The moan she let out hit him straight in the gut and he was hard even before she took that step towards him, wrapped her arms around his neck until she was all he could see and hear and smell.

‘A really bad idea,’ she said again, but the smile on her lips—God, her lips...so close...so full...so pink—told him she was past brave. She’d headed straight through courage to reckless and he was right there with her.

There was no hesitation when her mouth finally met his. She pressed firm against him, her lips tasting and exploring, while he was so overwhelmed that this was happening that he barely knew how to respond. It was only when she broke the kiss and looked up at him, that little crease back on her brow, that he snapped back into the present, stopped overthinking and realised that he had everything he had been dreaming about right in front of him. In his next heartbeat his arms were around her waist, he had pulled her into his body and crashed them both back against the doorframe, her body soft in his arms, her breath in his mouth.

CHAPTER TWELVE

FINN CREPT BACK into his bedroom after settling Bella back to sleep and paused to take in the sight of Madeleine Everleigh asleep in his bed. The sheets were tucked across her chest, her head turned to one side and her hair messy around her on the pillows. In the half-light, he still couldn’t quite believe what they’d done. That she’d wanted him as much as he realised he’d been yearning for her these past days. But now the spell was broken and he was out of bed—where did they go from here?

Could he just slip back into bed, wrap his arms around her and pretend the spell had never been broken? Or did he accept that his alarm was going off in an hour anyway and he might as well be up for the day? That must be the sensible thing to do. Because when he was too close to her he lost his mind. That was the only explanation for what had happened last night, when they had both jumped headfirst into something that they’d both said—out loud and on numerous occasions—was a very bad idea. And now they both knew exactly what they would be missing out on, he wasn’t sure how they were ever meant to make a sensible decision again.

Nothing had changed for them. The fundamentals of their lives remained the same. He couldn’t start a relationship now, couldn’t add that layer of complication to a life that he had kept on track by the skin of his teeth. But...but last night. He had never felt so connected to another person. Which was a bad thing, he reminded himself for the thousandth time. Because neither he nor Madeleine wanted this to happen. So when the sun came up they would go back to being so very sensible and not letting this happen again. Wouldn’t they?

Suddenly he wasn’t so sure that that was what he wanted—to give up on the idea of ever having a relationship. But there really couldn’t be a worse time. He had dragged himself out of poverty. He had worked every hour for a decade to build this business up. He had made the sort of marriage he had thought that he needed to survive in that world. And he’d tried his hardest to love her.

And all of that had nearly been derailed when his best hadn’t been good enough and he and Caro had had to find a way to unpick their lives and their finances. He had lost his home. He couldn’t face that sort of instability again—not now he had the twins. If the idea of losing everything he had worked for had been frightening before he had become a father, it was unthinkable now.

And yet...it wasn’t quite morning. The babies were asleep and there was still an hour before his alarm would go off. If last night was all they were going to have then he wasn’t going to waste the final hour of it examining his conscience.

He slipped back beneath the cool sheets and reached for Madeleine, an arm sliding under her waist, pulling her back towards him until he could feel the heat of her skin from his chest to his toes. She let out a huff of breath and tangled her fingers in his, pulling his arm tighter around her waist.

‘Mmm...’ she said, barely more than a whisper. ‘Don’t tell me it’s morning.’ He pressed a kiss to the nape of her neck, sweeping her hair out of the way to follow that thought around to her ear, her jaw.

‘We’ve an hour until the alarm,’ he said, fingers now exploring the soft skin of her belly, the dip of her waist, the ample curve of her hip. ‘Want to go back to sleep?’ He could feel her smile, even with her back to him, as she pressed herself just a tiny bit closer.

‘Not even for a second.’

By the time his alarm sounded he was boneless and heavy, his eyes sore from lack of sleep, his body deliciously fatigued. As he reached to silence his phone, Madeleine shifted from where her head had been resting on his chest to look up at him.

‘What are the chances we can ignore that and go back to sleep?’

He smiled at her and kissed her softly on the lips.

‘You know I wish I could, but I have to go into the office. Will you be okay with the twins here for a couple of hours, or we could all go in together?’

‘No, it’s fine, we’ll hang out here. I’m sure you’ve got lots to catch up on,’ Madeleine said, pulling the sheet a little tighter around her. And like that it was over. Neither of them had even left the bed yet, but whatever it was that had allowed them to ignore their better judgement was gone, leaving awkwardness in its wake.

He caught her gaze and looked her in the eye, and was

unreasonably pleased that she cracked him a half-smile. ‘Are we okay?’ he asked.

‘Go to work,’ she said. ‘And stop worrying. We’re fine, and if we need to talk we can do it later.’

* * *

If they needed to talk? On what planet did you sleep with your brother’s best friend—the same person who also happened to be your temporary housemate and whose kids you were babysitting—and not need to talk about it? Maybe Finn would get home from work tonight and Trudy would have left dinner and they could just eat and put the babies to bed and not mention the fact that he’d made her see stars last night. Well, that was a perfectly reasonable plan, wasn’t it?

She rolled her eyes at her own idiocy as she heard the shower in Finn’s bathroom turn on and started to look around her and work out what had happened to her clothes. One minute they had been in the kitchen—all meaningful looks and barely concealed lust—and the next they were done with even barely concealing and they were crashing against doorframes and knocking into bannisters, shedding clothes as they went.

From here she could spot underwear, but she was going to have to grab Finn’s shirt if she was going to make it out of here with any sort of dignity intact. Really, this whole morning-after thing would be so much easier if they had actually talked for even a second about how they were going to handle this today... They should just be going back to normal, right? Pretending that it had meant nothing and that they were little more than acquaintances to one another. Acquaintances who had seen one another naked and done any number of things that were making her blush now that she was thinking of them in the daylight.

But it wasn’t going to go any further than that because...because what? Because this wasn’t her style, getting involved with someone who she actually liked and respected. Because he was someone she could have a proper conversation with, someone she could rely on. Because he wasn’t one of the shallow boys that she normally picked up and put down. Because she knew deep down that he saw her for who she really was. He was someone who supported and respected her.

Yeah, she told herself with a heavy touch of sarcasm. Why would she choose that for herself, when she had her life of meaningless, pointless dating to go back to? It wasn’t as if the guy was a genius in bed or anything...

The shower stopped as she finished buttoning her shirt—his shirt—and for a moment she considered darting back into her own room. But that would be idiotic, she told herself. She’d got herself here—into this room, this situation—and she could get herself out of it with at least a little dignity intact.

‘Hey, you didn’t have to get up,’ Finn said as he walked back into the room and clocked her standing beside the bed in his shirt. ‘Looks good on you,’ he said with a smirk that was one hundred per cent alpha male marking his territory. In a really good way.

Tags: Ellie Darkins Billionaire Romance
Source: readsnovelonline.net