“He won’t get past me,” she whispered, a fierceness in her tone.
I smiled before I pressed a quick kiss to the top of her head. “At least we’ve got each other.”
At that, Maia snuggled in even more, her knees touching mine. I reached for the remote to restart the show, satisfied I’d made a small breakthrough with My tonight.
When she fell asleep, I discovered when Maia was out, she was out. Not once did she wake up as I lifted and carried her into her bedroom. I laid her down on the bed and gently extricated the holder from her hair so the silky dark strands spilled freely across her pillow. Not once while I did this or when I untucked the duvet to cover her up did she wake. Or when I took her glasses off and set them on her bedside table. I put her phone on charge and held the camera up to her face to unlock it just so I could make sure her alarm was set.
Maia didn’t even blink.
And she snored quietly.
I stared down at her, wishing like hell I could get in beside her. Wishing like hell it was my right, my place in her life to get in the bed and spoon with her. I fucking loved spooning, but girls tended to take spooning to mean something it wasn’t, so I’d stopped doing it.
With Maia, it would mean something.
I wanted to spoon with Maia MacLeod.
Impatience rode me.
“One day,” I murmured, before I bent down to press a kiss to her forehead.
As I was leaving the flat, filled with that impatience but also hope for the future, my phone buzzed. I pulled it out of my pocket to see it was a text from Callan.
Just giving you a heads-up, mate. Sorry people are pricks.
Attached to his text was a link to a video. I turned the volume down as I exited Maia’s building and strolled over to my bike.
The video was of a fit brunette, telling the world she’d fucked me a few weeks ago and I was clearly cheating scum. She’d posted the clip from the tabloid newspaper that got me in trouble. She was one of the girls in it. I did not remember sleeping with her.
I didn’t remember her, full stop.
Feeling sick, I turned and looked up at Maia’s dark flat.
What kind of shitstorm was this about to unleash on us?
On the possibility of us?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MAIA
Discombobulated.
I’d always liked that word.
I was discombobulated when I woke up the next morning in my bed, unable to remember how I got here. Quite quickly, I realized I must have fallen asleep on the couch and Baird had not only put me to bed, but he’d made sure my alarm was set. For a few minutes, I just lay there staring at my ceiling, heart racing, because of the squishy feeling in my stomach.
I recognized that squishy feeling.
It was accompanied by other feelings I’d been ignoring for a few weeks now.
“Damn,” I murmured, flushing hot all over with realization. “I’m crushing on my best friend.”
There.
It was true.
I was developing a big, juicy crush on Baird McMillan, the absolute worst romantic candidate in my life.
