Aidan shakes his head. “Let’s stick to the plan.” He tucks his chin and leans toward me. In a low voice, he says, “You should expect me to sneak into your room after we eat. I plan to take that dress off you twice.”
“Maybe breakfast can wait,” I murmur, but then my stomach growls and ruins the moment.
Aidan laughs. “Apparently not.”
Making the pumpkin maple pie gave me an introduction into how Diana sets up the kitchen, so I’m lightning fast at getting together everything we need to cook breakfast. While we cook, we snack on tortilla chips and use superhuman strength not to trade salty kisses.
In twenty minutes we are fed and finished with what is admittedly a shitty job of cleaning up behind ourselves.
Trying to act normal as we walk through the house and to my room is harder than not kissing Aidan in the kitchen. My stomach is flip-flopping more now than it was last night, a feat I wouldn’t have thought possible.
The gods are on our side. Nobody is around to see us creep through the house, up the stairs, and into my room. Aidan locks the bedroom door and follows me into the bathroom. He closes that door too, then turns on the shower.
“Shower sex?” I ask.
He pulls me into him and kisses my forehead. “I was doing that for noise, but now that you mention it…”
Aidan pushes the dress from my shoulders. He kisses me, and I lose myself almost instantly. His touch, his scent, just knowing it’shim, it’s all so overwhelming. Now that we are doing this, I can’t believe we haven’t always been.
Eventually, we make it into the shower.
* * *
“You go out first,then I’ll follow a couple minutes later,” Aidan tells me the plan as he puts his clothes back on. “I’m going to my room to change and then I’ll be down.”
“Sounds good.” I kiss him one more time and pull my zippered bag over my shoulder. My party dress is safely stowed inside, and I’ve changed into jeans and a sweatshirt.
He stands back away from the door, and I walk through, pulling it closed behind me. I’m almost to the stairs when Diana speaks.
“Natalie, there you are.”
I whip around. Diana is standing in the hallway, almost right in front of my door.
“Hi,” I say loudly, hoping like hell Aidan hears me.
Diana walks closer. “I’m glad I caught you. I wanted to talk with you about your manuscript.”
Holy crap.With everything that happened last night with Aidan, I nearly forgot about giving Diana my manuscript.
“You hated it, right? I knew it.” I’m not kidding. Crippling self-doubt is a hallmark of all writers.
“Quite the opposite. It has a lot of potential. If you don’t mind, I’d like to send it to my editor.”
My eyes widen, and Diana raises her hands. “I can’t make any promises. There’s a lot more to book publishing than a good book, unfortunately. But—”
A cell phone rings. From my bedroom. We both look toward my closed door, then at each other.
“I must have left my phone in the room,” I say, but I’m a terrible liar. My voice quivers and I cannot make my gaze stay in one place. Diana is apparently great at detecting lies. She looks at the room again, then back at me.
“The ringing cut off after one ring,” she says.
“Damn telemarketers,” I say lamely. “Must be that auto-answer thing they have.”
Her expression goes from shrewd to shining, and I realize she knows. She stares at me for an extra beat, smiling.
“Assholes,” she agrees, letting me off the hook. “So, I’ll let you know what my editor says. Sound good?” She starts down the stairs and I follow.
“Sounds amazing,” I tell her, setting my bag at the foot of the stairs.
