Restraint (Mason Family 1)

My head is murky. My thoughts are a complicated web of logic and emotion—the latter clouding the first. This is precisely why I don’t do this. It leads to disaster.

So why am I doing this with Blaire? Why am I pointedly not following my own rules?

Not only that, but why am I instigating it?

It’s usually a woman’s behavior that confuses me. This time, it’s my own.

My motivations are typically social or sexual. This time, it’s not.

I want it to be. Damn, do I want it to be. And maybe I even thought it was when I invited her to stay with me. But it’s beyond that now.

Now, wanting her to stay here isn’t just about sex. I want to talk to her just as much as I want to fuck her. I want to see her various smiles, hear her laugh, and smell her perfume in the mornings. It’s fucked up. But I don’t know what to do about it.

My fingers slip through her hair. The weight of her body against mine feels like an anchor. But instead of presenting like a ball-and-chain, it feels more like a reprieve. It gives me a moment to breathe.

There were definitely ideas that we’d work, then fuck, then go to bed. It was supposed to be an easy few days with a woman who lived a thousand miles from here—a woman who had class and her own sense of detachment.

It was perfect.

Blaire wouldn’t show up at my house once our time together was done. She wouldn’t call me to come over when I was working. There would be no assumptions that we were attending any event together.

It was a week cut-and-dry. It sounded like heaven.

Now I find myself counting the days until she goes home. And not because I’m looking forward to it.

“Fuck,” I whisper angrily into the night.

I slip out of bed. The air is cold and almost assaulting. Blaire stirs but settles again with her head on my pillow.

The sight leaves me with a knot in my stomach as I tuck the blankets around her naked body. She smiles in her sleep—a lazy, unguarded gesture that twists the knot inside me harder.

I turn away and pluck my robe off a hook on the bathroom door.

The house is quiet as I make my way through the hallways. I wander aimlessly through the rooms until I wind up in the den.

I flip on the fireplace and take a seat on the sofa. The flames flicker, giving both heat and the illusion of company.

“What are you doing?” I ask myself.

I rest my head on the back of the sofa and fill my lungs with oxygen. It’s an attempt to clear my mind.

What’s surprising is that I’m not thinking about her body, or how hard I got off, or that she’s still in my bed and I could, theoretically, go back up there for another round. Those thoughts are there—I’m a hot-blooded man, after all—but they’re a definite back seat to other matters.

I blow out the breath. The hiss of air leaving my body is the only noise in the room.

This is going to end badly if you don’t stop it.

I groan, knowing it’s true. I also know that if I don’t get my head out of my ass and finalize the Landry deal, more things than my situation with Blaire are going to end in destruction.

Our current projects are wrapping up, and we have nothing else on the table. We have to get this property. I have to get it. Everyone put their faith in me, and I can’t let them down.

I can’t fuck this up.

Yet here I am. Sitting in the den and not at my desk. Not getting ready to go to the office early like I should be.

Shit.

My brain feels like a room with a bunch of open boxes. The contents of which are spewed around my mind. The harder I try to sort them back neatly, the more they fall apart.

What is Blaire going to think in the morning?

This is not like Picante. This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment fling that neither of us thinks much about.

She’s in my home.

We’ve shared intimate things about ourselves.

She’s in my damn bed.

She has every right to wonder if I’m pursuing her for a reason.

Am I?

I grimace. “No, why would I be? She’s leaving in a few days. She doesn’t want something serious any more than I do.”

But as my words settle in the air, hanging around like they’re taunting me, I realize how bitter they taste.

I look at the chair she sat in this evening. She was still annoyed with me for pushing her on the carriage—something I shouldn’t have done. Yet her opening up to me and sharing things about her life is something I’ll never forget.

It was real. Raw. Profound, in a way.

I’ve never experienced that kind of intimacy before.