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

house had pierced her through the gut. She forced herself to look straight at him, calm and cool, and she didn’t want to ask herself why that was one of the hardest things she’d ever done to date.
    “Do you?” she asked. Mildly. “Then nothing I’m saying should come as a surprise to you.”
    “I was trying to figure out a way to tell you that your beloved fiancé is widely renowned as being completely incapable of keeping himself zipped,” Jesse said, something flinty in his gaze and in the cast of his mouth. “You seem like a nice girl. But hey, no harm, no foul, if you already know. If you support it.”
    “I don’t require that Terrence treat me like his confessional,” she told him icily. “He doesn’t need my permission to decide how and where he spends his time.”
    That was too much for Jesse, apparently. He muttered something and then he jackknifed up, tossing off the bedclothes and stalking over to his duffel. She had too few moments of staring at his astonishingly sculpted backside again, and then he hauled on a loose pair of grey athletic trousers.
    He took his time turning back to face her, which gave Michaela a few moments to breathe again. When he finally wheeled around, he raked back his unruly hair with one hand as he settled that faintly grim gaze of his on her. He was beautiful and obviously pissed off, at her, and her body reacted to all of that as if he’d sung her a set of poignant love songs and topped it off with roses and a box of chocolates.
    She’d never felt anything like this in her life.
    It was terrifying and exhilarating, a physical longing that felt almost like some kind of quick onset virus, and it was one hundred percent wrong . She didn’t care why. She didn’t care what Terrence would do in her place.
    Jesse Grey was not a trifle. He would leave marks.
    “Go on,” he growled at her. “I feel pretty sure you’re meandering around to the real bullshit right about now.”
    “I have no idea what you mean. I’m sure I don’t want to know.”
    “It means whatever convoluted reason you have in your head that it’s great if your boy Terrence bones every last bimbo in the Pacific Northwest but absolutely unacceptable if you touch anyone. Especially me.” He let that sink in, and then he crossed his arms. “I’m all ears.”
    Michaela realized she was breathing too heavily, as if she was flat-out running, when she still hadn’t moved a single inch. Not one. As if she really was frozen into place where she sat.
    “Sex that’s just sex would be fine,” she told him, and it was amazing how hard this was. But that was the point, wasn’t it? If it was easy, she wouldn’t have stopped things. If it was easy, that voice inside of her whispered, you would be a completely different person. She didn’t want to think about that. “This doesn’t feel like that. You told me yourself it would mean something,” she went on hurriedly when his eyes went unreadably dark. “That’s too intense for me. Stress relief is one thing, but this feels a little more complicated than your average Swedish massage. Which would be great, I love massages, but complicated sex is something I can’t do.”
    *
    Jesse had never been so furious and so turned on at the same time.
    He didn’t know what to do about it—aside from the obvious, of course, which it appeared was off the table tonight. And he knew, in some distant part of his brain where he was still a fully functioning person and not simply the caveman who would take her however he could get her, that this was a good thing.
    Michaela Townsend was a complication he didn’t need and shouldn’t want, and so what if he didn’t like the fact she’d been the one to say so? To call him complicated? That was pride, nothing more. Or it shouldn’t have been anything more.
    He told himself it wasn’t.
    “No, Michaela,” he said then, holding himself by a thread and letting all of that hunger pound through him. Letting her see it.