Chapter Seventeen

Chelle

The next morning, Chelle had almost convinced herself that she could totally hide in her room for the rest of her life. Who would blame her? She hadn’t been herself last night. She’d been…someone totally else. It was like she’d had a super horny, kinda-but-not-really kinky out-of-body experience and had been so turned on by the idea of Nash hearing her get off that she’d gone all bossy on him and told him how to jerk off.

Even worse, she wanted to do it again.

Well, not exactly that. She wanted to do more. So much more. Like all of the more.

How in the hell was she supposed to keep that bit of truth off her face when she walked out of her bedroom? As Karmel always said, Chelle’s face wasn’t just an easy read, it was like an audiobook that someone had turned up all the way, then broke the volume button and thrown it into the harbor.

The dogs whined at her bedroom door, the one she’d quadruple checked was closed, and gave her the doggie equivalent of the gotta-go-right-now dance.

That was it!

Dog walking took precedence over talking. Right? Right.

After that?

She’d figure it out. She always did. A woman didn’t hit her forties without getting a master’s degree in personal disaster management.

Keeping her head down, she hustled out of her room and headed straight for the dog leashes hanging from a hook by the front door, Mary and Groucho happy yapping at her ankles the whole way. That’s when Sir Hiss meowed from the kitchen, drawing her attention and completely blowing her perfect(ish) plan.

Nash stood in the archway dividing her tiny kitchen from the foyer, a skillet in one hand and spatula in the other. Instead of last night’s gray sweatpants hanging low on his hips, he was wearing a pair of jeans that highlighted the mouth-watering power of his rock-hard thighs and a navy Henley that made his eyes seem even more blue. The sleeves of his shirt were pushed up and showed off just enough forearm to make her mouth go dry.

“Going somewhere?” he asked without any of the heat making his gaze spark.

Words. She needed to make words. Make words? How about use words?

Holy cow, and you call yourself an author?

Yes, she did. Writing and speaking with the guy who’d tapped into some sexy boss part of herself she didn’t even know she had were not the same thing. One made sense. The other was about as logical as the marriage requirement in her dad’s will. That little reminder brought her brain back to the reality of the situation—she had a fake husband for a very limited time of one month so that she could stop her asshole uncle from closing the Finch Foundation.

That was all.

There was nothing else here—no matter what the squadron of rogue butterflies in her stomach were saying.

“I’m taking the dogs for their morning walk,” she said as she clipped Mary’s leash to her collar.

“I’ll join you.” He sat the pan down on the stovetop and turned off the burner.

Groucho’s leash slipped in her hand at the proposal. Nash? Going on a dog walk? After last night? The idea made her palms sweaty, and she sucked in a calming breath before saying, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. They have a routine.”

“Can I come with you? Please?” he asked, then looked at her, a smile starting to curl the corners of his mouth upward. “Positive reinforcement and all that.”

She opened her mouth to tell him no, but nothing came out because he was looking at her like the puppy she’d teased him about being. He was all pleading eyes and sweet energy. Then he gave her the full double-dimple grin, and her resistance wilted like a bouquet of magical pansies from her books when they got hit with the harsh light of a sorcerer’s wand in mid-spell.

“All right.” Giving in to the inevitable, she held out the handle of Mary’s leash with a weary sigh that there was no way he was going to buy as legit. “Let’s go.”

They made it down the stairs in silence—that was if no one counted the dogs’ happy yaps that echoed just enough in the stairwell that Chelle knew she’d be getting a nastygram from Suzanne about her dogs disturbing the building’s residents (AKA Suzanne). After they cleared the lobby door, they got hit by a blast of feels-like-winter-even-if-it-wasn’t-officially-December-twenty-third wind that blasted the chitchat right out of her.

A few minutes later, they were half a block away from her building, and Nash hadn’t said a single word yet, either. Aside from a few sidelong glances that sent a shiver through her, which had nothing to do with the chill in the air, he was quiet. No unsolicited advice about the correct amount of slack to have in the leash. No out-of-the-blue tidbits about the best route to take to give Mary and Groucho the optimum step-to-sniff ratio. No unasked-for opinions about the type of poop bags she had, the proper length of each break so the dogs could sniff the fire hydrants, or the ideal amount of space to leave between the pugs and any oncoming pooches.

There was no way one observed orgasm was responsible for all that. Nash was holding back. Why?

