Page 27 of Stuck with the Grump

Dark bags were beneath his eyes and his cheeks looked hollow. There was a tiredness to his presence that I hadn’t seen before, and I suspected it had to do with our fighting. Still, I wasn’t going to roll over and let him win.

“Your bed is a lot more comfortable than mine,” I said, pulling the blankets over my body and nestling down deep into the pillows. “Wake me up in a few hours, will you? I have more work to do.”

“You are unbelievable.”

“Better believe it, old man,” I said, offering him a lazy smile as I pulled the blanket up higher. “I’ll be here sleeping if you need me.”

“Fucking hell,” he muttered as he stormed out of yet another room, the door slamming behind him again.

I rolled my eyes at the show and inhaled the scent of his bodywash as it wafted up from the sheets. It was a dark scent and vaguely spicy. With a groan, I rolled over onto my other side, staring out the window at the pouring rain.

I’m an idiot,I thought, curling around a pillow and squeezing my eyes shut. I should have seen this coming after everything that had happened over the last couple days.

In that moment, I made up my mind. We would move forward in whatever direction we needed to, but I wasn’t going to push for anything again. If Clarke wanted me, he could come to me next time.

I was tired of being the one doing the pursuing.

12

CLARKE

Thenightbeforeleftme reeling. Well, it left me feeling lot of things but sexually frustrated was a lot lower on the list. The last thing I had expected was Leigh crossing the room naked and expecting something would happen between us. It had pained me to get rid of her, to reject her, but the more sensible part of my brain said that we would both regret falling into bed together.

My mind was a tangle of thoughts, none of them clear, as I looked in the fridge. There was very little food left but none of it seemed to have gone bad while the power was off. There was something to say about small miracles.

When I had woken up after a horrible night spent in my parents’ room, the house was humming with the telltale sign of electricity. The first thing I did was hop into a hot shower and wash away the cold that had been clinging to my bones for the last thirty hours.

Once I had scrubbed away the chill, I headed to the kitchen, needing something other than hot dogs and dry cereal. After my pancake disaster, I wasn’t going to try that again. I saw the egg carton in the back of the fridge and grabbed it and the cheese. Eggs didn’t seem like something I would ruin. Although my track record with eggs wasn’t great either. Only marginally better than my record with pancakes.

I could always surprise myself,I thought as I set the food on the counter and started the hunt for a frying pan that hadn’t been lit on fire. As I started cracking eggs, I thought about the naked woman still in my bed.

Turning her away last night had been the right thing. Emotions were running high after an exhausting day of nothing but arguing. Sleeping with her then would have set the tone for how we solved our problems in the future.

If there was a future, that is.

That was when the thoughts started spiraling even farther downward. What did I want with Leigh? Was it something more than this weekend? She challenged me in a way that no woman ever had but perhaps that was because she was too good for me. What did I have to offer her, anyway? She didn’t want my money or my connections. She had no interest in being in the media or using my position in life to her advantage.

There was nothing I had to give to her that she would want but she was still naked in my bed.

A lesser man would have stormed back into that room, stripped down, and given her everything she had been asking for. I would be lying if I tried to tell myself that I wasn’t considering it.

“What are you making?” Leigh asked as she walked into the kitchen.

I glanced at her over my shoulder, disappointed to see that she was in a pair of plaid pajama pants and a black tank top. Her hair was a tousled mess, almost like sex hair. My cock twitched as images of a freshly fucked Leigh came to mind.

“Eggs,” I said, not sure I could manage much more than one word without ordering her to head back to the bedroom.

“You going to light them on fire, or can you actually make eggs?”

I shrugged and poured a bit of oil into the pan. “Not quite sure, honestly. It’s been a long time since I made eggs.”

“What happened the last time you tried?”

My cheeks warmed as I looked away from her, concentrating on pouring the cracked eggs in the center of the pan. “They caught on fire.”

Leigh’s laughter filled the kitchen even as my face flamed. A chef I was not and would never be. Growing up, my father had done all of the cooking and after I made money hand over fist, I never saw a need to do my own cooking.

“Have you talked to your mom?” I asked, desperate to change the subject before she could ask about any of my other cooking attempts.

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