Page 39 of Santa Baby Maybe
“Trouble?”
“The end of trouble, I hope. But I don’t like leaving you. Is there someone else who can stay with you?”
“W.B., I’ll be fine. I would have been fine yesterday.”
He obviously didn’t agree. “I’ll go make us some coffee.”
He left and suddenly there was this weird emptiness in my bedroom. Like his presence had filled it with a masculine energy even Jake couldn’t match, and now that he was gone I missed it.
“Ugh!” I said, my head falling back into the pillow. This wasn’t good. I was getting too close to really liking him.
A minute later he appeared back in my bedroom, in his still-sexy bare feet, with two cups of coffee. Next to me Jake stilled, but he didn’t growl.
“I put food in your dish, cat. Go. Eat. Now,” W.B. commanded.
It appeared as if Jake was actually listening when he hopped off the bed and made a dash down the hallway, but the likelihood was that he’d just gotten a whiff of his food.
Sitting up, I pressed my back against the headboard and accepted the mug even as W.B. sat on the bed with me. For a few moments, we didn’t speak. He knew how I took my coffee, but I figured that wasn’t too weird. We’d chatted often enough in the break room while we’d made afternoon coffee together. He took his with two creamers and a ridiculous amount of sugar.
The silence seemed to thicken the longer time passed and I wondered what he was thinking. How soon he could get out of here? Or how much longer he could stay?
It turned out he wasn’t thinking about either of those things.
“Why didn’t you accept my offer to take you into the office last week? I told you to text me and you didn’t.”
I froze mid-sip. What was I supposed to tell him? He’d been on a date the night before. He was searching for a woman who was not me. Relying on him for anything was only going to make me fall a little deeper. I didn’t want to put myself in a situation where I might get hurt. Admitting that, however, meant admitting I was already falling a little bit.
I shrugged. “It was a nice offer, but you really didn’t need to…” I trailed off, hoping he would leave it at that.
He sighed. “When I was a kid I used to teach myself to always expect the worst outcome, so I would never be disappointed.”
That made me want to hug him. “Did it work?”
“I don’t know. I know I never got excited about anything. Good or bad.”
“This probably won’t come as a surprise to you, but I was the opposite. I always hoped for the best and so I was disappointed a lot.”
He looked at me then and I felt a whole different tension happening in my body. It was like he was trying to look into me, right down to my soul. Then his eyes dropped to my chest and the whole no-bra thing came back to me in full force. Especially since I was pretty sure my nipples were hard.
He reached for my mug and pulled it out of my hands, setting it down on the nightstand. He set his own next to it and moved in closer.
“I don’t want to leave you, Joy.”
I shook my head, trying not to be affected by his closeness and failing. “I’ll be fine.”
“No. Not because of your ankle. Because I don’t want to leave you.”
My eyes widened at that, and before I could say anything about it, he kissed me. A full-on mouth-to-mouth kiss. I felt his fingers at the nape of my neck, pulling me toward him. Without thinking about the implications, I opened my mouth and let his tongue inside. He was warm, wet, and delicious. Like a brownie just out of the oven. I wanted to sink my teeth into him and devour him in one bite.
I heard him groan, or maybe I groaned, but when I reached my arms out to wrap around his shoulders he pulled away.
Uncertain what to do, I clasped my fingers together and pushed them into my lap.
“That was a mistake,” he muttered without looking at me. “I’m sorry. I need to go.”
I nodded. “Yep. Thanks for everything. Except the kiss. That was definitely a mistake. So I’m not thanking you for that. At all. I probably should have slapped you. Or something.”
He looked at me thoughtfully but then his lips curved into a smile. “Yeah, I probably deserved to be slapped. You promise me you’ll stay off your foot?”
“As much as I can.”
His expression was grim. “Okay. I really do have to go.”
There wasn’t anything to say, so I didn’t say anything. I just reached for my coffee mug and pretended it was the most normal thing in the world to have been served coffee in bed, gotten kissed, then been rejected all in a matter of minutes.
“See ya, W.B. Or should I say Wilmington Baltimore? Like maybe your mom had a thing for East Coast cities.”
He huffed and got off the bed, taking his own mug with him. “Never going to happen, Joy.”
He left my room, and not very much longer after that I heard the front door closing. And I tried really hard not to be disappointed.