It was nice, though, the companionable silence as they made the U-turn at the corner of Forty-Fifth and headed back toward her building, stopping every few steps for Groucho to mark a mailbox, bike rack, or the ginormous planters filled this time of year with poinsettias she always had to keep Mary from taking a bite of.

Ideally, all of this silence would give her plenty of time to think about something—anything—to talk about except what they’d done last night. Of course, that meant all she could think about was how wet she’d gotten when she’d heard him come. Just thinking about it had her breathing harder than necessary.

By the time they were back in the lobby and heading up the stairs to her apartment, the anticipation was killing her. Was he going to say anything about last night? It had happened. It hadn’t been a case of her imagination running away during a solo sex session fantasy.

Fine, she’d been the one to say that they wouldn’t talk about it again, but what kind of person would take her seriously about that? What kind of person could just pretend it had never happened?

Once inside her apartment, she unclipped and hung up Groucho’s leash while he did the same for Mary Puppins. Then they just sort of stood there in the entryway, staring at each other. She had no idea when this had started to become a game of who can be quiet the longest, but it seemed like it had gone that way. This was not who she was. She was a chatter, a talker, a woman who liked to tell a story or twelve. She was about to burst with all of the words building up inside her, when he broke the silence.

“Okay, really, what are you getting up to in your room?” he asked as his gaze dipped down to her mouth.

The look in his eyes was intense enough to sear her skin and suck the jumble of words out of her head with an audible whoosh. Good Lord. This was what it was like to feel naked while fully dressed.

“During the day, I mean,” he said after a deliberate pause. “I’ve heard you during the past few days typing away, and sometimes you talk to yourself in different voices.”

No, she most definitely did not talk to herself. She cringed and screwed up her face as about a billion examples of how she’d gone over her main characters talking to each other and, to be honest, acted out their interactions filled her head. Fine, she did. She totally did talk to herself, but that was her writing process, and she refused to be embarrassed about it—no matter what lies the heat beating her cheeks told.

Really, there was no harm in telling him what only Karmel knew. It wasn’t so much that she was keeping it a secret as that she didn’t have anyone else to share it with. Did that make her sound like she had one friend and pretty much no one else? Yeah, well, reality was like that sometimes.

“I’m writing a book,” she said as she walked into the kitchen.

“Oh, that’s cool,” he said, following her into the tiny galley. “What’s it about?”

Chelle grabbed the two dog bowls from their spot on a shelf above the sink and scooped dry food from a cookie canister on the counter. “It’s part of a fantasy series.”

While she supervised the dogs eating—Groucho was true to his namesake, kind of a dick when it came to protecting his food—Nash reached into the fridge and grabbed the carton of eggs he’d bought the other day. He set to work cracking eggs, pouring in some heavy cream, and adding a few seasonings that hadn’t been in her cabinet before, then beating the mixture like it had insulted his mother. Finally, he poured them into the pan where he’d been sautéing some spinach and chopped tomatoes.

She wasn’t sure whether she was watching because it all smelled so good and she hadn’t had breakfast yet, or because Nash looked fucking hot in the kitchen with a daisy dishtowel slung over one shoulder. There was also the fact that he’d started a playlist and was dancing while he chopped, stirred, and tilted the cast-iron pan so that the egg mixture covered the veggies. His butt looked good when he did a little shake-shake thing.

Mouth-watering? Hers? Yeah, for the food, definitely for the food.

She turned around before she made a fool of herself by drooling and grabbed the box of Fruit Loops from the top of the fridge. Nash’s tsk-tsk sound stopped her before she opened a cabinet to get a bowl.

“What?” she asked.

He gestured toward the pan with the clementine he was peeling. “I’m making you breakfast.”

“You don’t have to do that.” But it was sweet, and part of her kinda liked the idea of having someone want to help her, instead of expecting her to always be the one helping simply because of her gender and her family’s dedication to outdated patriarchal bullshit.

“I know I don’t, but I’m doing it anyway. You know, breakfast is the most important meal of the day.” He folded his arms across his chest, laughter glimmering in his eyes as if he knew he was pushing her buttons. “Skipping breakfast is associated with an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease.”

“I have these.” Chelle shook the cereal box. “I don’t need you mansplaining the importance of breakfast to me.”

“How about you let me take care of you instead?” He cut a piece of the frittata and slid it onto a plate, garnishing it with a few sprigs of parsley and adding clementine slices to the plate. “Think of it as a thank-you for helping me win the bet with my cousins.”

