Chapter 15
QUINN
By the time I pulled up outside Ford’s cottage— our cottage, for the foreseeable future—it was after seven. I’d been done at the clinic for a couple hours, and while I’d run a few unscheduled errands and drove around town for far too long, I couldn’t delay the inevitable any longer.
When I’d woken up this morning in Ford’s bed—a place I never thought I’d be—I hadn’t anticipated finding him so close.
Although that was a gross understatement.
Ford wasn’t just close—he’d been curled around me, his chest pressed against my back, knees tucked up under mine, and his arm slung possessively around me, hand spread wide over the soft flesh of my stomach as if he was afraid I was going to try to sneak out.
Which, to be fair, was exactly what I’d done.
I’d slunk away to the clinic and spent the day submerged in work.
I’d taken longer than usual with each patient, and when there hadn’t been any appointments for me to see, I’d tackled the outdated filing system Dr. Dicknose still used.
Alicia told me they’d purchased a new program years ago but hadn’t yet transitioned to it, so I’d made that my project this afternoon and had started inputting patients into the system.
But I couldn’t put off the inevitable any longer.
I grabbed my purse and headed toward the cottage, steeling myself for our unavoidable encounter.
Opening the front door, I scanned the area for any sign of Ford, exhaling a deep sigh when I didn’t immediately see him.
He wasn’t on shift today—he’d given me his schedule so I knew when he wouldn’t be coming home, and I’d ignored the unease in my stomach over everything that could possibly go wrong for him during those two twenty-four-hour shifts each week—but maybe he was with one of his siblings?
His Jeep was out front, but maybe Addison had him working on a project for the resort…
Maybe he’d be gone for a while, and I would be asleep by the time he got home.
Was 6:30 too early to call it a night when you were only thirty-one? Probably, but what else was I supposed to do?
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be around him.
Okay, so it wasn’t only that I didn’t want to be around him. More, it was that I didn’t trust myself around him. Sweet-talking people into getting what he wanted was Ford’s specialty, and I’d always loved denying him that.
But if these past few interactions had proven anything, it was that my body did not agree with my brain. While my brain was putting on the brakes, my body was ready and all too willing to do whatever the fuck Ford suggested, especially if it involved his lips on mine.
I hung my purse on the hook by the front door before making my way into the bedroom, shedding my cardigan as I went. I was just reaching for the hem of my sundress when the bathroom door flew open, startling a scream out of me.
“Jesus, kitten!” Ford said. “You scared the shit out of me. Did you forget I live here?”
“No, I—” My words cut off as I turned to face him.
He stood in the doorway of the en-suite bathroom, his hair wet and chest bare, clearly having just gotten out of the shower.
Without my permission, my gaze tracked over every naked inch of him, following a droplet of water as it trailed over his body.
From his shoulder, down his chest and then the ridges of his abdomen, before disappearing into the towel that hung so low on his hips, his Adonis belt was on display and a shadow of hair was visible at the bottom of his happy trail.
If I thought gray sweatpants showcased what Ford was packing, they had nothing on a thin piece of white terry cloth. It was doing very little to hide anything, least of all the monster between his legs.
Holy.
Hell .
I couldn’t drag my gaze away, especially when I swore his cock twitched at my attention.
“Quit looking at me like that, wife, or I’m going to stop trying to hold this towel up and show you what your horny eyes do to me,” Ford said, his voice so low and deep and rough that my body responded immediately, a shiver working its way through me, my nipples tightening as heat pooled between my legs.
And no . Absolutely not. That wouldn’t be happening. Not today, not ever.
This was exactly why I’d avoided coming back to the cottage. But I needed to figure out a way to handle whatever was between Ford and me, because I wasn’t going to avoid coming home for the next eight weeks or however long we were in this sham of a marriage.
“I don’t have horny eyes,” I said, finally finding my voice. “And I didn’t think you were home.”
“Well, I am,” he said, taking a step toward me. “And I was right.”
“I do not have horny eyes.”
“You do, but I wasn’t talking about that…” He smirked at me while I diligently attempted to look anywhere but at him, doing my damnedest to keep my horny eyes to myself just so I wouldn’t prove him right. “Addison definitely lost her shit. Especially when she saw the newspaper.”
