“My last year in the army,” he said in a tone that said he wasn’t thrilled about it. “I usually only wear them at night, though. Otherwise, I wear my contacts.”
“Oh,” she said, a strange emotion she couldn’t quite identify rolling through her in a long wave. Sadness. Because he’d worn contacts and glasses for four years and she hadn’t even known. Something like that just felt like the kind of detail you should know about a friend. Though in fairness, before tonight she wouldn’t have known exactly how to classify them. Sorta childhood friends through her brother, turned business rivals who had absolutely incendiary chemistry when they let it loose, which was almost never. Yeah, that wasn’t unclear at all.
Sarcasm. Kady’s second-favorite –asm.
“They look good on you,” she said.
His eyebrow arched over one lens.
Annnd that was sexy, too. “What? I’m being serious.” It was a testament to just how hot those damn glasses were that she was just now noticing that his pants hung loose on his hips as if he hadn’t buttoned his fly.
“Well, thanks.” He dropped a toothbrush and contact case into his bag.
“Ha,” she said with a big smile. “You said it to me. That right there ought to earn me the win on this bet.”
“If only that was the bet that we made. Which it wasn’t.” He stretched out on the bed again, and the position confirmed the accuracy of her suspicion about his pants. A good inch separated the button from its hole, and the top of the zipper was down. He was the devil. Really, he was. When he twisted to retrieve the remote control off the nightstand, the gap widened, flashing her a glimpse of black boxers.
White undershirt. Dark-framed glasses. Sneak peeks at black boxers. Really? How much more was a girl supposed to be able to take before she either spontaneously combusted or found a shower with a removable showerhead?
She scooped up her purse and Colton’s shirt off the back of the chair. “See what’s on while I change,” she said. He nodded and started surfing channels, but she could’ve sworn she felt the heat of his gaze on her back.
In the bathroom, she quickly shed her blouse and bra and slid into the white cotton. And good God, it smelled like Colton. She pulled the collar to her nose and breathed him in. The masculine scent reached down into her belly and stirred things up until she found herself fantasizing about pressing her face, her nose, her tongue to his throat. For starters.
The thought had her glancing to the shower. No removable showerhead. The inhumanity.
Colton’s dress shirt was so big on Kady that she had to roll up the sleeves twice just to free her hands. Despite the fact that the shirttail hung past her butt, she wasn’t ready to walk out there with nothing between her and those glasses but the black satin bikini underwear she had on, so the skirt stayed, for now. Next, she brushed her teeth using the travel set she always kept in her purse—thank God—and brushed her hair, then she threw it up in a bun and stuck a pencil into it to keep it in place. She finished by washing her face and hands and refusing to give an ounce of thought to how Colton would think she looked.
They were just friends. It didn’t matter.
“Find anything?” she asked as she walked out into the main room. She dropped her purse onto the chair where she’d been working and hung her blouse over the back. She’d have to travel in it tomorrow so she wanted it to be at least somewhat presentable.
“Come look,” he said.
She turned and drank him in. Tight shirt. Glasses. Flash of boxers. Check, check, and check. Colton gestured toward the TV. Oh, right. Kady sat on the edge of the bed and kept her face forward so he couldn’t see the blush that had to be filling her cheeks, if the rising heat there was any indication. Her inability to ignore her attraction to him clearly revealed a couple things, though. First, that she still found him incredibly appealing. Second, that she wasn’t quite as over him as she’d told herself she was. And, third, that she was desperately in need of a good orgasm—and her body obviously recognized in him the one person guaranteed to make that happen.
“Let me know if something catches your eye,” he said.
Something has caught my eye, all right, but it isn’t in that box on the other side of the room. Stop it, Kady! She sighed. “Okay.” Honestly, there wasn’t much on that interested her, so before long her mind wandered to the book in her laptop case. She never traveled without reading material. Often, she read on an app on her phone, but she’d adored this particular story so much she’d bought the paperback, too.
