thing she wanted was to have a wardrobe malfunction—one naked person in this room was enough!
Jess tiptoed into the room, unable to drag her eyes from the steady rise and fall of Adam’s chest.
That was her first mistake.
She promptly tripped over one of the numerous embroidered throw cushions that usually sat on her bed and which Adam had obviously tossed on the floor. She clutched at her cleavage where the towel end was firmly tucked as she stumbled perilously close to the edge of the bed before righting herself.
Her heart hammered wildly in her chest and she didn’t move for a full minute in case just disturbing the air currents around the bed might cause him to waken. Finally, convinced he was sleeping soundly, she forced herself to watch her step instead of Adam as she continued towards her goal.
There were no built-in wardrobes in her room, just an old-fashioned art deco one that stood against the wall next to the bedside table. It belonged to her grandmother who’d insisted she bring it with her to the big smoke to remind her of home. It was beautifully crafted from dark wood with curved top edges and a full sized bevelled mirror between the two polished doors. Jess reached it without further incident and held her breath as she turned the key in the lock. The quiet scratch of metal on metal seemed amplified tenfold and when the door opened it creaked like a coffin lid in a horror movie.
Jess froze behind the door, waiting for Adam to stir, but a quick peek confirmed the noises hadn’t disturbed him.
That was her second mistake.
As he slumbered blissfully on, his lips snagged her attention. They were full, parted slightly and looked, oh, so soft. The stubble that framed them looked deliciously scratchy and she wondered how the soft/rough combination would feel against her own mouth? Jess swallowed.
How would it feel to be the one allowed to kiss that mouth?
Adam shifted slightly and she ducked behind the wardrobe door again like a nervous Victorian maiden. But not before she noticed her pyjamas peaking out from the pillow beneath his head.
Great.
Cowering behind the door, her heart fluttered ten to the dozen as she actually considered, for one crazy second, trying to retrieve them.
But that would be a third mistake.
And there were plenty of things she could wear right here in her wardrobe. Her hand shook as she slowly pulled open a drawer and extracted a pair of white cotton knickers and a white cotton, knee-length nightie. Her mother had embroidered tiny yellow daises around the modest neckline.
From habit she sank her face into it. It smelled of sunshine and home and a fierce shaft of nostalgia pierced her right through the heart. For a moment she wished she was back there. Where things were simple.
Where Adam couldn’t possibly be in her bed.
No matter how many times she’d fantasised about waking up with him, in her childhood bedroom, unchanged since she’d been seven years old, and her desires had been as innocent as Black Beauty wallpaper.
There was nothing innocent about her desires now.
She sighed inwardly as she shut the drawer carefully and then reached for her deodorant. Her still trembling fingers fumbled it and it thunked against the shelf. She made a grab for it as it rolled off the edge but it was already falling. It landed on the polished hardwood floor at her feet with a crash loud enough to wake the dead.
Or the devil anyway …
Adam sat bolt upright in bed, the sheet ruching around his waist. ‘What the hell …?’
Jess opened her eyes and poked her head around the edge of the door. ‘Sorry,’ she apologised. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’
Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.
He was utterly magnificent.
His sandy blond hair, beyond messy, somehow cornered the market on sexy. His chest and six pack were beautifully delineated. He looked like he’d just come from riding waves in Hawaii instead of another humanitarian mission.
Jess hastily averted her eyes, chiding her lack of decorum. He was a brilliant surgeon doing vital work. Not a male centrefold.
Adam frowned, his brain heavily mired in the sticky web of jet lag. He really was getting too old for continually mixing up his time zones. Too old for running away.
‘Jess?’
He blinked in case he was imagining her because this was not the Jess he remembered. Sweet Jess with the cute ponytail. Jess of the bare feet, jeans and T.
He’d never seen her with her hair all loose around her shoulders like this.
Or in nothing but a towel for that matter.
What the hell was she doing in his room? ‘What are you doing here?’
Jess swallowed as he pinned her with his lapis lazuli gaze. It was too dark to see them but she knew from detailed memory that the blue was flecked with golden highlights. He rubbed at the tantalising stubble at his jaw-line. The delicious rasping noise sent Jess’s stomach into freefall as the image of him scraping it against her belly took hold.
‘Er …’ Jess felt unaccountably nervous and hopelessly gauche in the face of his potent male virility. Which was utterly ridiculous. Adam was hardly leering at her. In fact, he was frowning at her like she was an annoying little insect that had dared to wake him up.
Instead of an almost naked, fully grown, nearly twenty-four-year-old woman.
She’d seen the way he looked at women. He was not looking at her like that. He’d never looked at her like that.
She doubted her chastity was under threat. Jess cleared her throat. ‘Ah … this is my room.’
Adam’s frown deepened as her response registered. He looked around. Too-small bed, scatter cushions all over the floor, floral sheets. Romance novel on the bedside table.
Then it all came flooding back to him. The air-con in his room deciding to choose this sweltering day to break down. One on a list of many ailments suffered by his poor, neglected house.
The repairman not being able to get here until ten. His overwhelming weariness.
Adam ran a hand through his hair as the cogs slowly started to turn. ‘I thought you were on an early today. That’s what the fridge calendar says.’
Early on in their cohabitation the girls had devised a colour-coded system to keep track of each other. With four people coming and going on shift work, it made things much easier. Her roster was in yellow.
Jess frowned, wishing his logic was as easy to follow as the flex of his biceps, the path of his fingers. ‘So you decided to … try out my bed?’
Her heart beat double-time at the illicitness of her suggestion.
Adam pressed the pads of his fingers into his eye sockets. ‘So the calendar’s wrong?’
‘No.
