Lita was laying on the bed, curled around Angus, her head shadowing his and one paw thrown over his back like she was trying to tuck him up into her belly.
Well, that was one hurdle down. I’d been dreading trying to keep the dogs away from each other if they didn’t get along.
***
What in God’s name was that beeping? I was having this strange dream of being in the middle of a field full of garbage trucks that were all backing up—then the sound penetrated enough to wake me. I grabbed my cell and hit a random button to bring up the time. Four-oh-eight in the ever-loving morning. My alarm wasn’t due to go off for another seven minutes. So where was the beep coming from?
Then I remembered Jensen and got out of bed. I grabbed my sweatpants from the chair in the corner and tugged them on to hide the morning wood. It’s not that I’m shy; I just didn’t need my co-host getting the idea that she was the cause of this thing, and she might see it waving around.
Let me correct that—there is no might in noticing my erect dick when it’s only hiding behind a layer of Calvin Klein cotton.
I trotted my happy ass down the hall to the guest room, wondering how she could be sleeping through the racket.
The bed was empty.
No wonder it hadn’t woken her up.
I headed for the red digits glowing softly in the dark and found the clock on the nightstand. I pressed anything on it that stuck out until the thing shut up.
Walking slowly toward the living room, I tried to think of an appropriate way to roust her today. I didn’t want to overuse the coach’s whistle and risk losing its punch. Besides, who knew if it would do the trick on its own? Last time, the phone had woken her to groggy and the whistle had simply sealed the deal.
Maybe the stereo turned up really loud? She was less than three feet from a speaker.
I got to the end of the hall—
And stopped.
Somehow, sometime during the night, the little pixie on my sofa had transformed.
Her caramel-colored hair was fanned out over the pillow and partially obscuring her face. A faint pink washed her cheeks, and her lips, still and quiet for once, were parted, the color of almost-ripe raspberries. I had a swift flash of desire, wondering if they were as delicious as they looked.
Hell, who was I kidding? I knew how sweet they were, and I wanted another sample.
Instead, I adjusted the crotch of my sweatpants, turned on the TV, cranked the volume to 37, and hightailed it into the kitchen. Escaping the flying pillows—and the TV remote, which bounced off the wall near the doorway—had nothing to do with why I ran.
Somebody had to start the coffee.
I let Jen shower first. She was a guest, after all.
Besides, thinking about her being naked, in my house, with water and streaky soap suds running down her skin—and this was even before she had even gotten up from the sofa—had that morning wood heading toward granite and I was thinking I might need a little relief in the shower. If I showered first, I’d be S.O.L.
No, that’s not skeevy –it’s just truth. If you had a penis, you wouldn’t even question it.
So perhaps it was divine providence that I ran out of hot water just one minute into my shower. The goosebumps wiped out any thought of there having been, just minutes before, a beautiful woman in this same tiled expanse, all alone and running her hands over her slick, naked skin.
I rinsed off in record time, before Tack Junior could suck up inside me completely.
See, here’s the thing about that, which no man in his right mind will ever tell you—although we know our dick is in protection mode from frigid temperatures, it’s disturbing as all hell for a guy to watch the thing pretty much vanish.
I mean, what if it doesn’t come back? It’s something every guy worries about.
We know it should come back, and it always has—but what if, one day, it… didn’t?
My life would be over, that’s what.
Oh, hey, sorry about the sidetrack. We were talking about hard-ons, mine in particular. And the cause of mine today—well, I had to wonder if all women looked that smolderingly angelic when they were sleeping. It almost made me want to let my next bedsport partner talk me into sleeping over, just to find out.
Almost.
But a fleeting image is not enough reason to start letting some random woman get ideas of tomorrows and other magical fantasies.
Although the regular fantasies would be lots of fun.
Speaking of handing out bad ideas, we didn’t carpool, although we could have. I didn’t feel like explaining to anyone at the station how we ended up in the same car, and if I didn’t explain, they’d get ideas of their own.
Besides, it’s not like we had talked about much over our coffee besides who was going to be served for breakfast on the Rubbish Report. I had no idea what Jen’s plans were for the rest of the day.