Page 111 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

Lacey

I woke up disoriented, the bed too small, somebody pushing against me, and I startled a little before I placed it. That wasn't my cat. Then the giraffes and the tigers on the wall, the soft lighting, Jessica's breath on my neck, and I remembered where I was. A wonderful way to wake up, next to a sleeping girl in her own little bedroom.

Except for the crick in my neck.

I sat up slow so I wouldn't wake her and stretched it out. God, how long had I been asleep? Why had he let me stay up here? I found my phone at the edge of the bed. 12:30. Three and a half hours. Everyone had to be gone by now. How was I even getting home? And why hadn't Derek woken me?

I cracked the door and went a little way down the hall and heard someone in the kitchen. Thank God, somebody's up. Maybe the party was still going. But the lights were low all throughout the house, and I knew before I got to the stairs that it wasn't.

Halfway down I saw him. Derek, moving things around in the kitchen, unhurried, in the quiet. He looked up and smiled.

"Morning, sleepyhead."

And there it was, the feeling I hadn't been able to set down in the car, sitting in a kitchen at half past midnight smiling at me like it was the easiest thing in the world. The man who built that place. The man who stopped. I still didn't understand him and now here he was being kind to me in the dark, which didn't help at all.

"Derek, why did you let me sleep in her bed? I've got a crick in my neck."

He laughed it off. "You looked so comfortable. I almost took a picture of the two of you, but that felt presumptuous."

I tried to do something about my hair and came the rest of the way down. "Can I have some water? My mouth is pasty."

"Sure. Here." He handed me a glass.

I drank half of it, then asked, "Did you really come in and look at me while I was asleep with her?"

"Yep. You looked adorable. Just like she did."

He was smiling, loose, relaxed in a way I'd never seen, and I stood in his kitchen trying to make it fit the man from the car and failed.

I looked around at the spotless rooms. "Did you clean all this up yourself?"

He laughed. "No. I had people for that. I like regular-guy things, but being rich has its perks, and I'm not cleaning up after a party. I was just moving some things around. Thinking."

"You could've woken me."

"And do what, kiss Sleeping Beauty? You were out three hours, not a hundred years."

I blushed, because I wouldn't have minded that, and then jabbed back. "You're not exactly a prince. But you're okay."

"Just okay." He said it like I'd wounded him. "I threw you a party. I brought you here in a carriage. It hasn't turned into a pumpkin, far as I can tell, and I'm pretty sure Aaron's still a man and not a mouse or a bird or whatever. My Cinderella knowledge sort of runs out around there."

I leaned against the bar. "So, I learned something about you a couple days ago, Derek. I'm not sure how to bring it up."

He looked right at me. "Just bring it up. There's a lot of things people think they know about me. And a lot they don't."

So I did. "You and Pamela started the Second Circle."

His eyebrows went up. "Oh," he said, almost amused. "That explains your cafeteria reaction. The bracelet. You didn't know I founded it."

I nodded.

"And I learned something about you, too," he said. "That you came to the club. I'll be honest, Lacey, that one was a shock. If it had been anywhere else, I'd probably have thought harder about what it meant."

He'd been thinking about what it meant. He'd noticed me there and turned it over the way I'd been turning him over, and I hadn't let myself imagine I registered on him like that at all.

"That makes two of us," I said. "It was a shock that you built the place. I had you pegged as sort of a—"

And the second I started the sentence I had no idea where I was taking it, and it petered out in my mouth.