Chapter 26
“Well, this is not exactly The St. Claire, is it?” The room was a sad relic, like a once-glamorous starlet now disheveled and forgotten, its floral wallpaper peeling at the edges and the carpet stained with the remnants of countless guests.
A faint smell of mildew and decay lingered in the air, adding to the overall feeling of neglect and abandonment. “You think you’ll be okay?”
Deacon looked down and smiled. “I think I’ll survive.”
This wasn’t his first rodeo, and he’d had some items delivered to make their stay hygienic and safe, which was all he honestly cared about.
“The bed is small.”
“I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“No, you will not. We’re adults and we’re friends. It’ll be like old times. A sleepover.”
“I never went to a sleepover.”
“Shut up.” Jenna slapped his arm playfully. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“You never went to a sleepover?”
“No. Security risk.”
“What about your house? Your parents didn’t allow you to have friends over?”
“No. That was also for security reasons, just different ones.”
“What about Cillian?”
“I was allowed to go to Cillian’s house, but no, I never spent the night.”
“Wow, I get to be your first sleepover. I’m honored.” Jenna beamed, smiling from ear to ear.
Deacon’s eyes narrowed. “Should I be scared?”
“Only if you fall asleep first,” she singsonged as she walked into the bathroom and shut the door carrying the bag of supplies he’d ordered for her while they were at dinner, including toiletries and some clothes.
He heard her in the bathroom turn on the shower, and his entire body groaned.
This friend thing was a lot harder than he thought it would be.
That was not a pun, it was literal. He was rock hard, and he had been for the last hour and a half.
During dinner, sitting across from her, staring into her eyes, watching her face light up with animation as she talked about work, clients, Pilates, renovations she wanted to do on the house she was leasing, his mom’s dogs, that TV show she liked, anything, his body just responded to her by getting aroused. He couldn’t help it.
And then there was the way she ate. It was sensual.
There was no other word for it. When the food was good, she made little noises of appreciation that sounded a lot like the noises she made at other times she was appreciating things.
It had taken every ounce of self-control not to pull her into the bathroom and fuck her up against the wall.
Even that would have only slightly taken the edge off.
Today had left him emotionally wrung out. He wasn’t trying to make excuses for himself, but he just needed human contact. He was craving connection. And the only person he wanted or had that with happened to be the one person he was stuck in a storm with, who was his friend.
It was like dying of dehydration in a rainforest.
He got right to work building a fire, stripping the bed, and putting on the mattress pad and bedding he had delivered, including the pillows.
Next, he disinfected the space using the supplies he’d bought.
It’s not that he didn’t trust the cleaning staff, but owning hotels, he knew better than most what people did in them.
Thankfully, the room was tiny, and he was able to cover every surface within a very short amount of time.
Once they had a clean environment to spend the night in, he screwed in his safety door lock. It wouldn’t make it impossible for the door to be opened. They’d have to practically break it down.
The bathroom door opened, and Jenna walked out in half of the clothes he’d ordered. The top half. She was wearing a v-neck white t-shirt that fell to her mid-thigh, her hair was up in a bun, but she had decided to skip the gray sweats he’d bought to go along with them.
“Your turn,” she declared.
“Did you get the sweats?” he asked.
Her nose scrunched up in the most adorable way. “I don’t like to sleep with bottoms.”
There were two ways to interpret that, and as he stood to walk in the bathroom, he refused to let his mind wander to which one it could be. As he passed her, she lifted her hand to give him a high five, signaling the passing of the bathroom turn-torch.
That was not what he wanted to do with his hand on her body, but he obliged because she was his friend. Honestly, he was seriously questioning if Ava knew what the fuck she was talking about. Who in their right mind willingly friend-zones themselves?
“Whoa. You’ve been busy.” She looked around and pointed to the top of the door. “What’s that?”
“A lock.”
Her lips curled up. “Is that to keep me in or other people out?”
“It’s security.”
“Security? Um, there was one other car in the parking lot.”
He didn’t respond. People didn’t want to hear “rich people” problems.
She tilted her head to the side. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me what you were just thinking.”
“No.”
Her eyes flared, she did not like being told no. Wow. Noted.
“Yes,” she insisted.
