Page 49 of Unexpected Company
“My apologies. How could I forget?”
Roman punches my arm playfully.
“Well,” I start, sipping at the horrendous tea in my mug. “I have a confession, too.”
Roman raises a brow. “Go on,” he says, repeating my earlier words.
“I hate tea.” I hold my mug up to him.
“What!” he exclaims. “But I make you multiple cups of it, every day.”
I nod. “I know. And I drink every last drop.”
He takes the tea from my hand and puts it down next to us. Moving onto his knees, he crawls over to me and straddles my lap. I brace one hand on the floor and grip his hip with the other.
“Why? Why would you do that?”
Shrugging, I go with the truth. “Because I like how happy it makes you to share it with me.” I kiss his nose. “I love the way you have rules about what tea gets served when. And what the perfect amount of milk each variety needs. And which is best drunk with biscuits, and which is best alone.”
“You’re ridiculous,” he replies, shaking his fringe out of his face. His smile reaches his eyes, the brown in them sparkling with gold as bright as the baubles on the tree. “Whatisyour hot drink of choice?”
“I would do terrible things for a latte right now,” I admit with a chuckle. Roman laughs again, then rests his head onmy shoulder. He smells like a mixture of my shampoo and his cologne, and I’m not subtle when I take a deep breath and imprint his scent on my lungs.
Roman falls silent, his hand drawing circles on my forearm, over my flannel shirt.
“Gare?”
“Hmm?”
“Has your detective fallen in love yet?” He asks the same question he did days ago and my heart trips over the words, my answer sticking in my throat. I think about the last chapter I wrote, my own feelings poured into the words on the page.
“We barely know each other,” Jack says, his hand on Blaine’s cheek, the younger man’s body pressed to his. They’re in Jack’s office. The door closed and case files laid strewn across Jack’s desk. This was never meant to happen. He was never meant to fall for the guy he’s sworn to protect. But what choice did he have when Blaine speaks to a part of Jack that he’d long ago closed off? Making him believe in a future he wasn’t sure he deserved.
“What does it matter? I know how I feel. Don’t you?” Blaine asks. His eyes boring into Jack’s, searching for the answer in the depths of his lover’s baby blues.
I nuzzle my face against the top of Roman’s head.
“Yeah,” I say after a moment of silence. “He has.”
Chapter nineteen
Roman
“Great form, Supernova,” I mutter to myself as I press through my heels and lift my ass higher, a stretch burning in my calf muscles. I try to focus on my breathing – measured breaths in and out – as I drop my head.
There’s a pleasant ache in my ass from my morning wake-up call and my mind flits back to how amazing that was. Laying there, at Garrett’s mercy. His puppet to play with as he wished. The way he’d wrung pleasure from my body while I was barely awake.
And great. Now I’m stuck in downward dog with a half chub. I breathe out and push the pleasant thoughts out of my mind, ignoring the sky high levels of anticipation coursing through my blood. I am ever so not patiently waiting for Garrett to finish preparing lunch so that he can hunt me down, bring me to my knees and do wonderful, wicked things with my body.
Concentrating on my breathing again, I stretch in my current position then flow into upward cat – or is it upward cow? I can’t remember exactly what Liam’s girlfriend, Sophie, called it whenshe dragged me along to her yoga class – and press my knees to the towel beneath me, then lift my head and let my belly drop.
I lose track of my breaths when the wind howls; the trees tapping a beat on the side of the cottage. It’s cold out today, and though it’s no longer snowing, there’s a blanket of it covering the ground outside. Garrett has already had second thoughts about his Christmas wish. His worry about me getting ill threatening to ruin our jaunt in the woods. But fuck that if he thinks a little cold is going to have me missing out on him hunting me down in the woods and fucking me senseless.
Not a fucking chance. And in any case, I read once that it’s a myth that you can catch a cold by being cold, so his point is moot.
To please him, though, I have agreed to wear my coat and keep my beanie on. We’ve also agreed to end our chase on the heated decking rather than in the melting snow, but Garrett is back on board and I cannot fucking wait.
Rounding my spine, I change position and flow back into downward dog. My head drops, looking backward through my stretched legs, my eyes landing on the man who makes my heart race more than any stunt or dare ever has.
