“It does,” she says. “It’s perfect. But I can’t believe you did this. Why? And how? You did it all so quickly.”
Her eyes are filled with tears.
“Don’t cry,” I moan. Shit.
“I’m not crying,” she sniffs.
“Poppy’s just too happy,” Belle says. “That’s why her tears are leaking out.”
“That’s right. I’m just too happy.”
Belle smiles. “Guess what! Daddy also hired someone to redo my room. No more of that baby pink. Everything’s blue now. And guess what?”
“What?”
“I have bunk beds!”
“Really? That’s so awesome.”
“Yes. Because I want to sometimes sleep on the bottom and sometimes sleep on the top. I wanted taller bunk beds, the tallest, but Daddy made me get the shorter ones. Now, if I wanted, I could even have a sleepover, and we’d each get our own bed. Do you think Sasha would like to have a sleepover?”
Poppy smiles. “I think we can definitely ask Sasha and her daddy.”
“Sure,” I say, trying not to roll my eyes at the mention of Conner.
“I don’t know how to thank you,” Poppy says, stopping next to me. She avoids my eyes as she reaches up on tiptoe.
I lean down slightly, and she brushes a kiss on my now-bristly jaw. That brief contact is enough to light up all my nerve endings. It affects me more than any wild sex I ever had when I was young and stupid, when I landed my first big roles in Hollywood. And with those roles came groupies. I was no monk. But anonymous sex soon grew old.
Sex with Poppy would be… I get hard at the thought. If the light brush of her mouth against my skin can make me ache—body and soul—sex with her would obliterate all who came before.
I shouldn’t be thinking of her this way, but ever since our kiss—hell, ever since that first night when she stepped into my elevator and into my life, she’s been destroying all my carefully laid boundaries, all my meticulously built walls. And now, they lie shattered at my feet. And I don’t know how long I can continue to resist what I want so damn badly.
* * *
Poppy
I step back from Ronan.My lips are still tingling from that soft kiss I placed on his strong jaw, from the feel of his rough stubble and smooth skin. Everything about him just works for me. His long blond Viking hair. His mountainous strength and his quiet, stoic demeanor. His pale blue eyes. His slow but devastating half smile, which is all the more precious because it’s not easily bestowed.
Except on me.
I shake my head in an attempt to break the spell. “Really, it’s incredible. I can’t believe you did this.”
Ronan looks down and shuffles from one foot to the other. Is it possible this giant of a man, this Hollywood god, is embarrassed? I detect a faint pink staining his cheeks and ears, but maybe it’s a trick of the room’s light.
He finally meets my eyes. “It’s nothing. I had help.”
“It’s not nothing. And what did you do with your gym? You have all that equipment that you use every day.”
He shrugs. “It’s no big deal. I moved it upstairs into the green guest bedroom.”
I know the room he’s talking about. “But that’s such a small space.”
A shrug again. “It’s fine.”
My heart fills with warmth. Ronan found me painting in the kitchen once, and he creates an entire art room for me, moving his gym, which he uses daily.
Looking again at the painting supplies laid out on the wide wooden table, I gasp when I notice one set of brushes.
