Page 47 of The Hanukkah Hoax
Her body, however, was having none of that. Despite her exhaustion, the damn thing still thrummed with a distracting vibrancy, so much so that she knew she wasn’t getting to bed anytime soon.
Marisa sighed and rested her hand over her runaway heart, letting her fingers fall in the valley between her breasts and her mind wander where it would.
But all that did was remind her that she was feeling a whole lot of heated flesh right now and that she was supposed to be talking to Alec.
And she sure as hell wasn’t supposed to be thinking about those two things together. But then her thoughts drifted again, along with her fingers, and well, willpower just seemed like the most uninteresting thing to prop up at the moment.
Maybe restraint wasn’t what she needed.
Maybe she needed a bit of indulgence, something to take the edge off the past several grueling hours and acknowledge the sweet fantasy of the morning.
A fantasy that was exactly that, but one she wouldn’t mind living in a bit longer.
Marisa dragged her fingers down her belly and began to slide them beneath the waistband of her shorts?—
Her phone blared through her quiet bedroom, scaring the ever-loving shit out of her and nearly causing claw marks that would be mortifying to explain to any emergency department triage nurse working the night shift.
She jolted out of bed and reached for her phone, which was still plugged into the charger. Any restraint she may have fancied flew out the window as Alec’s name appeared on her screen.
“Uh, hi! Hi there. Sorry I didn’t?—”
“You’re home.” Alec’s words definitely weren’t a question, nor were they filled with the smooth confidence she’d always known him to command. He almost sounded . . .
“Were you worried?”
His pause was brief but noticeable, and she imagined him casting his eyes up, as if asking for someone to save him from intuitive women. “I hadn’t heard from you. Wanted to make sure you got home okay.”
“Because you were worried for me,” she needled, smiling.
“Because I asked you to text me when you got home.”
“So you wouldn’t worry.”
The long-suffering sigh he gave was delicious. “So I wouldn’t hunt down your felonious friends and see whether they were throwing a party you went to without me. And also,” he added, infusing his words with what she suspected was a mollifying smile, “so I wouldn’t worry.”
The earlier tingle she’d abandoned fluttered to life again, except this time, she hardly knew what to do with it, so she just snuggled down into the comforter and gripped the phone tighter to her ear. “That’s got to be the cutest, coziest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
He snorted. “Not sure I’ve heard that before, but I’m in no place to argue with a woman who knows her mind.”
“Oh, please. I don’t know my mind so much as I am a slave to it. Besides, if I were certain about half the things I should be, I’m pretty sure you and I wouldn’t be using deception and a pet adoption event as a battle strategy when it comes to figuring out our lives.”
“I wouldn’t say that. You seemed pretty sure of yourself this morning, in all the ways. It looked quite bonny on you, that self-confidence. I’ve noticed it a few times now, the glow you get when you’ve settled into your own skin. It’s a different sort of radiance.”
Radiance. Whoa. She had no idea what to make of that or what the late hour was doing to her inhibitions, because she most definitely wasn’t the sort of woman who would ever ask?—
“Alec, can I ask you a question?”
“Anything. So long as it’s not what side of the bed Hugh likes to sleep on, because I’ll go to my grave before I admit to being the little spoon with that arsehole.”
She laughed, and man, it felt so good, in the way things could only feel when one’s brain was too exhausted to care about woulds and shoulds and, instead, just happily floated among the maybes, only firing the neurons it needed to, if it needed to.
No alternate mode. No safe topics. No eggshells. Just . . . joy.
“I like the way that sounds,” Alec added. “Your laugh. I wish I were there to see it.”
“See what? Me laughing? It’s not as glamorous as you might think. Spoiler alert: I snort more often than I don’t. I’m practically a farm animal at times. My mother couldn’t take me anywhere when I was a kid.”
But despite her attempt at humor, her mouth still had gone dry waiting on his next word, while her brain, ever the A student, sprinkled in all the extra credit tidbits the rest of her body sure as hell never forgot.
