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Perhaps she decided to relax in one of the other rooms down the hall. With the guests gone, the study, game room, and parlor would all be empty and available to her, perhaps for the first time since she moved in.
He was just about to go check when a flash of blond hair caught his eye through one of the windows. Moving up to the dishwashing station along the back wall, he peered through the glass.
Addison was crouched down at the far edge of the patio, clearing snow out of a patch of garden with oven mitts on her hands. One corner of his mouth ticked up at the thought of what Gabriel would do if he saw her treating his kitchen equipment that way.
Once her little circle of dirt was clear, she reached into both pockets of her apron, then spread handfuls of nuts and what looked like dried cherries on the ground. Straightening, she wiped her hands on the apron as she glanced around the garden, examining various bushes and hedges. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t hear her through the windows.
After about a minute of this, she started across the patio toward the kitchen door. For a brief moment, he considered rushing over to the pantry. He could pretend he came to grab a snack for the road and hadn’t been watching her. Ultimately, though, his curiosity got the better of him.
Staring down as she came through the door, Addison stomped her feet on the mat to get the snow off. “Eat up, Alexander,” she called out into the garden. It wasn’t until she closed the door that she finally noticed him, freezing with her hand still on the doorknob.
“Who’s Alexander?” he asked.
Her eyes narrowed, and he had to resist the urge to clench his jaw. Why was it that every goddamn thing he said to this woman pissed her off?
Even more importantly, why did that make him want to fuck her even more?
“Don’t make fun of me,” she snapped, tossing the dirty oven mitts into a white rattan hamper between the door and the break table, followed immediately by her apron.
That time, he did clench his jaw, hard enough to make his face hurt. “I’m not making fun of you. I saw you spreading some food out there, and then you said something to Alexander on your way in. It’s perfectly natural to be curious.”
Frowning, she regarded him for several seconds, clearly unsure if she could trust him. In the end, some of the tension drained out of her shoulders. “I saw a cardinal out in the garden. One of his legs is broken—or maybe it used to be and didn’t heal right? I can’t really tell, but it sticks straight out to the side.”
Addison sounded so sad when she said it, his chest literally ached. “He can land with just one leg?” he asked.
“Yeah, and he hops around,” she said, using two fingers in the shape of an upside-down L to demonstrate. “I thought it might be harder for him than the other birds to find food, especially in the winter.” She gave him a self-conscious smile.
In his mind, she had zero things to be self-conscious about. When she saw an injured bird, she not only hurried to give it some food. She even named it. He couldn’t remember the last time he was this utterly charmed by another human being. After all, charm wasn’t usually the goal in his line of work.
“Alexander is a perfect name for a cardinal,” he said, surprised by the warmth in his own voice.
She peered at him warily for a few more seconds. When he didn’t burst out laughing or start mocking her, the last of the tension eased out of her muscles, and she looked truly relaxed for perhaps the first time since he met her. With a little smile, she said, “I assume you want your jacket back? I’ll have to run upstairs. It’s in my room.”
“No,” he answered, then hurried to add, “I mean yes, I do want it back eventually. But that’s not why I’m here.”
Her smile grew a little wider, and her hazel eyes sparked with interest. “Oh? Is there something else you want?”
It was now or never. “You,” he said simply, loving the way her full lips formed a perfect O of surprise. “I want you, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.”
The smile she gave him then sent a jolt straight to his cock. “You told me to ask for what I want,” she said, closing the distance between them with agonizingly slow steps. Flattening her hands against his chest, she looked up into his eyes, her lips slightly parted. “So that’s what I’m doing. I want to fuck you again, Mason.”
What little restraint he had left fizzled away. Burying his hands in her hair, he held her still as he kissed her, devouring her tiny moans and sighs, memorizing the feel of her. Her hands fisted around his lapels as she arched into him, and he released a moan of his own as her soft stomach pressed against his cock.
It was almost impossible to break the kiss, but he made himself do it. If they kept going much longer, he’d fuck her right here in the kitchen again, and that’s not what he wanted. Not this time.
“We need to set some rules,” Mason said between gasps for breath. “Number one, nothing else can happen between us in this house.”
Eyebrows shooting upward, she released her grip on his lapels as if they burned her. “Why?” she asked, taking a tiny step backward.
“Because when I’m in the Manor, I need to be able to concentrate on my work,” he said, finally wresting back control over his breathing. “If I’m constantly thinking about sneaking in here or up to your room, I won’t be able to give my guests the attention they deserve.”
Pleasure brightened her eyes. “Have you been thinking about this since Monday?”
One corner of his mouth twitched. “Have you?”
“Maybe,” she said with a lazy shrug. “I’ll admit I’ve been thinking it would probably be best if we kept fucking until we got it out of our systems.”
“That leads us to rule number two,” Mason said, pleased she’d been as distracted as him. “What are you looking for exactly? I’m not touching you again until we both know exactly what the rules and boundaries are.”
