Page 50 of The Misfits of Copper County
This time, Delaney was too fucked out to do more than offer me a sleepy slur of agreement when I told him to stay there while I cleaned up and fetched him a warm washcloth. By the time I got back to the fire, he was dead asleep with his arm stretched out and the barest edge of one fingertip resting on the hair at the end of Teeny’s tail.
The sight of his little stealthy attempt at overcoming his fear made my chest ache. Maybe I didn’t give Delaney Monroe enough credit. The man I’d thought was a fussy know-it-all might just be hiding a tender heart after all.
I leaned down with the cloth and cleaned him up before repositioning his head on a pillow and lying down next to him. Once I’d settled next to him and pulled up the blankets, I couldn’t help but stare at his face in the golden light from the fire.
He was so beautiful… sensitive and reactive in all the best ways. But he was still my client.
This was a royally bad idea. A mistake of gargantuan proportions.
And when morning came, I remembered why.
In front of many,manywitnesses.
CHAPTERNINE
DELANEY
KAK-WEEEEE!KAK-WEEEE!
My eyes shot open at an unholy sound piercing the peaceful cocoon of sleep… and piercing my eardrums in the process. For a single, disorienting moment, I had no idea where I was, only that I was warm… and naked… and wrapped in blankets on a hard surface that was definitely not my bed.
“What the fu—” I started, then froze as my elbow connected with something solid—humanly solid—beside me.
Brewer. The sledgehammer. The wall. The kiss. The… everything else.
KAK-WEEEE!
“What the—?” Brewer mumbled, his voice thick with sleep. When he rolled over, the sleeping bag slid down to reveal his bare chest, and the sight made saliva pool in my mouth. His dark hair stood up in approximately seventeen different directions, and there was a suck-bruise on his shoulder that might or might not carry the DNA of a local journalist.
He looked just as good in the cold light of morning as he had in the glow of the firelight, which seemed unfair on a fundamental level.
“Hey.” He smiled warmly at me for a moment, then frowned. “Is something on fire?”
“Doorbell,” I croaked, tearing my gaze away. “Someone’s at the door.”
As if on cue, the bell rang again, followed by sharp rapping on the door. “Delaney? Brewer? Are you in there?” a woman’s voice called from outside.
Eyes wide and head throbbing, I caught bits and pieces of several voices having a lower, more muffled conversation.
“No way anybody’d sleep through that racket?—”
“Brew’s not answering his phone, but Reed said?—”
“The power’s back, so maybe they’re?—”
“…ain’t leavin’ ’til I give ’em croissants?—”
“And poor Delaney, without a shovel!” the woman wailed.
Oh. My. God.
I scrabbled around on the floor for my glasses, nearly face-planting when the blanket tangled around my ankles. “People,” I whisper-hissed, shoving the glasses on my nose. “Multiple people! There are multiple people outside my house, Brewer!”
Brewer, who’d risen with considerably more grace, simply stretched and yawned. The sight of his naked body—all of it, because apparently, morning was his, er,happiestand mostconfidenttime—momentarily short-circuited my panic.
“Relax,” he said, reaching for his jeans. “It’s probably just some neighbors checking on you because of the power outage and snow.” He nodded toward the window where the morning sun glinted off at least a foot of pristine white stuff.
Hen’s leg, it seemed, had been vindicated.