Since it didn’t matter to him one way or the other, he told her, “I was thinking people don’t like to hear rich people problems.”
Her face scrunched in the most adorable way. “How is that a rich person problem?”
“There’s one car in the parking lot, but I don’t know if someone at the airport saw me and has been following me all day.
Or if the cook recognized me and is calling his brother, and they are going to decide to try something stupid tonight to rob the billionaire.
Or if I’m going to get contacted by the FBI at three a.m. to let me know there is a group of people who have been meeting for months and plan to kidnap me or someone I love to hold them for ransom and their phones are pinging within a mile of me.
Which has happened. More than once. When you have the kind of money that I do, that my family had, it puts a big target on your back. It always has.
“On my first day of first grade, I went to the bathroom and got jumped by three ten-year-olds who told me if I didn’t bring them each a hundred dollars to school every day, they’d beat me up every day.
Which they did, because I didn’t have that kind of money.
After about two months, another kid joined in, and he aimed for my face.
I couldn’t hide my injuries like I had been.
I got home and my mom took me to the hospital.
I had a broken nose, a fractured eye socket and had to get three stitches over my right eye, but they did x-rays and through the exam they discovered I had older injuries: a fractured rib that had healed and some bruised internal organs.
I told my parents, the doctors, everyone, I fell off the top of a metal jungle gym. ”
“So nothing happened to the boys?”
Deacon smiled.
“Why are you smiling?” she asked.
“Cillian, he figured out what was happening. Followed me and beat the shit out of them with a baseball bat. He put two of them in the hospital. One with a broken jaw and two with broken ribs the doctors said they were lucky they didn’t have brain bleeds or brain damage. They never messed with me again.”
“I love Cillian.”
“So, do I.” Deacon knew that she didn’t mean she loved, loved him, but he was still jealous that Jenna was declaring her love for Cillian before him.
If things did work out between him and Jenna, he would never tell him that.
He would take that to the grave. Cillian would never let him live that down.
She must have noticed his reaction to her saying that she loved his best friend because her big blue eyes fluttered up at him as she asked, “Can we call Cillian so I can tell him I love him?”
“No.” Deacon walked past her to the bathroom.
“Please?!” she begged.
He shut the door. His bathroom routine was over in less than five minutes, but he lingered wondering if he should just sleep in the bath. Some pillows, a blanket, his back would hurt the next day, but if he went out in that room, he worried his blue balls might become a permanent condition.
It was her eyes. Her smile. Her hair. It was her.
His sweats were not going to be able to hold or conceal what she did to him.
He wished there was a gym in the motel. He needed to burn off energy.
That’s what he needed to do. He wished he could do some sit-ups, pull-ups, push-ups, and run for ten to eighty miles.
That wasn’t really an option, so he settled on walking the two steps back and forth in the closet-sized bathroom.
Was it working? No. But it was time he wasn’t spending with Jenna, and at this point that was time well spent.
He was scared she might give him a heart attack. One smile. One graze of her hand. He was so close to the edge. It wasn’t her fault. Although he knew she knew what she was doing some of the time. Not all but some.
She was totally unaware of how effortlessly sexy she was though. The way her head tilted when she concentrated, the way her lips pursed a little right before she smiled, the way she sucked in a tiny breath right before she laughed as if it surprised her.
But then she did torment him on purpose.
Can we call Cillian so I can tell him how much I love him?
Those big blue eyes. Those lashes fluttering. The please.
Come on, she knew what she was doing.
“Hey, everything okay in there?” Jenna asked, knocking on the door, then turning the doorknob, which was locked.
“Hey! What if I was taking a shit?”
“Then you should be in the circus, ’cause that means you can shit, pacing back and forth.”
He flung the open the door and found her standing on the other side with her arms crossed.
She looked him up and down. “I see you went bottoms, no tops.”
He glanced down at his sweats and then back up at her.
“What? I didn’t want you to wear a hole in the linoleum, they charge for that here. This isn’t The St. Claire,” she said the hotel name with an English accent as she smiled, and his chest did that weird expand thing, flip thing it had done since the first time he saw her.
She really was going to kill him.
“We should get some sleep.”
She saluted him as he walked by, and he wanted so badly to pick her up, throw her sassy ass on the bed, and spank her. The worse part was, he knew she’d like it.