Chapter 3
CHAPTER
THREE
MIRABETH
I feel silly knocking on my own bathroom door to ask a stranger who has only lived here for approximately two hours and thirteen minutes if it’s ok to come out. It’s one reason why I haven’t apologized for basically climbing him like a rabid monkey. He doesn’t deserve it.
Conrad growls with irritation on the other side when I press my ear to the door. “Fourth time I’m telling you this, and I won’t repeat myself again”—which is what he said the last two times—“I’ll let you know when I’m finished, and not a second sooner.”
“But when?” I whine as I tighten my lemon-patterned towel around me.
I soaked in the tub until my skin turned pruney, then filed and painted my fingernails and toenails.
Embarrassingly, for absolutely no good reason, I even waxed my legs and intimate region, biting back howls of pain with each rip of the wax strips, tears streaming from my eyes.
“I’ll let you know!”
I inch the door open. “Can I at least get some clothes?”
Conrad growls again, and he shoves his hand through the crack, holding a neat stack of clothes: an oversized baby blue T-shirt, white pajama pants with little pastel rainbows, and—disconcertingly—my hot pink boyshorts. He closes the door with a bang.
It’s another mind-numbingly boring forty minutes later that he knocks on the door before pushing it open, sweeping his hand out in a ta-da manner.
He’s smiling from ear to ear, all pleased with himself, showing off his handiwork.
But then his brows drop along with his smile. “Why aren’t you wearing your pants?”
“They don’t fit.”
“Why not?”
“I was sick for, like, three weeks and—”
“Let me guess. You left food out, ate it, and gave yourself such awful food poisoning that you unintentionally lost weight.”
“No. That’s not what happened.” That’s exactly what happened, I realize, and I did it week after week, but I’m not going to tell him that.
Conrad pushes the heels of his palms into his eyes with a groan. “I’m going to make you take a food-safety course.”
I roll my eyes and squeeze past him, shocked to see the apartment sparkling clean and clutter-free. He even found my cookie tin sewing kit and mended my comforter. “Ok, I’m keeping you forever if it means I never have to do laundry again.”
“Best I can do is three years,” he says.
“Deal.” I move to my drafting table, which he’s rearranged to face the window instead of the side wall. He’s also leveled the TV, steamed out my dresses hanging from my closet bar with the combo iron and steamer that I never took out of the box, and…yup, folded my underwear and bras.
When I turn around, his brows pinch together. “Have you been crying?”
I narrow my eyes to slits so he can’t see the bloodshot inner corners. “No.” I’m never waxing again.
He steps closer and lifts my chin with his first two fingers, his touch warm and unexpected. “Don’t lie to me.”
Fine, I won’t. I press my lips together in a thin lie and say nothing at all, turning away.
Conrad sighs. “I’m going to take a shower. Dinner’s on the stove,” he says as I continue my perusal. “Merlin has already eaten his, so don’t let him trick you into thinking he’s starving. He already tried that with me.”
I eye Merlin, who’s sitting on the kitchen’s linoleum floor.
He meows as he stares up at me with those big, pitiful, green eyes that sucked me into bringing him inside in the first place.
Five minutes after Conrad has disappeared into the bathroom, I can no longer listen to Merlin crying without my chest caving in.
I tiptoe past him so he doesn’t spook and attack my feet, and I quietly rifle through my newly reorganized cabinets until I find his expensive cat treats that are a quarter of my monthly food budget. Only the best for my little devil.
Conrad suddenly barks over my shoulder, “What did I tell you, princess?”
I scream, making Merlin hiss and claw my already throbbing right ankle before he runs away.
Princess this, and princess that. It’s been, like, four hours since we’ve met, and already I’m tired of the way he calls me princess—an insult laced with derision instead of some cute nickname to give me the warm and fuzzies. Not cool.
I spin and hide the green bag of treats behind my back.
Whatever I was going to say gets lodged in my throat to see a lock of Conrad’s damp hair curling over his forehead, a bath towel wrapped low around his narrow hips.
His broad chest is bare of hair—did he use my razor to shave or is he naturally that smooth?
—his upper body deeply carved with bulging muscles.
Even his lower legs peeking below the towel are thick and strong, and his towel twitches, parting slightly when he shifts his big, bare feet the longer I stare.
He snaps his fingers, making me look up sharply, his brow raised, having caught me appreciating his near-nakedness.
