Page 51 of Direct Action

Damn right I was.

Chapter Seventeen

I was tiptoeing out of Ryan’s room after pawing through his drawers for a T-shirt and a pair of his boxers.

I needed coffee. I also needed to figure out how embarrassed I needed to be I’d woken him up in the middle of the night and instigated sex. Well, I hadn’t meant to instigate sex. I’d intended to give him a blow job, but then all his sexy talk along with the taste of him and the way I very clearly had command of his body got me all hot and bothered, and I couldn’t not have sex with him. Though, truth be told, he had sex with me, and that was not a complaint.

I wasn’t a floozy, nor was I a prude. I enjoyed sex, but I didn’t troll bars with the explicit intent to find a man to take home. Though I’d had a few one-night stands. Neither was I a woman who had a rule about a certain number of dates before I allowed intimacy. I was more of an if the time is right, it’s right kind of girl. I was somewhere in the middle, and as such I’d had more than a handful of lovers, but that count barely hit double digits, and none of the men I’d been with could compare to Ryan. It was like the men who’d come before weren’t even playing the same game. They were playing flag football and Ryan was playing rugby. Full-body engagement, intense, sometimes brutal in all the best ways—explosive power, brilliant endurance, and out-of-the-world five-point try with a conversation kick thrown in for good measure.

In other words, I’d never had better sex then the two times I’d had it with Ryan. Which also meant I was sore in all the right places. Further, I wasn’t sure if my embarrassment would stop me from asking him for round three before he drove me home today.

I was leaning toward throwing whatever dignity I had left out the window in favor of a few more mind-bending orgasms—because Ryan, I’d learned, was a multiple-orgasm master—when I entered the kitchen, stopped dead, and barely suppressed the scream that had bubbled up.

“Mornin’ Chloe,” Gavin rumbled from the island.

“Um,” I mumbled.

“Made coffee,” he continued like there was nothing wrong with this situation. “Help yourself.”

“Um . . . I didn’t know . . .” Shit. What didn’t I know? That he was here? That he’d catch me coming out of Ryan’s room again? That I was indeed a floozy who was screwing her boss, and now her other boss knew?

“I take it you didn’t know I live here.”

He lived here.

Ho-lee shit.

My mind did a fast rewind of last night, praying to all things holy I hadn’t screamed Ryan’s name like he’d told me I was going to do. When I got to the part where my second orgasm tore through me while Ryan was behind me, one hand in my hair giving it a delicious pull while his other arm was wrapped around my hips, his hand between my legs, his relentless fingers at my clit, relentlessly toying, and I was panting—and yes, screaming his name—I changed my prayer to pleading for the walls to be soundproofed.

“Um. No.”

His lips twitched. “Right.”

I felt a hand on my lower back, jumped, and that startled scream I’d been able to tamp down came out as a squeak.

Ryan’s mouth went to my ear. “Kiss me before you roll out of bed.”

“Huh?”

“Before you get out of bed, kiss me.”

It was safe to say waking up next to Ryan had been a dream come true. However, the weirdness of yesterday and the middle-of-the-night romp that I still didn’t know which way I was leaning toward—best decision of my life, or most humiliating—made me not want to be in that bed when Ryan woke up. Which led me in search of coffee and head unscrambling. Which was thwarted by Gavin being here.

Yet with all of that, Ryan asking—no, demanding—me to kiss him before I got out of bed was oddly beautiful and just plain odd.

“Why?”

“Fell asleep last night with you in my arms. I didn’t like waking up and you not being there. If you get up before I do, kiss me before you roll out so I won’t wake up expecting you to be there and finding the bed empty.”

There was nothing odd about that explanation. It was straight-up beautiful. It was also the scariest thing I’d ever heard. In another life I would’ve vowed to wake him up with a kiss every morning and, to ensure that happened, I’d set five alarms to make sure I always woke up before him.

But I wasn’t living another life. I was living mine. And it was time for me to snap out of fantasyland and get back to reality.

“Since that won’t ever happen again, there’s no need for me—”

“That won’t happen again.”

“Nope.”