“What? I didn’t want you to wear a hole in the linoleum, they charge for that here. This isn’tThe St. Claire,” she said the hotel name with an English accent as she smiled, and his chest did that weird expand thing, flip thing it had done since the first time he saw her.
She really was going to kill him.
“We should get some sleep.”
She saluted him as he walked by, and he wanted so badly to pick her up, throw her sassy ass on the bed, and spank her. The worse part was, he knew she’d like it.
27
Thirty minutes later,they were lying in the dark, rain pounding on the tin roof, fire flickering in the fireplace, and Deacon was doing everything he could not to think about how close he was lying next to Jenna, or how good she smelled, or how silky her hair felt brushing up against his arm, or how soft her skin felt every time she unintentionally grazed him.
Fifteen minutes of silence had passed before Jenna, still sounded wide awake as she asked, “Are you enjoying your first sleepover?”
“Mmm,” grunted.
“There are several sleepover traditions you could choose from to indulge in if you’d like.”
He inhaled slowly through his nostrils. “Okay.”
“One involves penises and one?—”
“I choose door number penis.”
Jenna chuckled, causing the bed to move, which caused his dick to think it was all-systems-go. He inhaled slowly through his nose, trying to keep his hatches battened down.
“Okay then whoever falls asleep first gets a penis drawn on their face.”
“Wow,” Deacon stated flatly, “that did not play out how I thought it would.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but they were all girls’ sleepovers, it’s not exactly like we had penises on demand.”
“Oh, I promise you, youabsolutelyhad penises on demand.”
He felt Jenna glance over as she laughed.
He loved this. Just lying with her, talking, and joking around. Knowing that for a few minutes, her brain was shut off. She wasn’t stressing. Even if it was slowly killing him, he loved this for her. “What other sleepover traditions did I miss?”
“Well, I can only speak for girls’ sleepovers, but there was a lot of secret telling.”
Okay, now they were talking. That was definitely a road he’d like to go down, he wanted to know every secret in the head of the woman beside him. “Okay.”
“You want to tell secrets?” She sounded very surprised.
He turned and looked at her. “It’s a sleepover, I don’t think we have a choice.”
“The rule is it has to be something you havenevertold another soul.”
He nodded.
“You go first,” she challenged him.
Shit, he felt like they were playing vulnerability chicken. He wasn’t sure how much he should admit. “I just started therapy. I’ve gone a couple times before, but this is the first time I’ve been honest.”
She seemed shocked that he’d come out of the gate with something so personal. It was strategic. If he wantedto know everything about her, he needed to be an open book himself.
“I don’t think I was really in love with Asher as an adult, and I know I never loved my second husband James.”
“In therapy I’ve talked more about you than anything else in my life.”
