’t hear a response. Would she have gone out without telling him? Maybe. His behavior that morning had been pretty rude.

He put his guitar down on a chair in the living room and wandered toward the back of the house, looking out through the glass door to see if she was in the pool.

She was.

Well, she was getting out of it anyway. In a black bikini. Not even a particularly skimpy bikini, but still, there was no missing her curves.

How the hell had he ever missed those curves?

Partially concealed by the door, Tex let his eyes roam downward. He felt like a sleaze, but he might as well get it over with since there didn’t seem to be any way to put the genie back in the bottle now that it was out; no way to stop seeing her as a desirable woman. And he was going to be living with her for three weeks, so he needed to get used to looking at her.

She was slender, but with surprisingly full breasts, nipped-in waist and curvy hips. Long legs for her height, and he already knew what her ass was like—perfect.

With water dripping down her skin and her hair slicked back, she looked like a walking wet dream.

Fuck me.

He ran his hand over his face, trying to control his body’s response. It was a struggle. What the hell was wrong with him? How many gorgeous women had he seen naked for God’s sake, yet he couldn’t remember ever having such a visceral reaction to any of them. Perhaps it was because she was so off-limits—he only wanted what he knew he couldn’t have. Or because she was so unaware of how she was affecting him, unlike the women he was used to who were always primped to perfection, who dressed and posed just to catch his eye. Eden was nothing like that. At the moment she was simply standing, casually toweling herself off, looking out at the ocean with a dreamy smile on her face. And he was fucking hard, just from that. God knew what would happen if he ever saw her completely naked.

Shit, don’t think that!

Too late, he was already there.

Images of her naked in every position known to man paraded through his head. On her back, riding him, bent over the back of a chair, up against the wall, on her knees… Oh fuck, he was so hard it almost hurt.

Tex scrubbed his face, forcing the images out of his mind by running the chords for one of Fractured’s more complicated new songs through his head. It worked. Sort of.

Glancing out the door, he saw she was collecting her stuff and about to come back inside. He pivoted and headed out of the room, not wanting her to catch him in an aroused state again. He heard the door open before he made it safely to the stairs.

“Tex?” There was a note of uncertainty in her voice, and he hated that he’d been the one to put it there.

Stopping, he bent and grabbed his guitar from where he’d put it on the seat and held it in front of him as he turned toward her. Thank God she had the towel wrapped around her.

He smiled, determined not to let his inability to control himself affect her any more than it already had.

“Yeah, darlin’?”

“I was going to make some lunch. Would you like some?”

“Sure, uh, do you want some help?”

Eden smiled. “That’d be great, I’ll just run up to my room and change.”

He cleared his throat. “Good idea.”

She threw him an odd look but headed up the stairs, and he had to drag his eyes away from the sight of her toned thighs. Fuck, how old was he again? Old enough that a pair of bare legs shouldn’t be enough to get him going.

Ten minutes later she was back down, her cheeks pink from the shower. She bounced into the kitchen where he was sitting on a barstool at the island, scrolling through his phone to try to distract himself while he waited for her.

“What do you think about chicken tacos for lunch?” she asked.

“Sounds great, what can I do?”

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