Page 7 of Until We Come Home

He grins back at me over his shoulder. “That’s the point!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say. “Safety and all that.”

On the way to the stairs he lays the back of his hand against each door we pass, quick and automatic. Where the hell the innkeeper is, I have no idea.

We follow the noise down through the empty lobby and into the little sitting room off the back, and there’s the smoke alarm, screaming away on the ceiling. No fire. No smoke in the room, even. Just a window propped open, and out past it, somebody’s bonfire a few houses down, the smoke drifting straight inside on the breeze.

“There it is!” I yell, pointing up at it like he hasn’t already spotted the problem.

Dragging a chair over, he climbs up onto it, looking very fucking good up there if I do say so myself, and jabs the button on the alarm. It cuts off mid-shriek, and the silence is so sudden my ears keep ringing in it.

“Oh, thank sweet merciful heavens,” I sigh, dropping my hands with a shudder.

“Though they really should have these things wired together on a system,” he says from the chair, brow furrowed at the detector in his hand. “I don’t think any of this is up to code.”

The grin spreads across my face before I can stop it as he turns the detector over and squints at the manufacturing date. For a man this serious, he is cutely pedantic about safety standards. It’s an occupational hazard, I suppose, but it’s undeniably charming.

“Well, we can be sure to let them know,” I say, glancing around and spotting the handwritten sign propped against the bell on the front desk. Back in 20, ran to the store. Thank God, considering I’m standing here in a man’s shirt and bare feet next to the shirtless man it belongs to.

“Hmm. Yeah, I guess,” he says, clipping it back onto the ceiling and hopping off the chair, still frowning up at it.

“Well, that was a fun little side quest, but let’s get back to the main one,” I say, reaching out and grabbing his arm.

He lets me pull him in, no resistance at all. “Oh? You’re still up for that?”

“Surprisingly, the fire drill didn’t ruin a thing,” I say.

He kisses me, and I’m gone again, the two of us stumbling back up the stairs without taking our hands off each other. Luckily, the Midnights are all still at the party at the restaurant, and we seem to have the whole place to ourselves.

We fall back through the door, my hands on his chest, and he picks me up and pins me against the wall, and I’m gasping all over again. If anything, watching him go into work mode has only made me hornier. Maybe a little roleplay is in my future. Uniform and all. I could be into that.

He shifts us over to the bed, dropping down beside me, his teeth lightly grazing the pulse point at my neck. A small moan escapes my throat as I reach down to unbutton his jeans, turning my head to catch my breath, and freeze as something small flickers across the floorboards.

“Ah!” I shriek, bolting upright and pointing wildly at the baseboard.

“What? What is it?” he asks, instantly alert and scanning the dark corners of the room.

“A mouse!” I say. “There’s a mouse or a rat or something that just ran past!”

He sits up and spots it frozen in the corner by the dresser, a tiny gray thing with its whiskers going a mile a minute. He glances down at me, and the corner of his mouth twitches.

“It’s just a little field mouse,” he says. “I wonder how he got in here. He’s way more scared of you than you are of him.”

"Doubtful." I pull the quilt up around me.

He laughs and gets up, buttoning his jeans and looking around the room for what I presume is something to catch it with.

“Don’t hurt the little guy,” I tell him, keeping my eyes fixed on the creature as it tracks Mateo’s every move.

“I’m not going to hurt him,” he says, still searching. “I’m going to take him somewhere safe outside.”

It's actually pretty cute. Big ears, tiny hands, little black eyes that keep flicking between the two of us. Not exactly ideal timing to meet a rodent, though, right when I was about to have the best orgasm of my year.

"Aha!" Mateo says, producing the ice bucket from the top of the dresser and creeping back toward the mouse in a half crouch.

"It's gonna run. You'll never be able to catch it," I say, shaking my head. "They're fast. That's their whole thing."

"No faith," he says, inching toward the corner with the bucket held out in front of him. "Watch."