Free With Extreme Pleasure by Alison Kent Page A

his key fob had disengaged the locks, so he popped the hood, started her up, and listened to his horses whir. He knew engines—V6, V8, V10, V12, didn’t matter—and this one was singing sweet. But he was cold and Cady was waiting, so he headed back to the room.
    He didn’t purposefully sneak in, but once inside was glad he hadn’t made a lot of noise because Cady was fast asleep. And she was fast asleep in the bed that was supposed to be his for the night.
    He sat on the foot of the one where she should’ve been sleeping—the one that was now covered with everything they’d brought inside, including his dirty clothes, and was missing the bedspread to boot.
    It was as if she’d made sure he had no choice but to bunk on the floor—if not with her—or else wake her and ask, “What the hell?”
    He didn’t want to wake her. Not after the day she’d had. Her body needed recovery time and nothing beat sleep for healing.
    But even though he’d said otherwise, there was no way on God’s green earth he was going to spend the night on the floor knowing he’d be sitting behind the wheel most of tomorrow, and most likely the day that followed.
    Spending the night propped up in one of the room’s two wing chairs wasn’t any more of an acceptable option…though hitting the front desk for another room was. He’d just leave Cady a note first—
    She interrupted him by clearing her throat. “You’re trying to get out of sleeping with me, aren’t you?”
    He tossed the pen he’d found back to the desk. He hadn’t even made it as far as finding something to write on. “Actually, I was trying to remember the last time I bailed on a woman who invited me to bed.”
    “It must be hard to be King.”
    He liked this girl. He liked her a lot. “In a manner of speaking.”
    She raised up on one elbow, tossed back the bedspread she was wearing like a cocoon. “I’m fully dressed. I’m under my own covers. There’s no chance here for accidental physical contact. So come to bed. We both need sleep.”
    It had to be the shadows from the room’s dim light making her face look so ghostly. Yeah, her hair was dark, as were the bruises marring her skin, plumping one side of her mouth into a fleshy pillow and sinking her eyes into her skull. But still. She looked like the waking dead.
    He returned to the foot of the bed to tug off his boots, wondering if he’d ever slept with a zombie before. “You get your banking done?”
    She burrowed deeper into the covers. “I couldn’t get onto the hotel’s network. I’ll try again in the morning, if there’s time before we leave.”
    “How much you think it’s going to take to finance this escape of yours?” he asked, weighing the pros and cons of sleeping in all of his clothes or just some of them.
    She didn’t answer, and he left it alone, suddenly more tired than he had reason to be. Along with his boots, he pulled off his belt, then left the first bed for the second and slid beneath his sheet and blanket.
    Cady’s bulk was nothing at his side. There was no dip in the mattress from her weight causing him to roll toward her. He could’ve been sleeping next to a pile of clean laundry for all he noticed her being there.
    It took several minutes for him to relax, for his breathing to steady, his heartbeat to settle, and his goose flesh to disappear, before he realized he was feeling her body heat and not just that of the bedding.
    Things got kinda weird then, what with the two of them being in bed there together, and her warming him so nicely the way she was, and him remembering the way she’d stared when confronted with his wash cloth and his body. He hadn’t come up against that expression in a very long time. In fact, he wasn’t sure he’d run into it ever.
    It was a wanting kind of look, a hurting for something kind of look, a look that tore at something inside of him that even he didn’t like knowing was there to be torn. He sure didn’t like thinking that he’d