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No, she didn’t. The bills were depressing, she couldn’t balance her profit and loss reports to save her life, and doing hours of paperwork in the back room was lonely. She was so damn tired of being lonely.
More tears burned her eyes, but a few determined blinks held them at bay.
“Now’s not the time to clean the desk or have a pity party,” she muttered. Since she didn’t need the keys right at this moment, she turned away from her disaster area, toward the storage part of the room.
Her part-time employees, Tessa and Darcy, kept everything ship-shape over here. Once Roxanna verified new orders and made sure the inventory was correct, they didn’t let her near their organized shelves.
Thankfully, though, she didn’t have to dig through any boxes since there was a clothes rack off to one side with older clearance items that hadn’t sold. A few select items she might try to cycle through the shop one last time, but most she planned to donate to a local women’s shelter and take the tax write off.
She found a brown T-shirt, and a brown, gold, and black gauzy skirt, and then took a second, extra-large, orange tie-dyed T-shirt to sleep in. It would be a toss-up between lying awake the rest of the night or going comatose the moment her head hit the pillow.
Essential oils would help with the latter, so she made a quick trip out front for bottles of lavender and ylang-ylang, then grabbed socks and a pair of the fashionable new mid-calf, lace-up military boots she’d stocked for winter. With everything gathered in her arms, she made her way back out to the door in the hallway that led to the second floor.
After keying in the apartment code, she moved inside on auto-pilot. Light through the window from the outside street lamps guided her straight to the bathroom, where she shut the door and stripped down for a shower. A quick wash of her underwear in the sink ensured they’d be clean and dry when she woke up, then she stepped beneath the steamy spray.
After she scrubbed her hair and her body, she was in the middle of rinsing the suds away when the horror of the night replayed in her mind, and the tears she’d been fighting resurfaced yet again. She didn’t need her psychic intuition to tell her releasing the emotion was the best thing to do right now. She turned her face up and let them flow as the water washed them down the drain.
Fatigue weighted her limbs when she finally shut off the water and dried from head to toe. She probably wouldn’t need it, but dabbed a couple drops of the ylang-ylang oil on her temples, wrists, and the back of her neck anyway, then pulled the orange T-shirt over her head. With her five foot nine height, the extra-large barely covered her bare butt cheeks, but right about now all she cared about was getting to the bed.
She wrapped a towel around her wet hair, wishing she’d thought to look for a comb or brush in the shop. Now it would have to wait until morning, when she went down to open up. She grimaced as she remembered she was working alone tomorrow. At least it was Sunday, the one day she opened at eleven a.m. instead of nine.
When she shut off the bathroom light, the dark quiet helped soothe her frayed nerves. There was only one bedroom, and the door swung open easily. Room darkening shades kept out the light from the street, but the faint outline of the bed was enough to guide her silent footsteps.
She stripped back the corner of the comforter and slid between the cool sheets with exhausted relief. A deep inhale to ease the tension in her shoulders filled her nose with the faintest hint of distinctly male cologne. A tingle of unease raced down her spine at the same time the mattress suddenly rocked beneath her.
Roxanna froze as her heart surged up into her throat. Something warm and hairy brushed against her leg at the same time a muscled forearm snaked around her waist.
She screamed and swung wildly, kicking free of the sheets to scramble from the bed.
Chapter 2
Loyal Diamond’s dream went from sexy and promising to shockingly painful when a shriek nearly blew out his eardrums and a hand wacked him across the bridge of his nose.
“Ow. God—what the fuck?”
He jerked back against the pillow and wrestled his arms from the sheets as the bedside lamp clicked on. He blinked and shielded his eyes against the sudden brightness, then couldn’t quite comprehend the astonished brown eyes staring back at him from a pale face framed by long, wet, brunette hair.
If he was still dreaming, it had become a nightmare. Pulse revving like a race car, he levered up on one elbow to face the woman standing beside the bed.
“What the fuck?” he repeated at the same time Roxanna Kent demanded, “What are you doing here?”
Wide awake now, he frowned at the accusation in her abnormally high voice and pushed up farther to lean against the headboard so she wasn’t towering over him like Godzilla. “My brother gave me the key code.”
When he lifted a hand to rub at the dull ache in his cheek and nose, she suddenly gave a sharp gasp. “Are you naked?”
He darted his gaze down as he grabbed for the covers. Heat climbed his neck when he saw lingering arousal from his dream. Pulling the sheet up over his hips to cover his exposed family jewels, he shot back, “Way to ask the obvious, psycho…I mean psychic.”
Her jaw clenched, and she started to frown, but then her eyes went wide before she whipped her head toward the door. “Oh, my God. Is there someone here with you?”
“Besides you?” he asked with derision. “No. And why is it that you are here?”
She turned back, eyebrows drawn together over her glare, her wet, tangled hair streaming down alongside her face and over her shoulders. “You didn’t seem at all surprised when you grabbed me.” Her gaze darted down for a split second, then jerked back up.
“I did not grab you—I was dreaming. Right now, I wish I still was.” No—that sounds bad. “And not because you climbed in the damn bed with me.”
“I didn’t know you were here,” she snapped as she spun away.
For the first time his brain actually processed what she was wearing. Or more accurately, what she wasn’t wearing. His heart started t
