His eyes popped open, and then his brows slammed together. I yanked my hand back so fast I was surprised it didn’t hit me in the gut. “Is something wrong?”
“No.” I flopped onto my back and folded my arms over my chest. “I woke up, and I couldn’t fall back to sleep. Actually, I haven’t tried. I rolled over and saw you next to me, and honestly, it surprised me. I didn’t realize you were planning to sleep in the bed with me.”
“Where did you think I was going to sleep? I told you Tony commented on our living arrangement. I couldn’t exactly sleep in a guest bedroom. That would’ve defeated the whole purpose of putting you in here in the first place.”
“That fuzzy rug on floor or maybe one of those chairs in the corner. All of them look appealing. Soft even. Hell, you could slide those chairs together and toss that rug over it.” I squeezed my lips together to suppress a snicker. The sheepskin rug at the foot of the bed couldn’t have been more than four or five feet long and three feet wide, and the black leather-tufted chairs didn’t have arms. He’d roll off in a matter of minutes.
He raised his head, surveying his room. “Not happening. I’m good here. Besides, I hate that rug. It looks like there’s a dead animal on the floor.”
I giggled. “I think that’s the point. Why did you buy it if you hated it?”
He dropped his head back on the pillow. “I let Carmela decorate the place, which was a major miscalculation on my part.”
“You don’t like it?” I leaned forward to brush his dark hair from his eyes but froze halfway and let my hand drop to the bed.
“No. It’s fine. I hated the process,” he grumbled. “The more opinions I offered, the more options she gave me. She dragged shopping bags into my house every night with sticky notes outlining the pros and cons of every piece. Boxes showed up on my doorstep every day. She demanded we meet every morning to discuss her selections. After a week, I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I handed her a wad of cash told her to buy whatever she liked.”
I patted his shoulder. Being with him like this felt so natural. Too natural. It was easy to forget we were enemies with a common goal, not friends. I pushed the thought aside.
“How cute. She manipulated you.”
“No.” A hundred mega-watt grin spread across his face, and my heart clenched. “My sister tortured me with discussions of texture, color trends, and the advantages of warm or cool tones.”
“Sounds like Carmela. I can see you holding up dainty fabric swatches making nonsensical comments,” I said between fits of laughter that quickly increased in volume when I saw the look on his face. Carmela wanted to be an interior designer. She enrolled in a few online classes last fall—though, nothing came of it. While she claimed she didn’t have time, I didn’t believe her. She’d been stuck in a rut since her fiancé died, and she couldn’t bring herself to move forward.
“Stop laughing at me.”
I buried my face in the pillow, my limbs trembling. It smelled like fresh, clean laundry and Gian. “I can’t help it.” My words were muffled.
“Oh, really?” His hands curved around my ribcage, and he tickled me.
“Oh my God.” I kicked my legs, squirming, wiggling, and twisting until I escaped his hold and flipped onto my back. My hair covered my face, and the t-shirt I found in his dresser had shifted up my waist, revealing a good slice of my stomach.
He pushed my hair away from my face. His body hovered over mine, his topaz-colored eyes glittering with some unknown emotion. “Do you have a brother or a sister?”
I raked my teeth over my lower lip. “A younger brother who I haven’t seen in years.”
“Where is he?” he asked, his fingers still playing with my hair.
“He joined the Army right after he graduated from high school, and he never has much time to talk. The four years before he left, he spent the summers at some camp on the East Coast, and I spent the summers dancing with my mom. Needless to say, we’ve gradually grown apart.”
He nodded. “What about your parents? Are you close?”
“Nah, not really.” I glanced to the side, feeling exposed under his heat of his stare. “My dad didn’t live in Nebraska with us. He visited us on occasion until I turned five, when he disappeared entirely.”
“What happened to him?”
“Who knows? My parents never married. I don’t share his last name. I’m pretty sure I could walk right by him on the street and I wouldn’t have a clue. He’d come around for birthdays and apparently with enough frequency to get my mom pregnant again, then one birthday he didn’t show up, and my mom never offered an explanation.” I rolled my eyes. God, she could be so stubborn. Thinking about her gave me a headache. “Even now, she won’t say anything about him other than he belongs in the past. As you can imagine, we’ve never gotten along very well.”