The thought of it hardens something inside my chest.
“Because if it is, I’m opting out.”
My voice drops suddenly. “I wouldn’t share you if the human race depended on it.”
Erin’s smile falls and her breath hitches.
We stare at each other, an electric tension crackling the air in the room.
After a few long, heated seconds of silence, Erin clears her throat. “Bathroom.”
I nod and she grabs her bag and flees, clicking the door shut behind her.
Erin
Safely inside the bathroom, I lean against the sink, stare at my reflection and wait for my pulse to return to normal.
Get it together,I whisper to myself.
This is business. Not whatever that look was. And not whatever he meant by saying he wouldn’t share me.
So, why did it make my legs feel like the floor had dropped an inch without warning?
August King is an attractive man. Averyattractive man. So attractive in fact, I might sometimes hold a breath in my lungs when he enters the room.
But he’s paying me to be here. As he coldly and accurately put it at dinner, I’m hisemployee. I’m here to serve a purpose: to help him clinch a deal that matters to him.
If it was so difficult getting an invitation to this gig, I doubt he would want to jeopardize that by getting involved with his fake wife.
A shiver ripples down my spine at the thought of being intimate with him. To feel his rough, large hands on my trembling skin, his dark mouth smashed against my lips, his fingers teasing between my thighs…
I grip onto the vanity as a wave of lust cracks through me.
And that there was just a figment of my imagination. I’d be lucky to get out alive if August King made any kind of physical move on me.
It’s better this way. Employer and employee. No blurred boundaries or line-crossing.
Besides, what on earth would he see in a forty-something divorcée with a teenager in tow and a shitty bar job?
I have wrinkles he could camp in and grey hairs that grow in nonsensical directions like I’ve stuck my fingers in an electrical outlet.
I glance down at the long, trusty t-shirt I’ve slept in for around twelve years. It has ‘Italians do it better’ emblazoned across the chest and is identical to one Madonna wore in one of her music videos. Back in the day.
Urgh, I can’t believe I’m one of those people who says that now.
I hadn’t been expecting to share a room, let alone a bed, with August King, so my shopping activities didn’t extend to sleepwear. And now I’m kicking myself.
Not that he’s going to care what I sleep in anyway. When he said he wouldn’t share me, it’s not because he wants me for himself, it’s because he doesn’t want anyone else to have me. Not when he’s paying me a fortune to be withhim.
I focus on trying to catch my breath again as I change quickly, my heart racing.
When I open the bathroom door, August is standing in the middle of the room wearing loose gray pajama pants, his bare chest catching the soft light of the bedroom lamps.
Our eyes meet, and a rush ten times more intense than the one I just felt in the bathroom, passes through my core, whipping my breath.
“This okay?” he asks in a broken timber.
My brain has short-circuited. “Is… is what okay?”
