Chapter Fourteen
When Sheena woke up in the morning, there was a large, masculine arm draped over her waist.
Holy shit. Had she actually . . . ?
She rolled over onto her back and looked up at the ceiling. It was the same white shiplap ceiling that she had been looking
at for the last several days, but this was not the same bedroom.
She looked over at Denver. And her heart did something heretofore unknown. It froze for a moment, then felt like it expanded,
before thumping hard against her sternum.
“Oh no,” she whispered.
She had fallen asleep with him.
He had taken her hand and led her upstairs, and had thoroughly wrecked her resistance last night in his bed and she had . . .
fallen asleep with him. She had never done that before.
She had never stayed the whole night with a lover.
That was . . . It was getting clingy. Desperate.
Relationship.
She had been very clear that wasn’t what this was.
“Good morning,” he said, still not opening his eyes.
“You weren’t asleep?”
“Afraid not,” he said. There was a slight smile on his lips, but he still didn’t open his eyes.
“Well, what do you think of all this?”
He turned his head then, and his eyes fluttered open slowly.
The light hit them, all blue and brilliant, and her breath caught.
Damn him for being so pretty.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
He said that with ease. She had heard it a lot of times, but there was something about the way he said it that did something
to her. To her stomach, to her throat. To her heart. It was genuinely annoying. It really was. Why did he have to affect her
so deeply?
It was the sex. Because while she had good luck getting herself to climax in her previous encounters, that’s what it was.
It was her knowing exactly how to use a man’s body to her advantage.
But that wasn’t what it was like with Denver.
He took charge. He said things and did things she wouldn’t have even known to fantasize about. He was showing her things about
herself, and it was annoying. Because she didn’t especially want some guy to teach her about herself.
“I wasn’t going to stay the night,” she said.
“Well, let’s look at this reasonably. You have been staying here for the last few days. Your car is still over by the event
space.”
She clapped her hand over her mouth. “Why does everybody think it’s there?”
“Oh, everybody knows you’re sick. You haven’t been down to work.”
Well, she supposed that was a relief. Nobody thought that she was mooching off of Denver. That would be annoying.
Or trading anything for sex. That would also annoy her.
She didn’t care if people knew her and Denver . . .
That stopped her short. She wouldn’t have cared if people knew that she and Denver had slept together, and considering the
power of the town’s rumor mill, many people probably did know, because it wasn’t like they were subtle when they headed out
of the bar.
She didn’t know for sure, though, because this illness had put her out of commission in a very weird way.
But yeah. People knowing that she and Denver King had a one-night stand was a particular thing.
People knowing that she and Denver King were actively sleeping together? No, thank you. That made her want to jump and hiss
and spit like a feral cat.
“What’s the matter, Sheena?”
“Nothing is the matter, Denver,” she said.
“You seem skittish.”
“I am never skittish,” she sniffed. “It’s not in my nature. You’re never going to catch me taxidermied and mounted up in some
axe throwing bar. Skittish is for rodents. I’m not a rodent.”
“You seem a little bit . . .”
“Oh please. Do you traditionally spend the night with your hookups?”
The ensuing silence was strange. She could hear her heart beating in her head. She wanted him to say no. She realized that
much to her chagrin. She wanted to be special.
And what the hell was that?
“Of course I don’t,” he said. “But I’m not worried about it. Because I already said that I wanted to keep doing this with
you. And I think practicality dictates sometimes it’s going to make sense to spend the night.”
“All right. Fair. How many nights a week are we talking?”
“For spending the night? Or for sex?”
“Either. Both. Pick a boundary.”
“Do you need boundaries?”
She tried to imagine this just free-floating. Having no rules. Then just coming together and tearing each other’s clothes
off whenever they felt like it. Yeah. Okay. There was something kind of intoxicating about that, but mostly she felt like
she was free-falling through space trying desperately to find something to grab onto other than Denver’s broad shoulders,
because she had already left marks there last night, and she didn’t need to go grabbing hold of them again.
“Three days a week,” she said.
He groaned. “Only three days?”
He looked boyish then, and Denver King was not boyish.
But she was also not fluttery, and something in her stomach fluttered just then.
