Page 63 of Beauty and the Bayou

Juliet wet her lips.“What if you try to sneak out the window afterward and fall off the roof?”

He laughed.“I’m not sneaking out the window.”He pulled her in for another long, slow kiss, this time dragging his tongue over her lower lip.“I’ll be staying and going out the front door after Cora heads back to Ellie’s for the breakfast crowd,” he said, when he let her go.“But only because I’ll be wanting to stay in that bed next to you for as long as possible.I don’t care who knows where I spent the night.”

Juliet took a gulp of air.“What if the headboard bangs against the wall and wakes everyone up?”

Sawyer’s eyes were nearly black with desire now.“Yeah,thatis going to happen for sure.Along with a lot of creaking springs.Not to mention the gasping and groaning and ‘Oh Sawyers.’”

She laughed even as desire pounded through her.“I guess we should maybe get up there and get going before anyone comes home then.”

“But you missed a couple of What-Ifs,” Sawyer said.

“Did I?”That was very unlike her.

He leaned in, his mouth brushing over hers.“What if I make you come so hard you can’t move for several hours after?”

Air whooshed out of her lungs and she just stared at him.That was a risk she was very willing to take.

He met her gaze intently.“And what if you ruin me for all other women?”

She wanted to do that.

Thatwas a terrible thought to have.She wasn’t staying here.Sawyer wasn’t leaving here.He belonged on this bayou no matter what had happened and how he felt about it now.And she…didn’t.She couldn’t even swim.Anymore.That was a complicated result of her fear and water phobia after nearly drowning, but it certainly wouldn’t make living near a big, sometimes dangerous body of water a good idea.

“What if wedon’tdo it?”she finally asked softly.“Then we both spend forever wondering what it would have been like.”She could handle squeaking bedsprings and not being able to move from orgasms so intense her muscles all turned to goo.But she wasn’t sure she could handle never knowing what being with Sawyer Landry was like.

Without another word, Sawyer stood swiftly, his hands cupping her ass.Instinctively, she wrapped her legs around him, linking her ankles, and grabbed his shoulders.Unable to resist, Juliet put her lips to his neck.She kissed him, flicking her tongue over the hot, salty skin.She felt the rumble of his groan as he started in the direction of the stairs, climbing them smoothly, as if he didn’t have his arms full of a woman wiggling to get her aching clit against his hard body.Reallyanyhard part of his body would do at the moment.

At the top of the stairs, he headed down the hallway with long strides, turning into the bedroom she was using, without asking.It didn’t matter how he knew which room was hers.It mattered that there was a bed in there.

But he stopped abruptly in the doorway.

Juliet pulled her lips from his neck and looked up.

“What if,” he said slowly, “someone put a mosquito netting over their bed?”

Oh yeah, that.“We can just push it back.”

“What if there’s a bat caught in it?”

Juliet pivoted in his arms so quickly that his grip on her slipped and she felt herself sliding to the floor.Abruptly.She was still against him—and he was big and hard and strong and all of that—so she didn’tfallexactly, but neither did she have time to really enjoy the slide down the Sawyer-pole.

Because there was abatin her bedroom.Caught in the mosquito netting she’d hung over her bed.

“Oh my God!”she gasped.“What the— Oh my God!”

“Not exactly the way I’d been expecting to hearoh my Godup here,” Sawyer said dryly.

Juliet, her eyes wide and fixed on the flapping brownthingtrapped in the white netting, slipped around behind him, putting his big, used-to-critters-and-not-freaking-out body between her and that bat.

“What if I’d been up heresleepingwhen thatthinggot caught up like that?”she whispered in an admittedly horrified-sounding voice.

“Guessing I’d have been coming over to get it out a lot like I’m going to do now,” Sawyer told her.

She looked up at him.“You’re going to get it out?”But of course he was.He was a big, strong bayou boy.He’d probably grown up playing with these things like they were puppies.She shuddered.

“You would have come over?”

“Of course,” he said.Then he shrugged.“If I didn’t wake up to your bloodcurdling scream, Cora would have leaned out of her bedroom window and shouted at me.”

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