Chapter 45
forty-five
. . .
WHITNEY
I wake up slow, warm and heavy, and very aware that I’m using Connor as a mattress.
For one blissfully blank second, I just lie there with my face tucked against his chest, his arm low around my waist, the sheets tangled around both of us.
Then, the memories arrive, and like a flood, all at once.
The dark. His voice. The way he’d said you have me like it meant something.
My face grows hot against his skin.
Nothing says emotionally stable like blushing in the arms of the man who has already seen every possible version of me, including the feral sounds I make when he’s deep inside me.
Connor shifts under me, waking. His hand tightens automatically at my waist before his mouth brushes my hair.
“You staring at the ceiling having a crisis?” he murmurs.
“I prefer to think of it as processing.”
“That bad?”
I tilt my head back. “Are you always this smug in the morning, or is this a special post-sex feature?”
His mouth curves. “Baby, I was smug before the sex.”
I laugh, and something in my chest shifts at how easy this feels. Not the sex or the heat between us, but the warm, sleepy version of him looking at me like I’m exactly where I belong. And it’s dangerous how good it feels.
His thumb drifts once over my side. “You okay?”
The question lands soft, yet it makes my heart pound.
“Yeah,” I say. “Just tired.”
“Good tired?” he asks, throwing me a wicked smile.
“Connor.”
We both need to get up. Early training, content filming, sponsor lunch, the skills clinic, then another workout later. The tour doesn’t care that we were up making terrible, yet also excellent choices in the middle of the night.
“We could pretend that aggressive cuddling is part of our warm-up.”
I lift my head. “Aggressive cuddling does warm the muscles and create excellent blood flow.”
His laugh rumbles under my cheek.
And there it is again—that tug low in my chest, like my body has started recognizing this as comfort.
I ignore that with the skill of a woman who has ignored many things before.
We finally manage to get out of bed, and the day moves fast after that.
Training is chlorine and muscle fatigue and the surreal experience of pretending my body isn’t still reminding me exactly how little sleep I got and why. Connor is all business in the water, but every glance he gives me between sets feels loaded now. Every quiet you good? makes my stomach flutter.
Media content filming is somehow easier, yet worse, because there’s nothing natural about being forced to smile under bright lights while standing next to a man whose mouth was between your thighs a few hours ago.
At one point we’re shoved into a sponsor photoset together.
“Big smile,” the photographer says.
Connor smiles just enough to look lethal.
“Whit,” he says under his breath.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
His mouth twitches.
I keep smiling for the camera like my life depends on it.
Maybe it does.
Sponsor lunch is long and loud and full of people who say words like synergy without irony. Connor sits across from me looking unfairly composed for someone who was saying filthy things into my neck in the dark last night.
At one point, he catches me staring.
One brow lifts.
I immediately look down at my water glass like hydration has never been more compelling.
The clinic should be the point where I finally flatline, but instead the energy of it buoys me along.
Connor is good with kids and watching him be this openly true version of himself is becoming my favorite thing to do.
He’s patient with the nervous ones and teasingly playful with the cocky ones. When he enthusiastically high-fives one little boy, the kid looks ready to pass out from happiness.
And because apparently I haven’t suffered enough, Connor glances over at me while I’m getting schooled by a girl in pink goggles about why butterfly is the superior stroke, and the look on his face is soft enough to do actual damage.
I don’t have time to unpack why that makes my stomach feel warm and weird.
There’s still Wilmington.
One more city. One more stop. Then home to Coral Cove.
That thought cuts through everything.
Home means reality.
Home means Rory.
Home means at some point I’m going to have to explain the deeply uncasual fact that I have feelings for Connor.
And I’ve slept with him.
Repeatedly.
With enthusiasm.
And Rory, as my brother, and not a fan of Connor’s, is going to have opinions about that.
That is very much a later problem.
Preferably one for a version of me who has slept more than four hours and isn’t currently being marched to another workout.
So I shove the thought into a mental drawer labeled later and slam it shut.
By the time we make it back to the hotel, I’m being held together by fumes and electrolytes.
I barely get the door shut before I kick off my shoes and collapse face-first onto the bed.
“This is it,” I announce into the comforter. “I live here now.”
Connor drops his bag onto a chair. “Move over.”
I roll enough to squint at him. “For what?”
He gives me a look. “For the nap you’re about to pretend you don’t want.”
I should refuse on principle.
Instead, I shift over.
Connor lies down beside me and opens an arm without a word.
And because apparently my body has abandoned every remaining instinct for emotional self-preservation, I go straight into it.
His arm settles around me and my head finds his chest like it’s already familiar terrain. His hand drifts slowly up and down my back, not asking for anything, just there.
It should feel too intimate, and it does. That might be the problem.
“You okay?” he murmurs after a minute.
There’s that question again, but it comes out soft and sleepy now.
“Yeah,” I say, quieter than I mean to.
He presses a kiss to my hair. “Good.”
My phone sits on the nightstand.
For one unhinged second, I consider texting Winnie, because if any moment in history has earned all caps and seventeen exclamation points, it’s probably this one.
But I leave the phone where it is because I don’t want anyone else in this yet. I want it to stay mine a little longer. Mine and Connor’s.
Which is, admittedly, not a sentence I’m emotionally prepared to examine. So, I don’t.
I let my eyes close and breathe him in. Let the rise and fall of his chest under my cheek and the steady drag of his hand along my back pull me under.
And right before sleep takes me, one last inconvenient thought drifts through: The sex isn’t the real problem. The problem is how easy simply being with him feels.