“You are ridiculous,” she said. “All right, fine. How about we just see how it goes?”
Yes, she was screaming internally. But the truth was, she wanted him even now. Right this second.
And it was a good thing she did, because he kissed her and rolled her onto her back and pleasured her for a good thirty minutes
before they went downstairs for coffee and to get ready to go to work.
She had to go back and get her car, so that meant her first stop was the event space. When they arrived, there was a full
crew of Kings already on hand.
“Sheena,” said Bix. “You’re better!”
“Yeah,” she said, trying not to project I just spent the morning doing unspeakable things to your brother-in-law right out at the cheerful other woman.
“Denver said that you were really sick.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I was.”
“Sorry about that,” said Bix. “Being sick is the worst. Though, it’s a lot better when you have somebody take care of you. Back when I was living the van life if I got a cold I would just pull over somewhere and hope that nobody disturbed me while I convalesced in a sleeping bag.”
Bix was one of the few people that Sheena had ever met who’d had it harder than she did.
Bix’s father had been a moonshiner, and Bix had ended up striking out on her own, trying to put some distance between herself
and her father’s criminal empire. She could hard relate.
But Bix didn’t have siblings who looked out for her, and she had lived a transient existence for a while, stealing what she
could to survive. Sheena was glad for Bix. That she had somebody like Daughtry in her life.
After all that.
But the way she said that hit a little too close to the bone. Because she and Denver were not Bix and Daughtry. They weren’t
going to be. That was just a fact.
She was in no danger of forgetting that. Not when they had agreed to a kind of no-rules situation, but one that had very clear
parameters.
And she didn’t need that. She didn’t. That aching sort of feeling, where she had wished for somebody to take care of her,
was the closest she’d ever gotten in her life to feeling . . . Whatever. It didn’t matter. She didn’t even want what Bix and
Daughtry had. She could be happy for somebody else without wishing she had the identical outcome. Could recognize it was good
for somebody else without thinking that it was necessary for herself.
So she did her best to banish her internal lecturing, and the slight pang of wistfulness in her stomach, because neither were
very helpful.
“Yeah, it was definitely better to have Denver take care of me than to be convalescing at home by myself,” she said.
Because not saying something would be churlish. And look more than a little bit suspicious if not outright ungrateful.
“Denver is good like that,” said Justice. “He was basically the only good parental figure we had.”
“In fairness,” said Landry. “Maybe our mom was okay when she was around. It’s just none of us can really remember.”
“She was fine,” said Denver.
And she realized she had never heard Denver say anything about his mother. Not even once.
Fair enough, she didn’t talk about her own. Because the memories were scant and just disappointing. Her sisters were her half
sisters anyway. That was why there was such a big gap between them.
For a while it had just been her and her father.
And . . .
“I better get out to the bar,” she said. “We have a lot of work to do if we’re going to have it ready for Christmas.”
“I’ll walk you to your car,” said Denver.
She bit back a terse comment about how that was completely unacceptable, because she wasn’t actually trying to alert anybody
to the fact that there was something going on with them.
And resisting something that simple, that chivalrous, was definitely going to have the lady is protesting too much vibes.
“I’m going to have to go home tonight,” she said.
They had washed and cleaned the one outfit she had with her, so she had been fine today, but she was itching to get back to
her things, her face cream. Her makeup. A different pair of panties.
“Sure,” he said.
She couldn’t read his emotions there. Maybe he was glad to have a break from her. Maybe he was disappointed because he wasn’t going to get laid.
Though, she felt like she could certainly squeeze in some sex before she went home.
She thought about the logistics of that for far too long during the workday. The wiring was in, and new plumbing had been
done. They were closing up the walls, and Sheetrock was going up. Sadly for Denver, much of the molding was not salvageable.
But she had chosen some wallpaper that was done up in an old-fashioned style, to mimic what had been there before.
The structure of the place was good, and all the wood floors needed refinishing.
Making the bathrooms modern was one of the bigger projects, but that was well underway.
The crew had put in the axe throwing lanes during her convalescence. And she had to resist the urge to test them out. Resistance
that didn’t last when the crew left.
She went and stood at the end of the throwing lane, picked up one of the axes and drew her arms back over her head, letting