Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
AIDEN
This was fucking torture.
We’d been in the room for all of seventeen minutes, and I wasn’t sure I’d make it three nights with Avery in these cramped quarters.
I had no idea how this room was classified as anything but a closet.
While it had large windows on three of the walls, which helped with the whole claustrophobia thing, the double bed took up the vast majority of the space.
The only other furnishing was a luggage rack that sat tucked into the corner.
When Mark had shown us to the room and Avery and I had settled in, we’d danced around each other as best we could.
Which, in a space this size, did fuck all.
It felt like I couldn’t even breathe without brushing against her.
And if I somehow managed to avoid that, I still sucked in a lungful of air laced with her sweetness.
Which, as previously established, only made my dick hard.
So, basically, I was fucked.
Now, I lay on the bed on top of the white down comforter, my arm tucked behind my head as I listened to the sounds of her getting ready on the other side of the bathroom door.
The only saving grace in the laughably small Cozy Garden Hideaway was its surprisingly spacious bathroom, which was damn near the size of the bedroom.
Avery’s eyes had lit up when they’d landed on the old-fashioned claw-foot tub, so it wasn’t a total loss.
Pretty fucking close, though. Because not only was our room tiny, but it was also freezing.
I’d changed into a pair of sweatpants and kept on my long-sleeved Henley, and still, my nipples were hard enough to cut glass.
I only hoped Avery had brought something besides the minuscule doll clothes she usually wore to bed.
Otherwise, she’d be an ice cube by morning.
The bathroom door creaked open, and I didn’t know if it was a blessing or a curse that the room was nearly pitch black so I could barely see her.
Only the nearly full moon illuminated the space, but it didn’t lend enough light for me to make out more than her shape.
It wouldn’t have mattered anyway for the swiftness with which she dive-bombed the bed and burrowed beneath the comforter.
“Fuck me,” she said through chattering teeth, clamoring to cover herself up. “Did we have to pay extra for an igloo room?”
I huffed out a laugh, surprised I couldn’t see my breath. “Knowing Addison, I wouldn’t put it past her. She’s conniving when she sets her mind to something.”
“And her mind is set on forcing us together?” Avery turned away from me even as she asked the question, as if she was trying to put as much space between us as possible.
But that did fuck all in a bed this size.
She didn’t take up much of it, but at 6’4”, I wasn’t exactly a small guy, and a double bed wasn’t exactly grown-ass-man-sized.
That meant I could feel every shift she made, and my dick was one hundred percent aware of that fact.
I’d just managed to talk it down while she was in the bathroom, and now it was back with a vengeance and hard as a fucking rock, wondering why the hell we weren’t doing what we’d done the last time we were in a hotel room together.
I grunted in the affirmative. “Seems that way.”
“If only she knew,” she said, so quiet I wasn’t sure I was supposed to hear. She probably thought I wouldn’t be able to over the loud chattering of her teeth.
I figured her shivers would settle after a few minutes of being under the covers.
Instead, they only seemed to worsen until I could feel the entire bed vibrating with them.
Even though I’d seen every inch of this woman—kissed and licked and sucked all of them…
even though I’d been inside her—I’d lain on top of the covers to give her the only bit of separation I could.
But that had been before I knew she was a human popsicle. And I wasn’t about to lie here and let her suffer. Especially when it was clear that though she obviously needed me to lend her some body heat to warm up, she’d never ask for it.
She snapped her head toward me when I shifted to stand so I could slip under the covers. “You’re leaving?” she asked, her voice tinged with panic.
I paused, wondering if I should’ve offered to sleep in the car… “Do you want me to?”
She was silent for a beat…two…and then she said, “You were the only warm thing in this bed, so not particularly.”
And that was all the confirmation I needed—never mind that it was all I was going to get—so I lifted my corner of the comforter and slipped under it.
“What are you—” Her words shut off on a shudder when I slipped in directly behind her. I curled my body around hers, pressing my front to her back, my knees tucked beneath hers, and wrapped my arm around her waist.
“I’m getting you warm,” I said into her hair. “If you died of hypothermia while I lay on top of the covers and watched, Addison would never forgive me.”
She huffed out a laugh but otherwise didn’t say anything.
But she also didn’t move away, and I took that as a good sign.
Finally, her body started relaxing by degrees.
Soon enough, she melted into me, pressing every inch of herself against me.
Including her cold-as-fuck feet, the chill of which seeped through the material of my sweatpants.
“Jesus Christ, woman,” I muttered, even as I curled myself tighter around her. Even as I tucked those blocks of ice she called feet between my calves in an effort to warm them faster. “I can feel those through my sweatpants. Did you take an ice bath before you came to bed?”
“I should’ve taken a hot bath, actually.
It’s the only thing that warms me up when I get cold like this.
My body has this superfun quirk where my feet are, like, twenty degrees colder than the rest of me at all times.
Same with my nose.” As if to prove her point, she lifted my hand that was resting on her stomach to her face and pressed her nose against it.
She wasn’t wrong. And though I had no idea how to warm up her nose, I’d try my hardest to take care of the rest of her.
I tucked one arm under the pillow beneath her head and wrapped the other arm around her, my forearm between her breasts, hand flat against her chest. Attempting to imbue as much of my heat into her as I could.
Her chattering teeth had finally subsided, and her breathing had evened out until I was sure she’d nearly fallen asleep.
Then the noises started.
It was quiet at first, just the whisper of a moan. Something that could be written off as a dozen different things. But then there was the hushed murmur of voices interspersed with more moans. And then came the soft, rhythmic thumping of a bed being put to good use.
If I thought I was hard before, it had nothing on the solidness of my dick right now. Holding Avery this close and listening to the ASMR version of amateur porn had my cock ready to bust through my sweatpants. I could only hope I’d shifted my hips back far enough so she couldn’t feel it.
She must’ve heard the noises next door, though, because her body stiffened.
And then she started squirming against me.
Subtle at first, and then more pronounced.
Like she was just as affected by this as I was.
When she shifted again, this time brushing over the beast in my pants, she sucked in a sharp breath and froze.
So much for my hope that she wouldn’t notice.
“Ignore it,” I said into her hair.
She huffed out a laugh. “I hate to be the first one to tell you this, big guy, but you’re not exactly packing something that’s easy to ignore.”
Jesus Christ, this woman was trying to kill me.
I shifted my hand to cup the front of her neck, just resting it there as I ran my thumb up and down the length of it in an effort to relax her all over again.
If she didn’t fall asleep soon, I had no doubt where this night would lead.
And I also had no doubt she wasn’t ready for that yet.
When…if…she was? Well, that was a different story entirely.
“Go to sleep, bunny,” I murmured into her neck, my thumb soft against her skin.
Before long, despite the pornographic soundtrack coming from the other side of the wall and my cock trying to break through the barrier of my sweatpants and burrow its way into its favorite place, she did just that.
And though I assumed I’d be up for hours, kept awake by my incessant insomnia and the horny bastards next door—or the horny bastard in my pants—it only took minutes for me to fall into a deep sleep, just like the last time I’d held her in my arms.