It was an erotic romance—super dark—about an underground boxer who was shamelessly unself-conscious about the kind of sex he enjoyed—rough, really rough. The kind of sex that left fingerprint marks on arms and wrists, and bruises from pounding hip bones on the soft flesh of the thigh, and tenderness in the ass cheeks that made it hard to sit comfortably for days. The kind of sex that involved harsh words and hot taunts rasped in the ear, and the overpowering of the woman’s body, and even role-playing involving force.
Kady had reread it so much that the pages fell open to her favorite scenes. Truth be told, she was shocked by how much the darkness thrilled her—so shocked she’d never even shared her growing interest and curiosity with her girls. But there was absolutely no denying it did. Maybe her interest in this explained her inability to orgasm with the men she’d dated. Maybe her experiences had all been too sweet and tender to get her there. Maybe it had nothing to do with Colton’s wonder powers after all.
Thinking about the book made her yearn to build a little pillow fort against the headboard and curl up with it for a few hours, but no way she was reading that in front of Colton. For one thing, this book made her way too hot. For another, Colton would probably have the mother of all freak-outs if he knew that this was what turned her on. And if he ever told her brother? Oh, God. No. Nope. Not taking that chance.
“I don’t really see anything,” she said. “Do you?”
He shook his head, got up, and retrieved his laptop. “Netflix to the rescue,” he said.
He lay down on his stomach and settled the computer at the top of the bed. As Kady shifted to stretch out next to him, she couldn’t help taking a good, long look at Colton’s ass. The looseness of his waistband had tugged the dark fabric down, exposing the dimples in his muscular lower back. God, he was a work of art. Really.
She lay down and tried not to think of her bedmate’s well-sculpted butt.
“Oh, here we go,” Colton said. “How about Office Space?”
“Oh my God, I love that movie.” Kady grabbed a pillow, folded it in half and propped up her head so she could see the monitor. “I’m gonna need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow,” she said, mimicking a line in the annoying supervisor’s voice. “Mmkay? Oh, and I almost forgot, ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday too, ’kay?”
Colton chuckled. “You clearly have excellent taste in movies.”
“Th—” She swallowed the word.
His eyebrow arched. “Almost,” he said in a low voice that was way too damn sexy.
“Almost nothing,” she said.
He smirked and clicked play, and they settled in as the credits started.
Soon, they were both laughing and saying some of the lines right alongside the movie and taking turns proclaiming their love for this scene or that. Really, you couldn’t work in the computer field and not adore this movie’s championing of the little-guy computer programmers’ p
lan to swindle money from the evil firm so they’d never have to work again. It was damn near a cult classic.
As nice as sitting with Colton and working had been earlier, this was even nicer. Only rarely did she get to spend time with him when neither her brother nor their professional colleagues were around. And it gave her the opportunity all over again to admire his sharp sense of humor and revel in the sexy rumble of his laughter. All while he wore those glasses and lay two feet away from her on the bed.
Their room might’ve been old and out of style, but this night had turned into a little oasis of paradise in the middle of the Nevada desert. It kinda made Kady feel weird…sad?…that they would part ways again tomorrow afternoon. She mentally ran through her schedule for the next few months and couldn’t readily determine when she’d next see him. And that sucked.
Don’t get attached, Kady.
Right.
Except…
She couldn’t actually think of a time when Colton Brooks hadn’t owned a little piece of her heart. The admission set off a squeezing pang in her chest.
In the back of her mind, Kady could almost hear Regan telling her she was screwed.
When their first movie ended, it was still on the early side, so next they agreed on The Matrix, another movie with a computer programmer/hacker hero, this time set in the future. Kady readjusted her position, getting really tired of the confinement of her skirt, but still feeling strange about parading around in front of Colton in just her panties. “Mind if I get under the covers for this one?” she asked.
Colton’s eyes flared. She could’ve sworn it. “’Course not,” he said.
They got off the bed and folded back the bedspread and sheets, and Kady climbed in. Then she used the cover of the blankets to wiggle out of her skirt. She dropped it on the floor by the bed.