Her hands clenched at the thought of him invading her personal space. But there was no helping it. He was right. They couldn’t very well claim to have had a whirlwind romance so intense that they got married and then blissfully go back to living separate lives. So she nodded. “That’s fine.”#p#分页标题#e#
“Do you have family over often?”
“Just my mother and my cousin Sierra.” And her mother would be trouble enough. Aurora tended to drop by when the mood struck her. Ariadne had given her a spare set of keys as a security measure, but her mother had no qualms using it anytime she so desired.
“Is she likely to notice anything amiss between us? Like us sleeping in separate bedrooms?”
She shrugged. As much as she loved her mother, she was weird and just plain flighty. “Maybe,” she admitted, “but you’re still not sleeping in my bed.”
He grinned. “Then I’ll store my belongings in your room and sleep in the guestroom. If anyone notices, we can say that you snore.”
“I don’t snore.”
“How would you know? You’re sleeping.”
“Could we stay on topic, please?”
“Where is this family reunion taking place?”
“This year we’re all going to a lodge in Virginia. There will be a picnic in the park the first day. It’ll be a casual get together. That will more than likely go on all day. The second night, there’s a ball and catered dinner. After that, we’ll board a yacht to view fireworks.”
“We’ll be staying at this lodge?”
“No. My Aunt Rebecca offered to let some of us stay with her. My mom, a few of my cousins, and I-” She broke off, realizing that if she took Asher with her to the reunion , she couldn’t very well ask for a separate bedroom for her husband. “Oh, crap.”
Asher laughed that husky laugh of his, putting her on edge. She clenched her knees tighter together. “Ash, nothing is going to happen between us. Get that through that thick skull of yours right now. I didn’t agree to this to become your latest bed buddy.”
“What? I didn’t say a word.” He stood and stretched, putting on such a fine display that she swallowed. He had just the right amount of hair on his chest. Not so much that he reminded of an ape, but enough to let her know that he was a man. His grin was too self-satisfied for her liking. “See you in the morning.”
Chapter Five
The three story brick mansion his father lived in with his wife Terri was not the same house that Asher had grown up in with his parents. David Hollister had sold the house in Greenville during Asher’s senior year in college. Asher hadn’t been thrilled, but after all the shit he’d put his father through, he couldn’t object. His father was finally trying to move on with his life, having lived in a state of mourning since the passing of Ash’s mother, Joanna. Not that Ash had recognized his father’s mourning for what it was. He’d been a selfish and very angry teen. While he chose to display his grief by spiraling into increasingly bad behavior, his father had withdrawn into himself. That had only made Asher angrier. It had seemed to him that his father hadn’t cared. But no matter how much he acted out or lashed out at his father in anger, his father had responded with nothing but patience.
It wasn’t until the night of the car accident he’d finally pushed his father over the edge. He could still remember his father yelling at him while he lay in a hospital bed with a broken arm. Tears had filled his eyes as his father finally read him the riot act. David hadn’t said a word about the brand new BMW that was beyond salvaging. “We both lost your mother. We can’t lose each other, too. I couldn’t survive that, Ash. It’s time for you to stop acting like a damn child and grow up. Your mother wouldn’t want this for you.”
Ash had been twenty-one. That was when he finally realized how much his father had been hurting. But he’d held himself together because his focus had been on helping Ash to cope. After Ash was released from the hospital, he tried to quit smoking for the first time. He’d started smoking at sixteen in an act of defiance. He was angry at his mother for dying of cancer, at his father for not falling apart, and at God for taking his mother. Their family money came from tobacco. His mother had hated smoking. Her own father had been a smoker and died from lung cancer. Joanna had made sure that they no longer had any ties to the cash crop. She had never smoked a day in her life, but she had died of breast cancer.#p#分页标题#e#
He had tried to quit smoking again and again only to fail. It was only until Ariadne’s offhand comment about his car that he’d finally been able to kick the habit.