“Smart man.”
I should not find that attractive. The fact that I do is a problem I’ll address later, when I’m not climbing into a bed with her.
She sits up and starts pulling the decorative pillows into a line down the center of the mattress, stacking them with a concentration that would be endearing if the whole exercise weren’t a testament to the absurdity of this situation. Two adults in a honeymoon suite, separated by a barricade made of throw pillows. This is my vacation. My get-away-from-stress, doctor-prescribed, forced vacation.
“Fortifications?” I ask.
“Boundaries.” She sets the last pillow in place and surveys her work. “The Great Wall of Pillows. You stay on your side, I stay on mine. Everyone sleeps. Nobody gets weird.”
I watch her smooth the final cushion into position, and what strikes me isn’t the wall itself but the care she’s putting into it. She needs this barrier too. She’s not building it for my benefit. The realization does nothing to simplify my evening.
“I have no interest in crossing any lines,” I say, and it sounds exactly like the kind of quarterly projection that falls apart the minute the market opens.
“Great.” She reaches for her bedside lamp. “Then we’re both on the same page.” She clicks it off. “Goodnight, Alec. Try not to organize anything in your sleep.”
I smirk into the darkness. “Goodnight, Ella.”
For the first ninety seconds, I’m fine. I am lying on my back with my arms at my sides, and I’m fine. The ceiling fan turns above us. Waves break against the beach below, steady and rhythmic. Trade winds push through the louvers carrying the scents of flowers and salt air. A perfect tropical night, and I am a man at rest, completely at ease, not at all aware that her breathing on the other side of the pillow wall is slightly too fast for sleep.
She’s awake. I know she’s awake the way I know a market is volatile before the numbers confirm it, some ambient signal in the data that registers before the pattern becomes visible. She’s lying over there, behind four pillows of Egyptian cotton and goose down, and she is conscious, and my entire body is tuned to that fact like a receiver locked on a frequency it can’t switch off.
Minutes pass. Her breathing changes. Slows. Stretches into the deep, even rhythm of actual sleep, and the tension in my shoulders doesn’t ease. It redistributes. Because knowing she’s awake was one kind of torture, and knowing she fell asleep while I’m lying here with my heart rate fifteen beats above resting and a hard-on that hasn’t quit since the chocolate cake is a different kind entirely.
She dropped off like a woman with nothing keeping her up. Meanwhile, I’m conducting stress tests on my own self-control and failing every one. My dick throbs as if to remind me it’s being ignored.
Down, boy. This is nothing to get excited about, just two bodies sharing a mattress. Basic biology. The fact that I’m hard enough to pound nails is only the predictable result of heat and darkness and not enough square footage. It has nothing to do with her specifically. I’ve been near attractive women before. Board dinners, charity galas, a notably aggressive VP at Merrill Lynch who once pursued me to my car after a late-night work session. My body maintained its professionalism without incident. This is no different.
Except Ella’s body heat is reaching me through the sheets, a slow tide I can feel creeping across the mattress, and my skin is responding to it like she’s running her fingers along my arm instead of sleeping ten inches away with her back to me. I should turn over. Face the bathroom. Put more distance between my body and the warm center of this bed. Instead, I lie here and breathe, and every breath pulls in whatever she puts in her hair, that scent I’ve been failing to classify since the plane. It’s saturated the pillow under my head so thoroughly that there’s no position, no angle, no amount of controlled breathing that filters it out.
She’s just a woman. Objectively attractive, sure. I can acknowledge that the way I acknowledge good systems architecture. Clean design. Elegant structure. It doesn’t mean I want to take it apart. Except I don’t typically lie awake with a hard-on thinking about server configurations. My lame comparison falls apart before I’ve finished making it, because she’s in my lungs and her warmth is on my skin and this bed is enormous but my body can locate her on it with a precision that has nothing to do with objectivity.
She murmurs.
Not any specific word. Just a sound, small and sleep-soft, pulled from whatever she’s dreaming about, and my cock throbs so hard I have to press my palm flat against my thigh to keep from groaning. Heat floods my chest. My skin goes tight across my shoulders and down my arms, and I am suddenly, viscerally aware of every inch of my body in these thin shorts, the fabric doing nothing to disguise or contain what’s happening south of my waistband.
She turns toward me. The pillow wall wobbles. One cushion tumbles off the barricade and lands against my ribs, warm from where her body pressed against it. I should put it back immediately. I should rebuild the wall and reinforce the perimeter and behave like the disciplined, controlled man I’ve spent thirty-two years constructing.
I put it back. But my fingers linger on the Egyptian cotton for a full second, feeling the residual heat of her through the fabric, before I pull my hand away.
The gap left by the fallen pillow offers a clear sightline to the curve of her shoulder in the moonlight. The thin tank top strap has slipped. Bare skin, smooth and tempting against white sheets. I look at the ceiling fan as if it can help me navigate this disaster.
Get it together, Beckett.
I do not get it together.
Instead, I lie rigid for the next two hours while she sleeps like a damned baby. She shifts and the covers pull. She curls onto her side and the mattress dips toward center and my body drifts toward the warmth of her, drawn by some primal tilt in the geometry that I correct every twenty minutes only to find I’ve drifted again. Each time, I’m closer. Each time, the heat of her is stronger, and my cock hasn’t stood down since roughly ten PM and shows no signs of retreating.
I consider the veranda lounger. Six feet of open air, ocean breeze, the restoration of my dignity. But going out there means admitting she got to me, and if she wakes up and finds me outside, those blue eyes will ask a question I don’t have an answer for that doesn’t involve the words “you” and “those tiny shorts” and “that sexy-as-fuck sound you made while eating cake.”
So I stay put. The pillow wall continues its eventual collapse. Ella’s breathing fills the dark, steady and soft, and my pulse continues its betrayal, running at a pace that would alarm Dr. Vaughn for reasons no cardiologist could have predicted when he prescribed this vacation.
Ella breathes the relaxed rhythm of the innocent. And my dick does not stand down for one damned minute.
It’s going to be a long fucking night.
CHAPTER 8
ELLA
