“No.” Her voice was starting to crack. “Ronan, seriously. Can you please just leave?”
By now, she was looking at me like I was genuinely crazy. And maybe I was, since I was very much not listening to any of her perfectly reasonable requests.
“Leave?” I repeated, suddenly feeling philosophical about it, giant erection or not. “Why? We’re married. And this is my house. My bathroom. And for fuck’s sake, sweetheart, I’ve seen you naked. Plus, you’ve been looking at my dick like a lollipop since I walked in here, and then there’s the fact that you rode my hand like a hobby horse last night, so honestly, what’s the?—”
“RONAN, JUST GET OUT OF THE FUCKING BATHROOM SO I CAN GET DRESSED!” Laney shrieked at what had to be the top of her lungs. There was no way the entirety of Charlestown hadn’t heard her, much less my neighbors.
I blinked like I’d just been slapped.
Fuck. What was I doing?
“Right.” I grabbed a towel to wrap around my waist, backed out of the bathroom, feeling something brand new. Something I suspected was probably shame.
I didn’t like it.
Even if I did enjoy the image that would be seared into my brain until my dying day. Honestly, if Laney’s delectable body covered in bubbles was the last thing I ever saw, I’d die a happy man.
As I closed the door, my heart pounding, another thing occurred to me:
Just a few seconds with Laney Fisher, naked or not, had done more for my state of mind than any drink, pill, or fight ever could.
I shoved on a pair of pajama pants and went downstairs, where I stewed on that fact in the living room until she appeared about ten minutes later.
She had also gotten out in a hurry and hadn’t bothered to do anything more than wrap a towel around her hair and pull on mywhite robe. She was more covered up than almost any other time I’d seen her, but somehow she was infinitely more erotic.
A few droplets of water remained on her neck, dripping from a few errant wet strands.
I couldn’t breathe.
“Hey.” Her voice was quiet and a bit hesitant.
I stood. “Hey.”
“Sorry for yelling. I—you just surprised me is all.”
“You surprised me too.”
We stared at each other, suddenly overcome with awkwardness. Which was weird, because I was Ronan Black. I didn’t do awkward.
“I… I wasn’t sure you were coming home,” she said.
Home.
It was the first time she’d referred to my home as hers that way.
I swallowed. “I—yeah. I got busy at work.”
She nodded. “I figured when you didn’t text back.”
Just like that, everything came back to me. The day at work that truly was death by a thousand cuts. The feeling that I was traveling in the completely wrong directly, like a boat lost in a current without a rudder or an oar.
The awful, horrible emptiness that I was starting to realize had plagued me my entire life, but filled in a little bit the moment I saw this woman walking down the Las Vegas strip like she leaving a trail of crumbs for me to follow out of the heart of darkness and back into the light.
“Laney, I?—”
She took a step further into the room, coming close enough that I caught the scent of daphne, remnants of her favorite soap. “Yeah?”
But the words wouldn’t come. Maybe because I didn’t know what I wanted to say.
