Get a Clue(27)

Heart drumming.

Too close, way too close. If he’d so much as turned his head—

But he hadn’t. No one had. No one saw.

No one ever did.





In the suite, Breanne waited. And waited. Going more and more crazy as the minutes ticked by.

Any time now, she thought. Any time now, Cooper would saunter back in, casually edgy, astonishingly sexy, laughing at her because he’d seen nothing. Yeah, any minute now.#p#分页标题#e#

And when he did, she was going to grab him and never let go—screw going to sleep. She was going to thank him, even though she didn’t expect him to understand. She was going to—.

“Hi, honey, I’m home.” Cooper swaggered back into the room, a vision in his sweat bottoms and nothing else, bringing life back into the place with just his presence.

“What did you find?” she demanded.

“Nothing.” He crossed the room until his knees bumped the mattress. The candlelight danced over his sinewy chest, over that flat, rippled belly she wanted to touch, over his powerful thighs . . . and the intriguing bulge between them that kept captivating her gaze and holding it against her will.

“Nothing but a dark house,” he said softly, in a voice that suggested he knew where her thoughts had just gone and liked it.

She forced her gaze up. “You went into my room?”

“I went down to the great room. Didn’t see a thing.” He frowned. “Not even your stuff. You weren’t sleeping down there dressed like that,” he realized.

She looked down at herself. The gossamer-thin silk clung to her breasts, just barely covering her nipples. Snatching the covers back up to her chin, she avoided his smirk that said it was too late—he’d already gotten an eyeful. “Lariana made me move upstairs to a bedroom,” she murmured.

“And then you changed.”

“I told you, I . . . got hot.”

A fleeting smile touched his mouth at that. “Babe, you’re always hot.”

She was always hot?

“Which bedroom?” he asked.

She was always hot? “Uh, back to that hot comment. I thought I was a pain in your ass.”

“Yeah, well, you can be both. You can be a hot pain-in-my-ass, how’s that? Which bedroom, Princess?”

“Coming up the stairs, it was the first door on the right.”

“Okay, hang tight.”

“Wait!” No way was she getting left behind again. She leapt out of bed, but a look at the way his gaze heated and she nearly dove back beneath the covers. She crossed her arms over her breasts. “Do you have a shirt I can wear?”

“No.”

“Yes, you do. You have a big bag—”

“Do I look stupid enough to cover you up twice in one night?”

With an exasperated sigh, she tugged the sheet free of the bed. “Men are dogs,” she muttered, wrapping herself up.

“Wuff, wuff,” he said. “Come on, let’s go find your boogeyman.”

That slowed her steps, reminding her why they were doing this. Someone had been in her bedroom, someone had wanted to scare her or worse, and all she had for protection was a sheet and this man. She sneaked a sideways glance at his tall, leanly muscled form. That odd sense of awareness he had shimmering around him, coupled with the intensity he could get between the flashes of ridiculous guy humor, made her admit that low as her opinion of men was at the moment, if she had to depend on one even temporarily, she hadn’t done too shabbily.

However, she’d long ago learned that the more good-looking a man was, the fewer his actual life skills. “You’re not a pencil pusher,” she guessed.

He looked startled. “Pencil pusher?”

“Accountant.”

He let out a low laugh. “No. I’m not an anything pusher.”

“What do you do?”

“Nothing at the moment.”

Not exactly comforting. “But you think you can keep us safe if it comes right down to it?”#p#分页标题#e#

He gave her a funny look. “I think I can manage.”

Glancing uneasily toward the door, she nodded, having no choice but to trust him. “’Kay, then.” Her voice wavered only slightly. “Let’s go.”

“Hey.” Stepping close until their thighs bumped, he reached out and slowly, purposely, stroked a finger over her hairline, across her temple, ostensibly to tuck a wayward strand of hair behind her ear. She didn’t buy that, though, not with the way he was looking at her, as if maybe he was starving and she was a twelve-course meal, as if maybe he could gobble her up in one sitting.

Odd how that made her knees wobble, as did the way his own breathing wasn’t any more steady than hers. “What are you doing?” she whispered.