Free In Bed with the Bachelor (Bachelor Auction Book 5) by Megan Crane

understand the problem.”
    And she felt as if there was something wrapped tight around her throat, cutting off her words. Her air.
    “There’s no problem.” Because she was a grown woman or she was supposed to be one. An adult. Not an immature child, prostrate to the whim of any feeling that stampeded through her. She’d always believed that. “Just because my relationship is open, that doesn’t mean I’m required to mess around with every man I meet who isn’t my fiancé.”
    “Of course not.” But that didn’t sound like a concession and sure enough, his hard gaze didn’t shift from hers at all. “How many men have you messed around with, would you say? Just give me a ballpark estimate. Five? Ten? Fifteen or more?”
    She felt her mouth fall open slightly, just slightly, and that told her any number of things she’d prefer not to know about herself. Things that until this very moment, she’d thought were outdated vestiges of the person she’d been told she ought to be as a child. Little ghosts of someone else, amusing in their way, but nothing at all to do with who she really was.
    Here, now, she saw that she’d been kidding herself. They weren’t ghosts at all. And they didn’t belong to someone else, they were hers. And the very idea of messing around with five, ten, any men while she and Terrence were together made her feel faintly sick to her stomach.
    And that meant she had no idea who the hell she was, after all.
    “I don’t think I’m going to answer that,” she told Jesse with every inch of that calm she’d worked years to perfect. “It’s absolutely none of your business.”
    Neither was the chaos inside of her.
    “Maybe it was none of my business before,” he agreed. “But now? It’s critical.”
    “And why is that?” She heard the kick of temper in her voice and could have reined it in, but she didn’t. “Because you have a hard-on and no place to put it?”
    “I have hands, thank you,” he said reprovingly, which was not a visual Michaela needed just then. “And, also, I’m not twelve.”
    “And it still has nothing to do with you.”
    “Let me tell you what I think.”
    “I’m going to let you in on a little secret, Jesse. I don’t care what you think.”
    “Right. That’s why you’re staring at me like that, haunted and wide-eyed. That’s why you shudder every time I touch you. That’s why your voice keeps cracking every time you say something to me.” He smiled, and it was the fact of that soft smile on such a hard mouth that did her head in. It made something seem to fall apart inside of her, like a building simply crumbling from the inside out, there one minute and the next, only dust. “What I don’t understand is why a woman in a wide-open relationship would pretend she’s not feeling an attraction like this, that’s so fucking obvious it could light up the whole of Western Montana. Even in the middle of a blizzard.”
    Michaela pulled in a shaky breath, then let it out again. But the mess inside of her didn’t go away. The clawing thing at her throat didn’t ease. And she was either honest with herself or she wasn’t.
    “Fine,” she said, because she wasn’t a liar, damn it. No matter how much easier it would have been to lie just then—to both of them. “You’re right.”
    He didn’t smile. But the gleam in his eyes was so potent it almost hurt to look at him. “I’m right about a lot of things, generally. But you might want to narrow that down.”
    She lifted her hands up and then dropped them, letting her palms smack against the legs she’d drawn up against her—and she was perfectly well aware that she was basically barring herself off from him. That it was a defensive posture that told him more of the things he already seemed to know.
    But there was no helping that, either.
    “You said we weren’t going to sleep together tonight,” she reminded him. “Did you forget?”
    “If I have to explain to you the long and varied and