Four thousand three hundred and twenty-two minutes.
The problem wasn't that she was messy. He could handle mess. He had a system. He could clean and reorganize. He could restore order from chaos with the same methodical precision he brought to everything else in his life. The problem was that he didn't want to.
Every time he picked up one of her abandoned mugs, he thought about her lips on the rim. Every time he folded one of her sweaters, he imagined what she'd look like taking it off. Every time he straightened her scattered art supplies, he remembered the way she bit her bottom lip when she was concentrating and the way her tongue poked out slightly when she was working on something difficult.
His thoughts had become increasingly... problematic.
Filthy, even.
He'd been trying to do his morning workout routine yesterday, and she'd wandered into the room to grab something from her bag. She was wearing leggings that fit like a second skin and she bent over to dig through the chaos.
His routine was a carefully calibrated series of exercises designed to maintain flexibility and core strength that he'd performed hundreds of times. This time he lost count of his reps. He just stopped mid-crunch and stared like a particularly depraved gargoyle until she'd found whatever she was looking for and bounced out of the room with a cheerful "Sorry, carry on!"
Carry on.As if his brain hadn't completely short-circuited. As if he wasn't going to need to add thirty minutes to his cold shower routine just to function like a normal person.
She was destroying him. Systematically. Cheerfully. Probably without even realizing it.
The singing stopped, and the bathroom went quiet. Then he heard her footsteps in the hallway, that distinctive rhythm she had because she walked on her toes like someone who was perpetually about to break into dance.
He forced himself to focus on the coffee maker. Beans in the grinder. Water in the reservoir. Everything measured. Everything controlled.
The footsteps got closer.
"Morning!" Her voice was bright and sleep-rough, impossible to ignore.
He turned around to offer a civilized greeting like a normal person who lived with a houseguest and had normal, appropriate houseguest thoughts. The words died in his throat.
She was wearing his shirt.
Hisshirt. A soft navy henley that he'd left in the laundry room two days ago because it needed to go in the delicates cycle and he hadn't run that load yet. The fabric hung past her hips, the sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and the collar was sliding off one freckled shoulder in a way that made his mouth go dry.
She was wearing tiny sleep shorts, so small they barely peeked out from under the hem of his shirt, exposing miles and miles of pale, paint-flecked leg.
Her hair was a wild red explosion, curls going every direction, pillow-creased on one side. No makeup. Just her, soft and rumpled and wearing his clothes like they belonged to her. Something possessive roared to life in his chest.
Mine,his orc instincts insisted.She's wearing my things. She's in my home. She's?—
"You okay?" She tilted her head, frowning slightly. "You look like you swallowed a wasp."
He opened his mouth, then closed it. He tried to remember how breathing worked.
"Coffee," he managed finally, his voice rough.
"Ooh, perfect." She padded past him, close enough that he could smell her—soap and sleep and that indefinable warmth—and reached up to open the mug cabinet. "I need caffeine before I can function. I was up way too late working on the central composition piece. I think I finally cracked the transition from the dynamic movement section to the?—"
She kept talking. The words washed over him without registering because she was stretching up on her toes to reach the shelf, and the movement made his shirt ride up to reveal the curve of her waist. There was a small paint stain on her hip that had probably transferred from her hand while she worked, and he wanted to put his mouth on it.
He wanted to put his mouth on a lot of things.
"—might need to adjust the color palette, because I realized that the green I was planning doesn't quite match the official team colors, and I was thinking maybe a slightly darker emeraldwith gold accents instead of the yellow I originally—are you listening?"
No.He was not listening. He was standing very still and gripping the counter behind him hard enough that his knuckles ached, using every ounce of discipline he'd developed over a lifetime of elite athletic training to keep himself rooted in place.
"Emerald with gold," he repeated. "Sounds. Good."
She squinted at him. "Did you sleep okay? You seem weird."
"I'm fine."
