“She’s a teenager. They are missing the consequences-and-perspective chip.”
“I didn’t realize you knew so much about child psychology.”
He didn’t. But he’d been that age once. “We should go if we are going to make our flight.”
“The boy’s father said he would call a limo. I suspect it’s going to be filled with champagne for the hero.” She didn’t give him a chance to say “hell no.” “Don’t worry. I knew you wouldn’t want a fuss. I told him I’d already called the cab company. But what you did back there, Colt.” Her voice got all thick and her eyes teary. “It was amazing.”
He didn’t like seeing that look on her face, so he brought up the subject that he knew would take it off. “I saw you and the baby over there. You look like a natural. I assume you and Lord Percy won’t wait too long to get going on the heir and the spare.”
She froze. Any admiration she might have been feeling for him for saving the kid slid from her face.
It took her a moment to respond. She gave a slight shake of her head and said, “No... No. I don’t think so.”
There was something about her response that was off, but he read it wrong. “You aren’t that old—or is it the ambassador? He has a couple of kids from his first marriage, right? Two and out, is that it?”
He didn’t think she was going to respond. She held his gaze until he felt like squirming. He who had withstood hours of interrogation (i.e., torture) training and never flinched.
“There were complications after the accident. I can no longer have children.”
Was there accusation in her tone, or did he just imagine it? He didn’t know, but whatever it was, it made him want to strike back.
It was what he did. What he always did. “Karma’s a bitch.”
She stood there just staring at him. She was so still he didn’t think she was breathing.
He used to be so good at reading her, but her expression was so blank, so stark, she might have been dead.
“Thank you for that.”
And with that she walked away.
They barely spoke on the return flight to DC. It was what he wanted.
He didn’t understand why she’d thanked him at first. But then he realized that if she’d been softening toward him, the remark had reminded her of who he was.
Twelve
Brittany had been so wiped out by the time they’d finally opened the door to the hotel room in Copenhagen that she’d barely registered the king-sized bed. She’d been too tired to care, protest, or act missish about sleeping in the same bed with him. It was big enough to spread out and leave a nice safety-zone buffer in between.
Besides, John had slept even less than she had in the past forty or so hours since she’d gotten out of bed yesterday morning—and he looked even more exhausted than she felt—so sex was probably the last thing on his mind.
He’d been strangely untalkative—almost brooding—since they’d gotten on the train, and she suspected he needed sleep even more than she did.
They both did the bare minimum in terms of preparing for bed—a few minutes in the bathroom to wash and the removal of outer layers of clothes—before collapsing in an exhausted heap on the bed.
But at some point during the night that nice safety-zone buffer disappeared. Brittany must have inched herway across no-man’s-land because when she woke, she was practically sprawled on top of John’s chest. Hisnakedchest.
It was worse than that, she realized, as her mind slowly lost the fuzziness and awareness came barreling in with all the subtlety of a freight train. Their legs were entwined, and his hand was cupping her bottom as if to hold her in place.
Her body temperature seemed to shoot up a good eight hundred degrees—at least. He radiated heat like an inferno, and with her plastered to him like this, it was flowing directly into her.
She knew exactly the moment he woke. She had her cheek pressed to the smooth, bare skin of that incredible chest, and his heart, which had been beating nice and steadily in her ear, started to pound.
She froze, hoping he wouldn’t realize she was awake. But her cheeks were burning.
So much for staying away from him. Apparently he was catnip even in her subconscious.
Mortified at finding herself in this position, Brittany was trying to think of ways to extricate herself when things went from bad to worse. If possible, his body heat seemed to go up a couple notches, from scorching to red-hot, and his hand spread across her bottom and began to lightly caress it over the jeans she hadn’t bothered to take off.
