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

straight up fascinating stretch of road between not touching at all and actually having intercourse with someone,” he practically drawled, and potent shifted into something so greedy and so hot it felt like a kick between her legs, “it’s going to make me cast a lot of aspersions on the state of your sex life, Michaela. Is that what you’re going for?”
    Michaela decided, right then and there, to stop pretending she had any idea what she was doing here. Jesse was right. She’d never taken advantage of the loose boundaries in her relationship before. She’d never had the time and, honestly, she’d never been tempted. It had been awfully easy to sit around talking about how she’d act in the abstract, with no idea that it could feel like this, but there was no use beating herself up for that now. Just as there was no point succumbing to the heavy thing a whole lot like guilt or maybe shame that sloshed around inside of her. This was the first time she’d navigated this situation. Of course it was rocky.
    “Terrence and I believe that no one is really monogamous, not naturally anyway, and that it’s pointless to break up great relationships over things as silly as meaningless sex,” she managed to say, feeling desperate and unhinged, ashamed and guilty, and she didn’t even know why. But the fact they were sitting there in the soft, intimate dark didn’t help. She reached over and switched on her bedside lamp, and if she were a better person, maybe she wouldn’t have enjoyed the way he cursed at the sudden light. She certainly wouldn’t have felt it leveled the playing ground, somehow. “What does one thing have to do with the other?”
    He grunted. “That sounds convenient.”
    “It’s practical,” she insisted, though she’d never felt anything less like practical than she did at the moment. “Some people see betrayals wherever they look. How is that healthy?”
    “Betrayal is betrayal.” His voice was flat. Unequivocal.
    “Betrayal is what happens when someone breaks a promise or the rules they previously agreed to follow,” Michaela said. “But casual sex with other people isn’t a broken promise or rule in my relationship. It’s no different than going out for dinner or a drink, as far as we’re concerned. What does it matter? It’s not dramatic, it just happens sometimes.”
    “If it’s like dinner or a drink for you, maybe it doesn’t matter,” Jesse said in that dark way of his. Judgy and snide, in her opinion.
    “Right,” she said, her voice arid. “Because you only make sweet, soulful, tender love. You connect on a higher emotional level, complete with poetry and promises, or not at all.”
    His dark gaze hit hers. Hard. “I’m not engaged.”
    There was no reason she should feel winded.
    “Sometimes sex is just sex,” she told him. “And Terrence and I have decided that our entire life together doesn’t have to be predicated on making judgments about sex, that’s all.”
    “But I’m getting the impression that sex isn’t just sex to you. That it doesn’t just happen sometimes when you’re out and about.”
    “It hasn’t as of yet,” she agreed, because she was trying to be honest here, which was about her, she reminded herself sternly. Not him. Not what he thought of her. There was absolutely no reason she should feel as if she was losing ground—wholly surrendering, in fact. “But different people have different drives, different needs. That’s perfectly healthy.”
    “Translation. Terrence Polk can’t keep it in his pants but he’s managed to convince you that he needs that.”
    She gritted her teeth. “It’s possible, you know, that people who aren’t you can think and feel things that make sense to them, without it ever having to make sense to you.”
    “I know Terrence,” Jesse said, abruptly.
    And there was even less reason her blood should seem to ice over, that it should thud through her as if one of the icicles on the back of her aunt’s