Chapter 30
BECKETT
Sleep has become a fucking problem. Every time I close my eyes, she’s there.
Not one version of her either; every goddamn one.
Blue eyes narrowed over some smart-ass thing I’ve said and she intends to make me pay for.
That mouth fighting a smile she has no intention of giving me for free.
Honey-brown skin I’ve never touched but somehow know far too much about in my head.
Her thighs locked around my waist. My hand spread over her ass.
Her hair all over my pillow. My mouth between her legs until that careful voice of hers forgets how to be careful and the only word she can manage is my fucking name.
Christ, I haven’t had a wet dream since high school.
High fucking school.
Back when I was a skinny nerd with shit hair, ridiculous standards, more computer equipment than social skills, and no practical use for the erection I woke up with.
Thirty-nine years old, and Laurel Bellamy has me waking up like a teenager again—hard, pissed off, and thinking about a woman who hasn’t even fucking touched me.
At this point, my dick has developed its own position on the divorce, and it isn’t remotely neutral.
I roll onto my back and glare at the ceiling.
This is getting bad. I’ve wanted women before.
Plenty. Lust isn’t some mystical experience I need interpreted for me.
Usually the idea burns hotter than the reality; you get close, learn the habits and flaws and irritating little shit fantasy conveniently leaves out, and the fever breaks.
Laurel refuses to fucking break it.
Reality keeps making her worse.
I want to know if she slept. If her throat hurts today.
If she remembered to eat or got buried under lawyers and forgot again.
I want the first smart-ass complaint of the morning, the opinion she knows she shouldn’t say out loud, the picture she takes and almost deletes before deciding I’m unlucky enough to deserve it.
I want to know which side of the bed she sleeps on, what she steals off someone else’s plate after swearing she isn’t hungry.
I want her laughing into my phone at midnight.
I want to be the one she calls with good news and the bastard she tells to go fuck himself when her day turns to shit.
And yes, I want her naked.
Very fucking naked.
I want to find out if all that attitude survives my hands on her.
I want those thick legs around me and her nails in my back.
I want that mouth saying every filthy thing I suspect it knows how to say.
I want to know what sound she makes when teasing stops being funny, what finally wipes the smart-ass answer off her tongue, how my name sounds when she isn’t saying it to insult me.
But the sex isn’t the part fucking me up.
I want the morning after. Her sleepy and mean in one of my shirts. Stealing my coffee. Insulting the way I make eggs. Bare feet in my kitchen like they belong there. I want to wake up and find her reaching for me without thinking about it first.
I want her to choose me.
And there it is.
I’m so fucked.
Laurel is twenty-five days into dismantling an eleven-year marriage, elbow-deep in a divorce getting uglier by the day, fighting for pieces of a company she helped build, trying to figure out if the voice she lost still has a future, and now Sloane fucking Avery is cruising her neighborhood like the last screw holding her together finally rattled loose.
Her life is already packed with people wanting things from her, taking things from her, deciding they know what she needs.
I refuse to become one more asshole reaching for something she hasn’t offered.
Which brings me to Studio B. Tomorrow she’ll walk into my building, lock the door, and do whatever the hell she asked for that room to do.
I’ve spent hours wondering about it. Is she going to sing?
Play? Sit in the dark with that guitar? Did something happen at therapy she hasn’t told me?
The questions are driving me fucking insane.
I could ask.
I won’t.
And maybe that’s the clearest proof yet that Laurel Bellamy has fucked me up beyond recognition.
I’m not scared she’ll tell me no. I can survive no.
What scares the shit out of me is one day hearing yes and discovering I was wrong about the only comforting assumption I have left—that having her would make me want her less.