The Wright Brother(33)

Jensen


I came to, holding a beautiful, naked woman in my arms. My eyes jolted awake, as I was unable to believe the turn of events. Not because I’d had the most amazing sex of my life. Or that the person I’d had it with was Emery Robinson. Or even that I was enjoying having her in my arms the next morning.

It was because I had slept.

I had really slept.

My eyes darted to the red alarm clock on the nightstand next to the bed we had migrated into at some ungodly hour last night. But, right now, it read nine o’clock.

Nine o’clock.

I had slept for seven blissful hours. I didn’t even care that I was late for work for the first time in my life or that I probably had a thousand emails and just as many texts and calls to find out if I was alive. I hadn’t slept seven straight hours since my father died nearly a decade ago.

“Mmm,” Emery groaned, rolling over to face me.

In the light of day, she was even more gorgeous than lit by candlelight, and I hadn’t thought that was possible. I’d been a fool to think she was beautiful as she could get coated in makeup with her hair done. Here she was with traces of last night’s mascara on her eyelashes and her hair down and messy in a freshly fucked way, and I was done. I was…totally fucked.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Nine.”

“That early?” She stretched her arm out.

“Mmhmm,” I said, suddenly realizing how utterly fucked I was. Utterly and completely fucked. I needed to get out of here and stop this now.

I couldn’t have had fucking incredible sex and slept through a whole night with a woman who was so wrong for me on every level. Attachments were overrated, and I had prided myself on being emotionally unavailable. I needed to find that in me now.

Emery Robinson had belonged to Landon. She was living in Austin. She’d grown up here. And I could think of a hundred other strikes against her.

I flung the covers off my naked body and moved to get out of bed. Emery reached for me with her delicate little fingers, and I careened away from her. I avoided her gaze. I didn’t want to see if she was hurt. I wasn’t an asshole. I just…couldn’t do this. I couldn’t feel anything for her.

I searched in the closet for clean clothes. Ours were still strewed across the living room.

“I’ll just…get your things, so we can go,” I said, stomping out of the room before she could say anything.

I found my cell phone first and glanced at the influx of messages. I texted my secretary, Margaret, to let her know I would be coming in late. Something had come up unexpectedly.

My phone dinged with a message from Vanessa, and I nearly threw the thing across the room. Just what I wanted to deal with my ex-wife after the night that I had and the morning that only reminded me why this was all a bad idea. Instead, I returned the message, because I knew she would hound me if I didn’t, but I made sure that my impatience was blatantly clear.

I ignored everything else and scooped up Emery’s clothes from the floor.

She was sitting up with the charcoal-gray sheet wrapped around her body. She seemed off-balance, as if last night had been a dream and she was waking up and realizing it hadn’t happened. She had been so comfortable with her body last night that it seemed a damn shame that she was covering it up.

“Just late for work,” I told her. “We have to get going.”

“Right. Of course,” she said.

She took her clothes out of my hand, and I gave her privacy to change. The notion was absurd, but between being late for work, how content I had felt the moment I woke up, and the text from my bitch of an ex, this morning itself felt absurd.

Emery appeared a minute later, dressed in the clothes she’d worn last night, with her dark hair up in a high ponytail. “All ready.”

“Great.”

We hustled back into my truck. The drive across town was quiet, punctuated only by the Christmas songs that were still playing on the radio. I didn’t have it in me to turn it off even though they reminded me of our night together. I pulled up in front of her sister’s house twenty minutes later.

She smiled weakly at me. “Have fun at work,” she choked out.

I wanted to kick myself. But I’d known that this wasn’t a smart idea. I didn’t date girls in town—whether or not they were here for a weekend—for a damn good reason. It made things…complicated. And complicated was not something I could afford outside of the boardroom.

“Thanks. Have fun with your sister.”

“My sister,” she repeated numbly. “Okay. Well, um…bye.”

She hopped out of the truck, gave me a half-wave, and then darted for the confines of the house. She didn’t look back before disappearing into the house, and I had the distinct feeling that I had just made her feel cheap.