And she was sweet.
And so fucking sexy.
Mackenzie rested her head in the crook of my shoulder, drumming her fingers against the beat of my heart. I buried my nose in her hair. The scent of sex and fruit filled my lungs. I could drown in that scent. I’d never smelled anything more perfect.
Grant’s words echoed in my mind, and my arm unconsciously tightened around the gorgeous woman sprawled next to me with her leg hooked over mine. He was right. This was more than sex. Wasn’t it?
Mackenzie started to giggle. I kissed the top of her head.
“What’s so funny?”
“Well, isn’t it just so cliché? Boss Man having sex with his partner in the office where they shouldn’t be? I don’t think this is what your father had in mind when he handed over the reins.”
And just like that, the afterglow was gone. The comment, honestly harmless, hit me in the gut like a full-force sucker punch. I let out a breath and sit up, pulling myself out of Mackenzie’s embrace.
“Walker?” She frowned, the light in her emerald eyes dimming.
“We should probably get cleaned up. It’s getting late.”
I didn’t look at her, because I didn’t want to see the look of disappointment that I knew would be on her face. She said nothing as we started to redress, but the air in the room had shifted from content sexual satisfaction to an awkward silence. I could practically feel the trepidation crackle and fizzle in the air around us.
The trip home was fucking worse.
Smelling like sex and regret, we piled into a cab together. I was painfully aware of her state of dress. The smudged make up. The tousled hair. Her still-flushed skin. It just served as a greater reminder of what we’d just done, and how I was flopping back and forth inconsistently when it came to Mackenzie and me.
We arrived at the house, and still, we said nothing. Mackenzie made a straight line upstairs, and I caught her lip quivering as she ducked past me. A door on the second floor closed, and a few minutes later, I heard the shower running. For a few long heartbeats, I considered following her. I wanted to follow her into the shower, hold her under the hot spray of water, wash her hair, and kiss her tears away. But instead, I left her to her privacy.
Goddamn it.
Three weeks was closing in on me fast.
An uncomfortable mixture of guilt, anger, and confusion churned in my gut as I did everything I could to take my mind off the situation at hand. I fed and watered Bruno. I went out on to the balcony, hoping some fresh air would clear my head. I rearranged the cabinets and the fridge. Mackenzie still had yet to get out of the shower, and I wondered if she, too, was killing time. Trying to get her mind off things.
Or trying to avoid me.
We shouldn’t have had sex in the office. It was reckless and stupid. I had always prided myself on separating my work and home lives, and for so long, it’d been easy. Part of that was because there’d been almost no home life to speak of, so there weren’t many things to get in the way of work.
But now?
I’d been trying to buckle down this p
ast week, to get back to that place where I lived and breathed my job.
Mackenzie kept creeping back into my thoughts no matter what I did though. My feelings were teetering where they didn’t need to be, blurring lines where they shouldn’t be blurred. I’d known what this was going to be when I made the marriage offer to Mackenzie. I had promised her it would be simple. Temporary.
So why was it so… hard to wrap my head around actually following through with it all?
Absorbed in my thoughts, I looked up, startled, when I heard a loud thud come from the bathroom, and a pained string of curses follow. I didn’t even think when I beelined down the hallway to the bathroom, throwing open the dark wood door.
“Mackenzie—!”
I paused, blinking at the sight in front of me.
The bathtub was partially full, suds floating on the top. Mackenzie was half in the tub, half out, with one leg over the edge of the tub and the other covered in shaving cream. It looked like she’d slipped… sitting on the edge of the tub.
I shouldn’t find this funny. This was the least opportune time to be amused, but the sight of her lying spread-eagle over the side of the large bathtub only reminded me of her earlier mishap, which made me think of the multitude of other times Mackenzie had gotten herself into strange and awkward positions. She wasn’t a klutz, more like a magnet for disaster, and it was hard to not laugh at the fact that she was a slippery, ungraceful mess.
“Ass munching unicorn farts. This is so not funny,” she huffed.