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She was too polite to say anything else.
Evidently, my decision last night not to tell Eva that my grandmother had also left a gift outside my bedroom door had been the right one. Nan clearly hadn’t listened to me, so I was really going to have to ask Mum to put her foot down and put an end to this nonsense.
Regardless of what Nan believed, she couldn’t keep going on about it.
As it was right now, I couldn’t move. At some point during the night, Eva had rolled into me. One of her legs was hooked over mine, pinning me in place, and she was tucked into my side with her head on my shoulder. If I moved anything other than my right arm, my only free limb, I’d wake her up.
I didn’t want to wake her up.
It was a bloody good thing I didn’t have to be anywhere today.
I couldn’t reach my phone on the bedside cabinet, so I resigned myself to lying here in silent stillness until she was ready to wake up.
Fuck, why’d she have to roll over onto my side of the bed and use me as her teddy bear? Having her soft, warm body against mine wasn’t doing me any favours. My cock was as hard as a rock and straining against the boundary of my shorts, and if Eva so much as moved her arm closer to my hips, I was going to explode.
Her breath was hot, and it skittered across my skin with every exhale. The gentle rise and fall of her chest against my ribs lulled my breathing into an equally deep pattern, and I let my eyelids fall shut again.
This was far too comfortable.
This was far more intimate than we’d ever been.
It was another smudge of the line I continued to toe with how I felt about her. My mind was still slightly foggy with sleep, and the part of it that was fully conscious was consumed by Eva—by how soft her skin was as it pressed against mine, how heavy her leg was draped over my lower body, how her eyelashes tickled me when her eyelids twitched in her sleep.
How her hair, tied in a loose bun, brushed against my neck and sent a shiver down my spine was that almost impossible to repress.
How every exhale rolling across my chest left goosebumps in its wake.
I’d been an idiot to think I could live with this woman and not feel anything for her.
I’d made it no time at all into the marriage before I found myself here, pining after her like a fool.
Like she wasn’t already mine.
Past Matthew had been a real twat. Aside from Alexander’s intervention when he’d brought up the possibility of either one of us developing real feelings, I’d brushed it away as something that would never happen.
We were both so adamantly against relationships, preferring something more casual.
There was no way we’d feel anything for one another.
Yet here I was.
Feeling things.
A great deal of things.
Eva groaned and stretched out, dragging her leg down across mine, and the arm that was resting over my body became ramrod straight. She yawned, tilting her head back, then froze.
I peeled my eyes open and peered over at her. “Good morning, sunshine.”
“Uh,” she replied, her voice thick with sleep. “Good morning?” She tried to move, but I tightened my arm around her, pinning her against me. “Matthew.”
“Shh. I’m comfortable.” I closed my eyes again.
“I need to pee.”
I sighed and let my arm fall to the side. Eva shuffled away and jumped out of the bed, and I looked up just in time to see her run on tiptoes out of the room.
I laughed quietly to myself and reached for my phone. There were seven thousand emails, ninety missed calls, and eight text messages.
All right, so I was exaggerating slightly there.
Except for the emails.
That was what it felt like as I opened the app and waded through all the spammy things I was almost certain I’d never signed up for. How did all these companies get my email?
I couldn’t be bothered with it this morning, so I did a mass select and reported them all to spam. It left me with less than ten emails that actually should have been there, but the only one I was remotely interested in was the one from my land surveyor saying they would be going to the bed and breakfast to do the survey this week.
Excellent.
Finally, some progress.
“That’s better.” Eva closed the bedroom door behind her. “Is that Christopher making that dreadful noise outside?”
I looked up from my phone. “Hm? Oh, no. That’s the gardener. He comes over from the public side to trim the bushes once a month. We can’t cut them during nesting season for the birds, but we need to keep them under control.”
“If you can’t cut them, how does he trim them?”
