“I...um...” She paused, gave him a tentative smile that set warning bells off in his head. “I’m going to brush my teeth and change into my pajamas. Take my bed, please.”
* * *
Take her bed, please? McKenzie thought, mortified as she washed her face and went through the motions of getting ready to go to sleep.
With Ryder in her bed.
Ryder whom she’d worked with for months and who she’d always agreed with her coworkers was easy on the eyes. But McKenzie had never really seen him. Because Ryder had always made her nervous when he was around, she’d never let herself fully take in just how sexy he was.
Had she known that if she’d let herself, she could have fallen into fantasizing about him, so she’d kept blinders on to avoid a guilty conscience since she’d been committed to Paul?
Ryder was hot.
Scorching.
Glancing at herself in the bathroom mirror one last time, she frowned at the haggardness of her features.
Yeah, Ryder looked fab after hours of travel. She just looked tuckered out.
Fine. Despite her sudden acute awareness of his overabundance of maleness, they weren’t really dating. He was her pretend boyfriend and they weren’t about to do anything except make a trip to night-night land.
Even if part of her wished this was real, that she and Ryder were embarking on a real relationship, that the sexual tension she felt was more than just her sudden awakening to his overabundance of testosterone.
When she tiptoed back into her room, closing and locking the adjoining bathroom door, she came to a halt.
“You’re not in my bed,” she accused, frowning at where he’d made a pallet of sorts on the floor with a fuzzy blanket he’d pulled from the foot of her bed. He had one of her old throw pillows tucked beneath his head. It wasn’t much of a pallet and there wasn’t an extra blanket for him to cover up with unless he took the comforter.
“You take the bed.”
“Ryder,” she began, feeling guilty that he was at her feet.
“There is no way I’m sleeping in your bed and making you take the floor.”
McKenzie eyed where he lay on the floor, then her full-size bed, and came to a quick decision. “Fine. We’ll both sleep in the bed.”
She’d keep her fantasies and her hands to herself.
His eyes danced. “You must have liked our kiss better than I thought.”
Cheeks heating, McKenzie tossed a throw pillow at him. “For that I should leave you on the floor.”
Sitting up to catch the pillow, he chuckled. “You definitely should.”
Something in the way he said his words, or maybe it was the way he was looking at her, shot a burst of feminine awareness through McKenzie.
“I’m not sure I’d trust myself if I was in that bed with you.”
Her breath caught. “You wouldn’t hurt me.”
She knew he wouldn’t. Not even for a second did she believe otherwise.
“Never, but I’m a healthy man with normal sexual urges and you’re a beautiful woman.” His grin was a bit lopsided, but then his face took on a more serious expression. “Trust me, it’s better if I stay on the floor.”
McKenzie’s heart raced at his words, at what he was saying. If they both slept in the bed he thought they might have sex. She didn’t sleep around. But, the way her body was reacting to the thought of having sex with Ryder, she knew he was right.
“It’s not as if I wouldn’t stop you if you were doing something I didn’t want you to be doing.” Good grief. She’d practically just told him that she wasn’t opposed to their having sex.
Staring at him on the floor, she wondered what it would be like to have sex with Ryder. To kiss him with abandon? To be kissed by him, her lips, her neck, her breasts? To press her body next to his, skin to skin, nothing between them as they moved in pleasure?