Chapter 7
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Loud, incessant pounding jars me from my deep slumber.
“Am I being fucking raided?” I groan into my pillow.
After working on Nolan’s website for hours after the midnight sun dipped below the horizon, my body aches from its desperate need of sleep.
Considering I often run on four hours during tight deadlines, I’m guessing I’ve been asleep for less than two.
Great.
I lie on the bed, head buried beneath a second pillow, willing the housekeeper or FBI or whoever is stupidly brave enough to disturb my beauty sleep to go away. But the knocking only grows louder, joined by someone calling my name.
Not someone.
Nolan.
In my nice, enjoyable, slightly erotic dreamland, Nolan was calling my name for an entirely different, less irritated reason. Fuck, I was dreaming about my boss. A very, very naked boss with a massively hard—
“Bree? Are you in there?”
“Calm down, Mr. Swat Team,” I yell back. “I didn’t steal your dog if that’s why you’re here.” I force one leg over the side of the world’s comfiest mattress, then the other. The knocking softens as I groggily shuffle toward the door, but it doesn’t stop.
If I’d had four hours of sleep or at least a solid dose of caffeine in me, I might’ve paused before yanking the door open. But I’m so desperate to make the knocking stop that I don’t give a second thought to how I must look until the door swings open.
“Were you still…asleep?” Nolan asks, aghast. His eyes go wide, and I’m suddenly self-conscious about the bird’s nest my messy bun has become. I think they’ve laid eggs since I passed out.
Gary pounces into the room, winding his husky frame around me as though he were a cat. I drop to my knees to greet him, gratefully pulling him into a hug so I can bury my makeup-smeared face in his fur to hide it.
“Hey, bud. I missed you.”
“Is everything okay?” Nolan asks. The concern in his tone catches me off guard, and I glance up. Shit, he actually looks worried.
“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”
“The front desk has been trying to call you for—” He spots the phone I left off the cradle, and his compassionate expression morphs into an irritated one. “Why would you leave the phone off the hook?” he asks through gritted teeth.
“It’s not just off the hook, it’s unplugged too.”
“I thought something happened to you. I thought—”
Gary licks my cheek, as though agreeing. As sweet as it is, I’m just confused. “Why would you think that?”
“Because of that spam thing?” The way he says spam sends a shiver throughout my body, but not the bad kind. Oh no. My traitorous body is reacting to the protectiveness in his scolding tone. He knows it’s not spam, and he was concerned that spam had tried to hurt me.
Fuck, why does that me want to tackle him and rip off his pants?
Down girl.
Because I would like to not get fired after all the work I’ve already poured into Nolan’s precious website, I ask instead, “Are you done interrogating me?”
“Why aren’t you ready? I hired you to—”
“You hired me to do a job,” I fire back, standing back up to look Nolan in the eyes, smeared makeup be damned. The whole sudden flip from concerned to annoyed is…confusing. “Which I require sleep to do.”
“It’s eight-thirty.”
“Your point?”
“Did you even look at the itinerary?”
As desperate as I am to kick him out and crawl back into bed—preferably with Gary to cuddle—it’s the hint of hurt in Nolan’s tone that causes me pause.
His gaze snags on the pile of papers the front desk delivered shortly after he dropped me off last night.
I haven’t done anything more than carry them from the door to the TV stand.
“I haven’t looked at it yet. I was a little busy building out your website.” I try to rein in the snip to my tone, but the exhaustion isn’t doing me any favors.
“You were sleeping,” he accuses, pointing at the messy bed as Gary hops onto it, curling himself into a ball and closing his eyes.
“Only as of an hour ago,” I shoot back, the earlier moment of guilt gone now that he’s back to being a jackass.
“An hour ago?”
“I told you, I’m a night owl.”
“Can I see your progress?” he asks, moving past me toward my computer setup.
I run, jumping ahead of him before he reaches my laptop and monitors and wakes them up.
If he sees the website now, in its rough, chaotic state, he’ll fire me on the spot.
It’s too messy for his organized brain. He’s faster than I anticipate, though, and his hard body collides against mine, knocking me backward.
“Shit, Bree.” He catches me by the shoulders, yanking me against him for a second collision. I start to make a snarky comment about his secret chest of steel being a little hard on the boobs when my belly presses into something else much harder.
He’s huge.
Split-my-vagina-in-half huge.
God, how long has it been since I’ve gotten laid? Too long.
“Sorry,” Nolan says, abruptly stepping back to put some distance between us before I do something reckless like stuff my hand down his dress pants. “I didn’t mean—”
I turn away so he can’t see the redness no doubt crawling up my neck and settling on my cheeks. I also don’t trust myself to look into those sky blue eyes and not attack him. The wetness pooling between my legs is out of control.
“You can’t see the website, no.”
“No?”
“Correction: not yet.”
“Why not?”
“It’s in the rough draft state.”
“So?”
“Number one rule: I don’t let anyone see my designs in their rough draft state.”
“Did you really work last night?” he asks, eyebrow cocked in accusation.
This man is going to give me fucking whiplash. One minute I’m about to rip his clothes off, the next I want to rip off his head instead.
“Let’s get one thing straight: If you’re going to wake me up before I’ve had my full four hours of sleep, you better come prepared to hand over iced coffee or orgasms.” Nolan looks utterly stunned by my outburst, and it fuels me to continue.
“Considering you’ve shown up with empty hands and now you’re insulting my work ethic, I’m tempted to delete the hours of work I absolutely did do and get on a plane today. ”
“Please don’t do that,” Nolan says, looking a bit like a scolded puppy. It’d be cuter if I wasn’t so irritated with him right now. “I’m sorry. I was out of line.” His gaze falls on the untouched itinerary, and dammit if I don’t feel guilty all over again.
“I need sleep.” I push him toward the door, and his feet shuffle forward.
“C’mon, Gary—”
“Since you came unprepared to wake a dragon, you’re leaving the dog.”
Gary doesn’t even lift his head from the bed. Good boy, Gary.
“Fair enough,” Nolan says, hand on the doorknob. “I’ll leave you to get some sleep. But Bree?”
“What?” I snap a little harsher than intended.
His gaze trails down my body and back up, those blue orbs turning to liquid heat when they lock with mine. “The only thing I showed up without is the coffee.”