The bet? Her gut dropped and she managed—just barely—not to flinch back. In the past week, she’d forgotten all about Nash’s reasons for their limited-time-only marriage. He didn’t want to be married any more than she did, which was what made the arrangement so perfect. Now, the question was would she be able to make it three more weeks without spending way too much time thinking about what he was packing in those gray sweatpants?

Probably not.

Chelle took the plate with a thank-you and sat down at the barely big enough for two plates bistro table at the end of the kitchen, underneath the window that led out to the fire escape. Nash joined her with his matching breakfast. His oversize-lumberjack-of-a-man frame shouldn’t look comfortable at the itty-bitty table, and yet he fit right in. Some people were like that. Nash Beckett was obviously one of them.

He lasted three bites before he set his fork down on his plate and looked her straight in the eyes. “Are you going to let me read your book?”

“No,” she said without hesitation, while stuffing down her panic at the idea of anyone—anyone—reading her work. “I’m working on book four. No one wants to start on book four.”

Nash’s eyes went wide. “You have three books already done?”

That nervous buzzing that always made her feel all jittery partnered with that roller coaster boosted with nitro feeling in the stomach she always got when she talked about her books had her putting her fork down. The frittata was good. Not puking it up because she was peeling back a layer of her skin and cutting open a vein of vulnerability was better.

“You gotta let me read them.”

He propped his forearms on the table, which meant his fingers were within millimeters of hers, which meant she added the warm, needy tease of desire to the buzzing and the stomach flopping. She was about half a second from adding super-sexy palm sweating to the mix when both of his dimples made an appearance.

Oh God, she was about to get the full court Nash Beckett charm offensive.

“I could give you free feedback,” he said with all the confidence of a guy who manspread on a crowded train.

Okay, she was getting what Nash thought of as a charm offensive. It took a lot of control not to laugh out loud at his idea.

“That sounds like the absolute worst version of hell.” Oops. Okay, that may have been too harsh—if 100 percent the truth.

If he was offended, he didn’t show it as he asked, “Me reading them or me giving my thoughts?”

“Both,” she said after a few seconds of thought. “Definitely both.”

“Who has read them?”

She shrank back her chair. “Me.”

He nodded and waved his hand in the air as if to urge her on. “And?”

She shot him her best shut-up glare—fine, it wasn’t the greatest one, but she was still working her way up to it. Still, it didn’t have any impact at all.

“Are you serious?” His you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me laugh filled the room and got the dogs all excited and yappy. “Please, let me read them.” He took her hands in his and brushed his thumb across the tops of her knuckles. “I won’t say anything about them. No advice. No feedback. No critique. Nothing. I just want to read them.”

Maybe it was because his touch scattered her sense of self-preservation to the wind, but she believed him. He hadn’t said a single word about last night and he’d had every opportunity. Hell, she was ready to break her own rule banning talking about last night when he started making her breakfast. If he stuck to his word about that, then he could stick to it when it came to her book, right? She could just pretend he wasn’t reading it.

“No talking?” she asked, a jittery sense of excitement mixed with dread making her skin prickly.

He gave her hands a reassuring squeeze. “Not a single word.”

Oh God, she was going to regret this.

“Fine.” She slipped her hands free of his, picked up her phone from the table, and AirDropped the file of her first book to Nash’s phone. “But I’m holding you to your word. We never mention this book again.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said as he stood up and gathered the dishes before carrying them to the sink where he started the water.

Shock at having someone help with a domestic chore had her glued to her chair with her mouth open for a second before she came to her senses. “I can do that.”

“I don’t mind.” Nash snagged the dishcloth hanging from the oven handle and handed it to her. “How about I wash and you dry? You know where all the dishes go anyway. It’ll be relaxing.”

“Dishes are relaxing?” Yeah, that word didn’t mean what he seemed to think it meant.

“Yeah.” He flashed a grin at her, but unlike the usual one—or even the double dimpler—it didn’t reach his eyes. “You clean it up and everything stays how it is supposed to be, then you can relax.”

He cut off whatever she may have asked after that by turning up his playlist and dancing in front of the sink as he scrubbed the dishes clean.

She was drying a plate at that moment when the realization hit that there just might be more to Nash than a mansplainer so committed to winning a bet that he was willing to get married to a stranger to win it.

And that meant nothing but trouble for her.