He sat up and rubbed his stomach. “You wake up all your boyfriends like that?”
“Only the fake kind who climb onto the couch with me while I’m unconscious and decide to have some nonconsensual cuddles.”
He laughed. He freakinglaughed.
What…the…heck?
He swung his bare feet onto the floor. “First of all, it wasyouwho climbed onto the couch withme. And I’m pretty sure I felt you grab my arm and wrap it around your waist when you rolled onto your side.”
“I might have been slightly drunk”—okay, more than slightly, but that wasn’t important—“but I remember falling asleep on the couchalone.”
He stood, and dear Heavenly Father above, the man was only wearing briefs. And he wasshredded. She’d known he was packing some muscle—one look at him in a T-shirt and anyone could see that—but this was muscle upon muscle.
How often did he work out?
“I put you in my bed and came out here to sleep on the couch,” he said slowly, like she was a child who otherwise wouldn’t understand. “But apparently, you can’t stay away from me even when you’re unconscious, because you sleepwalked right onto the couch with me.”
No. No, no, no. That couldn’t be true. It was too embarrassing. “That’s not true.”
“Afraid it is, Peaches.”
She hadn’t sleepwalked in a long time…almost a year. It was usually induced by stress.
And shehadbeen stressed after smelling the smoke yesterday.
Dammit. “Okay, let’s say I believe you. Why wouldn’t you just get up and go back to your own bed?”
“Because you told me not to.”
She swallowed. “You’re lying.”
He stepped closer, and it took every scrap of self-restraint she possessed to not move back and reinstate that semi-safe space between them. “You climbed onto the couch with me.” Another step closer. “Wrapped your arm around me. And whispered, ‘Don’t leave me.’”
She felt sick. That post-humiliation, new-core-memory-created kind of sick.
He reached out and touched her hip. “I couldn’t say no to that.”
The deep, sexy tone of his voice combined with the way his touch made her lower belly quiver—it was too much. “I have to go.”
“Stay for breakfast.”
She took a quick step back, hitting the back of her legs against the coffee table. “No. I, uh, need to get to work.”
It wasn’t a lie. She was due in at nine, but she didn’t even know what the time was.
She yanked her purse up from the coffee table, then ran—yes, ran—barefoot from his house. And she swore she heard the man laughing behind her.
Once inside her house, she slammed the door closed and rested her head against the wood.
Why? Why had she made an idiot of herself last night? Because she liked running from a fake boyfriend’s house? Because she enjoyed being humiliated?
Argh.
She pulled her phone from her purse and her jaw dropped. It was eight thirty. She started work in thirty freaking minutes.
Dropping her purse, she raced up the stairs and into her bedroom, where she stripped and took the fastest shower of her life.
It took her exactly twenty-one minutes to get ready, but that didn’t include feeding herself. It was fine—she’d eat at work. She probably had an apple or something lying around at the office. And there was a coffee machine there. She didn’t really feel like much more than coffee anyway.