Ugh. Smirking, he points to the stove while guarding the exit of the kitchen until I load a clean bowl with the Hamburger Helper sans hamburger meat that he found somewhere in my cabinets.
While Conrad finishes doing whatever it is that’s taking him so dang long in the bathroom, I turn off the overhead lights.
Since I had to cut out of work early to volunteer and I have a deadline I need to meet, I bring my tablet and pen to bed with me, getting comfy in the middle.
After putting my hair up in a bun, I hike my knees to prop my tablet against my thighs and open my illustration app.
Testing a new digital blending brush, I smooth out the highlights I’ve added to the custom-commissioned portrait I’ve spent the last week drawing.
I’ve really outdone myself this time, and my client is going to love seeing her great-grandmother’s creased, black-and-white, faded photograph brought to life in full color.
I startle and slash a line across the portrait when the mattress dips at the end of the bed.
Tipping my knees to the side, I find Conrad crawling toward me, wearing the pajama pants that are too big for me but wayyyyyyyyyyy too small for him.
He’s a hulking, shadowy monster. A nightmare brought to life, about to eat me in the dark like I used to be afraid one would do when I was a kid.
He even has the scary growl down pat when he says something too…growly…for me to understand.
“What?” I ask with a gulp.
Sitting up on his knees, he yanks the comforter away, and I press my tablet and pen to my chest, my heart beating fast against them. Oh, god, is he really going to eat me? Do I want him to eat me? No, that’s ridiculous.
“What?” I ask again impatiently when he growls out something else.
Conrad huffs and slides his hands beneath me.
“I said, move over. You’re taking up the whole bed.
” He lifts and deposits me on the edge, my left shoulder brushing the wall I share with the kitchen.
He then flops over on his back, dragging my comforter up over himself, covering his huge, half-naked, beautiful body. Good.
Too stunned to speak for a few moments as I stare at him, I eventually find my voice and ask, “What are you doing?”
“Trying to sleep,” he grits.
“Right…but what are you doing here…in my bed?” I shove against his hard shoulder with a grunt, trying to get him to move.
He swats my hand away and wiggles lower until he gets comfier. “It’s my bed now too. ‘Night, wifey.”
Bewildered by his audacity to claim he has any right to my furniture, I spit, “Bro. Get up. You can sleep on the floor.”
“Not a chance, bro,” he snarks back, mocking me. “I haven’t slept on a real bed in five years, and I’m not passing on it now just because you’re a prude.”
I scoff. “I am not! I’ve just never slept with a man before.”
He lifts his head and quirks a brow.
Flustered, I rush to clarify. “I mean, I’ve slept with a man, like, a lot of men, a lot, in college—not that I kept count. But I haven’t, like, slept-slept with a man.”
Conrad grunts. “TMI, but good for you, I guess. Sounds like a blast.”
Internally, I cringe, and I run my hands down my heated face. Why did I tell him I’ve had sex before? It’s not like it matters to anyone but me what I do in private.
He frowns deeply as he watches me squirm until he finally breaks the sudden silence by asking rudely, “You don’t snore, do you?”
Grateful for the change of subject, I say, “No…I don’t think so.”
“I do,” he says with a laugh. “Sucks for you, princess. ‘Night.”
Since I have no plans of giving up my bed in my apartment to sleep on the floor so I don’t have to share with this freaking stranger, I lie there for a few minutes, trying to figure out how I can physically kick Conrad off when he’s so much bigger and stronger than me.
I can’t.
So after a few more minutes, I give up and distract myself, returning to my tablet. It doesn’t take me long to get sucked back into the portrait, first removing the erroneous line, then adding another layer on top for shadows.
“I can’t sleep with all that tapping you’re doing on the screen.”
“Sucks for you,” I mumble with a small smirk.
Aha! I did it, I think to myself, when Conrad wrenches back the comforter to get out of bed. My silent victory doesn’t last long, though, since he takes my tablet and pen out of my hands and sets them on my drafting table. I bounce on the mattress when he dives back onto my bed.
The sheer audacity of this man.
When I try to get up, planning to retrieve my tablet, Conrad strikes, wrapping an arm around my waist. He hauls me back down, then pushes me up against the wall and forcefully tucks the comforter tight around my body, trapping my arms next to my sides like a swaddled newborn baby.
“Go to sleep,” he says with a threatening edge, then rolls onto his opposite side, facing away from me.
“I’m not tired yet. And besides, I was going to work at my desk so I wouldn’t bother you, your highness,” I say sarcastically.