Page 52 of Seduced by Her Billionaire Fake Fiancé

Alone, Andie expelled a long, slow breath of relief, as she set about the rest of her nighttime ritual, including washing her face and applying a hand cream she found in one of the drawers in lieu of her usual face moisturizer.

“Are you okay?”

His concern pulled at something in her gut. She was childishly tempted to ignore him, but she knew Max too well for that and she knew that he would genuinely worry and panic if she didn’t respond. Or at least barge the door open once more.

“Yes.”

She dragged her hair over one shoulder then moved to the door, a little unsteady on her legs, opening it to find Max hovering a foot on the other side.

He nodded once. “Right. Bed.”

She looked around the room, noticing it for the first time. “Here?”

He nodded once.

It was a decent sized room but there was only one bed, albeit a good sized one, and no sofa or alternative sleeping scenario.

“And you’ll be…”

“Also here,” he responded, challenging her with his eyes and the firm set of his mouth to argue. “And might I remind you, this was your idea.”

And while she was tempted, for many reasons, least of all because apparently, she adored arguing with him, she didn’t. She gave a curt nod, moved towards one side of the bed, pulled back the covers and sat down. He’d placed another glass of water there, full, she noticed as she slid beneath the covers and placed her head on the soft, downy pillow.

But she didn’t close her eyes. Instead, she wriggled onto her back, eyes pinning him where he stood across the room, arms crossed over his chest, expression mutinous as he looked at nothing in particular.

“Was this your room as a boy?”

His eyes drifted to her. “No. As a child, I was on the other side of the house, near our nanny’s room. As a teenager, I moved here.”

Curiosity had her looking around. “Did it always look like this?”

His eyes traced the room as if seeing it for the first time. “More or less. My mother has redone the wall colour and bedlinen since I moved out. I seem to recall I had a black duvet cover during my heavy metal phase. Posters on the wall too.”

She smiled. “That makes sense.” Her eyes were heavy now. She stifled a yawn. “Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,Tesoro.Sleep well.”

For Max’s part,he suspected he wouldn’t sleep a wink. Sharing a bed with Andie was a simple proposition in theory. The bed was large, she was small, and he could easily stick to one side of it, thus avoiding any kind of contact or complication.

But in practice, she was everywhere. Her soft breathing filled his ears, she rolled from side to side, so he kept turning to look at her, whether the back of her silky blonde head or her fast-asleep face, lashes forming half-crescents on her cheeks, lips parted a little in sleep. Wearing one of his shirts didn’t help. At one point in the night, when the heating had warmed the room to a cozy temperature, she flung off the duvet and kicked a bare leg out, so Max had to roll onto his side and focus on the wall if he had any hope of drifting off.

Sometime in the night, he must have, because he awoke with an arm casually thrown over Andie’s waist, her leg was correspondingly atop his.

He stared at her, his heart chugging towards his throat uncomfortably.

Her own eyes blinked open. Had he woken her? Had he betrayed in some way that he was awake? Flinched his arm? But no. Perhaps it was the other way around. Or maybe it was just one of those things, a coincidence.

Their eyes met and held, and they seemed to form a single entity for a moment, the liminal light of a new day shimmering through the window, making the impossible seem within reach.

“Go back to sleep,” he said, voice roughened by the direction of his thoughts. “It’s early.”

“I always wake early,” she said softly, but she blinked away from him, a frown pulling on her lips that made his gut tighten, because he suspected he was the cause of the frown, her memories from last night must be dominated by the way they’d argued then made love with such desperate, angry need.

A moment later, she pulled her leg away and rolled onto her other side, facing the wall, breathing even. He didn’t know if she fell back to sleep, he only cared that she pretended to, so he could do likewise, and they could put off any discussion about the preceding night until later in the morning.

Showeredand changed into fresh clothes, Andie felt a thousand times better than she had first thing in the morning. She needed something stodgy for breakfast and a bucket load of coffee, though.

She also needed to escape this torture room of awkward silence, where both she and Max were moving like magnets of opposite polarity, careful not to get within a few feet of each other, definitely not touching. It was absurd.

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