Page 80 of The Marriage Deal
In all the ways I’ve been touched, been kissed—I’ve never been kissed like this. Never felt so wholly moved by a featherlight touch of warm lips to the skin of my shoulder.
The ache in my core isn’t an ache any longer. It’s a surge of need hotter than magma.
It spills into my panties as Briggs pulls away.
I don’t move an inch until he’s behind the closed door of the bathroom. With my heart knocking in my chest and a throb I can’t begin to ignore between my legs, I touch my fingertip to my phone on the nightstand. The screen comes alive to tell me it’s not quite four in the morning.
I bite my tongue to bite back a groan. Then I flop back on the bed. Not even Senior has stirred, and I know if I wake at this time, I’ll be dead useless by mid-afternoon.
Still, I can’t help myself as I listen to the shower turn on. I wonder if Briggs is doing what I can’t let myself do now.
Is he touching himself? Is he touching himself to thoughts of me?
“Noooo…” I groan low as I scrub my hands down my face. Then I roll over with my back to the door of the shower. If I have to see that man hot and wet…well, I might just die.
The shower turns off and not even a minute later I hear the click of the door. I squeeze my eyes shut tight and pretend that I’m still asleep. I listen to a drawer open and close, the sound of a zipper and then the clink of a belt buckle. Again, a surge of wet heat I have no business feeling warms me between the legs.
I pray for deliverance.
I think I hear him pull a shirt over his head. Then there’s no movement at all, but I swear I feel him watching me. Studying me.
I don’t move. I don’t breathe.
I hear a low curse and then he’s moving. The bedroom door opens and clicks closed.
I lay completely still for a solid five minutes before I roll onto my back and expel a big breath.
I won’t be sleeping now. Sleep, officially is a lost cause.
Refusing to relieve myself to thoughts of my fake husband, I grab my phone and begin to scroll the feed for potting arrangement ideas. Then I make the switch to witchy cottage décor. It’s my happy place, and I stay there comfortably until five before I let my bladder haul me out of bed.
Then I don my robe in search of caffeine, because it’s going to be a looooong day.
31
YOU CALL HER THE LUNATIC
BRIGGS
Icould have set up my office in the house. There are enough rooms.
Hell, I could have done it in the garage. Sacrificed one of the three oversized bays, thrown up some drywall and bam. But no. I thought it would be a stellar idea to craft my temporary office space from a corner of the existing barn.
In the beginning, I told myself it was just sense. I’d be closer to the construction of the resort, after all. But now I know it’s more than that. It’s because I didn’t want my men lusting after my fake wife. A woman I feel all sorts of possession over even though I know possession is the furthest thing I have a right to feel.
It’s fake. So why does she feel likemine?
I curse at the tight space as I scan the pen markups to Nash’s paper drawings. Plans have changed, as plans always change. I’ve given up trying to get the guy to usea tablet like someone from the twenty-first century. Paper and ink are the way he operates.
Still, I let another curse slip at the stack of drawings I’ve positioned on the table that is too big for the makeshift space. We’re putting in a pool now. For the couple of cooler months of the year, it’ll be heated. With the sloping concrete work, fountains and view of the desert mountains with their veins of red surrounding the space, it’ll be a showstopper. Still, it’s missing something.
But what?
I’m chewing over the feeling that something isn’t quite right when I glance out the window to see Lilah standing talking to one of the crew men. My body responds physically to the sight of her after waking with her in my arms this morning. I’ve never experienced the collage of emotions that I experienced upon waking with her tucked in close. And then her breath hitched when I shifted. I’d had to curl my hand into a fist against her belly to keep myself from touching her. From pulling her closer. From tugging her onto her back and sliding between her legs. From kissing her.
I adjust as I grow hard behind the zipper of my jeans, cursing again. I’d already relieved the pressure in the shower this morning to thoughts of her in my bed.
I’d known she was awake when I ran my lips over her shoulder. But the explosion of goosebumps and that little shiver she thought she hid—fuck me.
