I laugh.
Out loud.
Alone on my kitchen floor with my phone in both hands and my heart doing something deeply inconvenient.
I should put the damn phone down.
I don’t.
For once, I let myself sit there and want the next message.
Chapter twelve
Nova
Theelevatoropensonthe fourteenth floor.
We’re back in Pittsburgh, not-talking since the bus. Professionally. Efficiently. Like two people who absolutely did not spend forty minutes in a parking lot yesterday. He walks beside me down the hall.
I check my key card.
1412.
Good. Fine. Normal hotel behavior.
Then he stops at the same door.
I look at his number.
1412.
I look at him.
He looks at me. Then, very slowly, he looks at my key card.
“Travel coordinator approved this,” he says.
“The travel coordinator doesn’t have this kind of imagination.”
His mouth moves. Not quite a smile. Worse. I swipe the key before I can think better of it. The light turns green. I don’t step all the way in.
“I’m going to call down to concierge,” I say.
“Yeah, good idea.”
The man at the front desk is very apologetic. Conference game. Sold out. Every overflow block taken. He’s checked twice. He can offer me a hotel 8 miles away.
I look at the room. At my recorder on the desk. At Jax Mercer leaning against the door with his gear bag at his feet, not saying anything, waiting.
“Thank you,” I say. “I’m fine.”
I hang up.
Ground rules.
I establish them the moment the door closes because that’s what you do when you’re sharing a suite in Pittsburgh with a man you got wrangled into rubbing down for half an hour while his cock strained against the sheet the entire time and you pretended very professionally not to notice.
I noticed.
