Chapter Fourteen
Honor’s Edge Investigations Office
Sam hovered somewhere between asleep and awake. It was just so warm, so comfortable. But it was bright in her room, brighter than it should be. Had she set her alarm last night? Was she going to be late…
Last … night.
She felt the bed move, dip, then go back to the way it was. Like someone—someone not her—had gotten out of it.
For a moment, she just lay very still, eyes remaining closed. Because in this very bright light of day, she was going to have to face all those choices she’d made last night. She had no idea how.
Maybe you should have thought of that last night?
But how could she possibly think when Nate could kiss like that? A lot more than kiss like that? Say things like Do you know how long I’ve wanted to kiss you?
And there was no going back. Undoing it. Maybe she could suggest it was some kind of … one-off, but…
It just wasn’t. Even if she wanted it to be. That had been building too long to not change everything.
She just hoped it could be a good change everything for once. Was that too much to ask? Okay, maybe not even good. Maybe just not disastrous? She’d take not disastrous as a big upgrade to the past year.
Regardless, she couldn’t pretend to be asleep all day. Even if he slipped out and went home right now, she had to face him at some point. Might as well be now, before time made it weirder.
So, she blinked her eyes open.
“Morning,” Nate offered.
She stared at him. He’d never taken his pants off. They’d worked around that. A little awkward, but she was hardly going to make him literally bare his scars. Even if she was curious in spite of herself.
Now the pants were all zipped and fastened and he’d pulled on his dress shirt from yesterday and was buttoning it up. Nate Bennet was getting dressed in her room.
Which wasn’t the wildest thing he’d done in her room in the past twelve hours. God.
“Going to go shovel,” he said, his voice rough with sleep-induced rumble.
“You’re going to shovel in a suit?”
His mouth curved. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say you don’t have any clothes that might fit me, Sam.”
She yawned, not quite able to make herself get out of the cocoon of warmth under her blanket. “You don’t have to shovel. I can do it later.”
“Too much ranch and military in me. I need to get up and do something. Won’t take long. Vanderbilt texted that court today’s delayed. Said there’s no point coming down since at most they’ll get to the medical examiner this afternoon. Relax. Get some more sleep.”
She yawned again. “Don’t have to tell me twice,” she muttered, letting her eyes fall closed again.
She was tired. Tired and satisfied. And if they were just going to be okay with everything that had happened, why not go back to sleep?
She listened to him leave the room. He knew where the shovel was since he’d cleared the walk a few times over the past few months. It was just like him to jump up and handle something like that.
She didn’t know why he wouldn’t relax and enjoy sleeping in for once, but that was his business, she supposed. But some doubts were starting to wriggle in, ruining her attempt at falling back asleep.
Were ranching and military life just some excuse? Maybe he was ditching her. He needed to go make a clear exit, so he didn’t have to stick around and deal with … this line they’d crossed. A line they’d both clearly valued.
Until last night.
Which he’d chosen, he’d pushed. She had been set to keep ignoring everything. So if he ditched her now?
She’d kill him.
Too worked up to fall back asleep, she got up. Threw on some sweats. She needed coffee to really think this through. And she was starving.
She padded out to the kitchen, amped up the heat, then got the coffee brewing. She collected ingredients to make breakfast for two. He didn’t have to eat it with her if he wanted to get the hell out of Dodge.
He might have to suffer a black eye, but he didn’t have to eat. She slammed around a bit in the kitchen, which made her feel incrementally better. The first cup of coffee added to that.
More alert, more reasonable, she scrambled some eggs and poured them into the pan, put some bread in the toaster.
It could be a one-off. Or a friends with benefits type thing. That could be fine. Maybe even better. What were they going to do? Date? Have some kind of relationship? Be normal like Aly and Landon?
That was hardly in the cards for her, she knew.
She heard his footsteps on the stairs. She shook her head, despairing of herself. She was bounding ahead when he’d probably come inside. Offer some half-hearted platitude and say he was heading out. A clear that was great, see you around.
Not that she could quite picture Nate being that blasé about the fact he’d changed everything, and she’d gone along with that. But she couldn’t picture anything right now, so she focused very hard on the eggs she was scrambling when the door opened.