I exhaled in relief, grateful for the change in topic.
This morning’s paper had been a surprise for me, too.
But, even better, it had shocked Dr. Dicknose into silence, while Alicia had squealed her excitement, swearing up and down she’d known there was something going on between us, but she understood we’d wanted to keep it a secret.
That was nowhere near the truth, but I was going to let her fill in whatever story she wanted to, so long as it made this marriage plausible.
I didn’t know whether I wanted to hug or kill Mabel for splashing our nuptials all over the front page of Starlight Cove’s newspaper, but I couldn’t deny that it gave our marriage outside credibility that Ford and I wouldn’t have been able to achieve on our own.
“Yeah, that was a surprise to walk into this morning,” I said. “Apparently I spoke too soon when I said Mabel didn’t have a clue.”
“As long as Dicknose saw it, that’s all that matters, right?”
“Right. I just thought we’d have more time to get used to things before Mabel spread our business to the whole town. I swung over there after work, picked up the last of my things, and told her I was moving out.”
“How did she take it?”
“You would’ve thought she won the lottery with how much she was smiling at me. She sent me away with a lifetime supply of strawberry-flavored lube. The bag’s in my trunk.”
Ford barked out a laugh. “Better that than her not believing this. Let’s just hope she doesn’t figure things out as quickly as my siblings did.”
I snapped my gaze to his, careful to keep my wandering eyes above his shoulders. “What do you mean by that?”
He grimaced and ran a hand through his wet hair, causing another water droplet to fall, but I absolutely was not going to get distracted by that one. “They know what’s going on.”
“What do you mean? How ?”
“Because they’re fucking Carmen Sandiego? I don’t know. Between the five of them, it took them like fifteen minutes.”
“Shit…” I breathed, closing my eyes and rubbing my temples. This was the last thing we needed if we had any hope of our coupling passing as reality. “Are they going to keep it quiet?”
“Oh yeah.” Ford nodded. “Addison’s all over it. She wants Dicknose out of there as much as you do, so she’s willing to do anything to help.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
Ford was still standing there in nothing but a towel, so I busied myself with the bags I hadn’t bothered unpacking last night. I’d never been more grateful for procrastinating because it gave me the perfect activity to avoid looking at him.
After grabbing one of the bags from my side of the bed, I strode over to the dresser, where Ford had cleared a couple drawers for me.
I started tossing items in without much care to how they were arranged.
I could fix it later. As long as it kept my attention off the nearly naked, extremely gorgeous man—who happened to be my husband —I didn’t care.
I could hear Ford shuffling behind me, but I refused to even glance his way, though my body seemed to be acutely aware of his movements, regardless.
Goose bumps had erupted on my skin just from the soft breeze of him walking behind me, and was I seriously getting turned on from someone walking past me ?
God, maybe Ford had been right, and three years actually was the breaking point. Hell of a time to figure that out…
I spun around, intent on grabbing the other bag, but instead landed face first into Ford’s warm, solid chest.
He steadied me with a hand on my hip, the other still clutching his towel in place. “Easy, kitten, I’m not gonna bite.”
But then his gaze raked over my upper body, sweeping down the column of my neck, across my nearly bare shoulders since I’d shed my cardigan, and down into the serious cleavage I was showcasing in this dress.
When he lifted his eyes to mine again, they were molten, the unspoken unless you want me to hanging heavily in the air between us.
“Would you put on some clothes, please?” I snapped, sidestepping him to grab my last bag and storming back to the dresser before I did something I’d regret.
Like tracing those water droplets with my tongue or tugging that towel right off his waist and telling him to put his money where his mouth was.
Because that was the thing—Ford was an excellent flirt, but that didn’t mean he actually wanted to act on this when it came right down to it.
Hell, I’d seen him flirt with Mabel more times than I could count, and I was fairly confident he didn’t want to bang her.
Too late, I realized what I’d stashed in this bag—the sex toy collection I didn’t want to discuss with Ford.
It wasn’t a collection so much as a couple prized toys—one in particular that always, always got the job done—but still…
It was not something I wanted to take out in his presence.
Hoping Ford wasn’t looking, I grabbed one of them and shoved it into the drawer.
Or that was what I attempted to do anyway.