“All clear if we need to get out later.”
Sam noted the if we, but she didn’t address it. Or the relief that wanted to course through her. “Well, you come in handy, don’t you?” she said brightly. Probably too brightly.
“Looks like you do too.” She could feel him getting closer, but she absolutely refused to look at him. “This is a lot better than Pop-Tart.”
“I’m no Aly when it comes to food, but it’ll do.”
His arms slid around her from behind, his chin resting on the top of her head. “Smells amazing.”
It was an easy, sweet gesture that just about took her out. She wanted to melt into it, but she didn’t know how to turn her mind off now that coffee had her synapses actually firing.
He was just … acting like this was normal. Like they were some couple who had mornings together every day. Who shared chores and just … touched this casually, this intimately.
Still, Sam studied the eggs, flipped off the heat when she determined they were done. But she couldn’t just take it. “Are we going to talk about this or just pretend it’s normal and not mention it?” she demanded, still staring at the eggs in the pan.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Nate. Maybe the giant sex elephant in the room.”
“Sex … elephant,” he repeated, amusement in his tone, his head still resting on hers, his arms still around her like they just belonged there.
“You know what I mean.” She had to resist shrugging him off. Remain calm. Remain in control. “I’m not saying we have to talk about it. I don’t need a state-of-things address. There’s just a lot of options here, and we should probably pick one. So we’re on the same page.”
The toast popped. It was burnt. She didn’t make a move to do anything about that, because he was still holding her, and she didn’t know what to do about it.
“Options?”
“We can do a friends with benefits type thing.”
“Is that what you want?” His question was carefully devoid of any inflection that might give her a hint of what he thought of that. Which was damn annoying. This was all so damn annoying.
Angry—or maybe terrified was the right descriptor for this emotion, but she didn’t like that—enough she couldn’t sit still any longer.
She turned to face him, but he didn’t let his arms drop.
So, she was now kind of caged against her own counter by his big body.
God, he had a nice body. He had a beyond nice everything, and she really didn’t know what she was doing.
No, she didn’t want to be friends with benefits. That sounded like some kind of half having him, which would be somehow worse than being all in or all out.
Well, maybe not worse than all out. She’d been in a bit of a dry spell, and that was a hell of a … drink.
The point was that … she … she needed this to not be awkward. Not make life worse. If she embarrassed herself, she didn’t know how she’d live through working with him. So she needed some sense of where he was at before she decided what she wanted or was going to verbalize wanting.
“What do you want?” she asked, because she could handle this.
She could adapt. The sex was … amazing. She wasn’t even shocked by that. The chemistry had been there from the start.
She was mostly shocked she didn’t feel weird this morning. It would be so easy to just ease into all of this.
Too easy. She’d never trusted easy. Not once in her entire life.
He took maybe five seconds to consider that question. “You.”
The answer was both somehow immeasurably sweet and overwhelming and irritating as hell. “That’s not a real answer.”
“Why not? Besides, you didn’t answer at all.”
She did push at him then, until he released her. She started putting the eggs on the plates she’d already gotten out. Threw the burnt toast on the plates. She shoved his plate at him. “Butter’s in the fridge. Peanut butter or jelly already on the counter.”
Then she sailed over and plopped onto her stool. Meanwhile he still stood on the other side of the counter, plate in hand, staring at her.
She studiously ignored him and ate her eggs. “You should eat. Cold eggs suck.”
“I don’t want some half-assed friends with benefits bullshit,” he said firmly before moving to the stool next to her.
She hated that a wave of relief went through her. Hated that she couldn’t quite get a handle on this or him. But if he could be honest first, she could be honest last. “Well, good. Neither do I.”
“That so hard to admit?”
She shrugged, took a long sip of her second cup of coffee. “Maybe.”
“So, what are my other options?”
She glared at him. Pushing the point. Pushing her. But the worst part was he had every right to. “This is going to be complicated,” she said, which was a hedge and they both knew it.
But he didn’t balk. “It is. I knew that going in. Didn’t you?”
“Maybe I didn’t think about it with your tongue down my throat. Among other things.”
He laughed. A real, true laugh. And it warmed her in ways that weren’t just complicated, they were dangerous.