Free Actually Love - Jessie & Zach by Melanie Shawn Page B

beginning to feel light, like it might just float away from her body. All around Zach’s impressive frame, Jessie could see little white stars. With each powerful step he took, she was finding it harder and harder to take in a breath.
    Come on, oxygen. Don’t fail me now!
    Instead of stopping in front of her, he brushed past her, and only then was Jessie able to breathe. Leaning back against the counter for support, Jessie was trying to figure out what in the name of Prada had just happened to her.
    Was she that overtired?
    Not any more than she had been for the last month.
    Was she getting sick?
    She didn’t feel achy.
    Her cousin Riley’s wife Chelle said that she’d passed out when she was pregnant. Thankfully Jessie knew that was not the issue. Unless she was somehow impregnated by Immaculate Conception. It had been a year since she’d been intimate with anyone, and she and her ex had always used protection.
    She definitely wasn’t knocked up.
    Then what could possibly have caused her to almost hyperventilate and pass out?
    *     *     *
    Zach took a moment to try to get his body under control as he reached for the gold doorknob. Breathing slowly through his nose, he did a quick visual of his lower region. Shit. He wasn’t just at mid-chub anymore. He was now at full strength.
    Dammit. It was bad enough that Jessie looked even sexier than she had when she’d strolled into Gianni’s yesterday. It also didn’t help that she’d woken him from a dream starring her and the black stiletto heels she was currently wearing. Zach had been doing a good job of keeping himself under control, even when Jessie’s gaze had been hungrily roaming up and down his body. It wasn’t until those big brown eyes of hers had flown to his crotch after she said that she didn’t want to “keep him up” that the thin thread of control he had been holding on to snapped.
    “The lock is broken on this door.” He jiggled it as evidence as he turned his head, glancing back over his shoulder, keeping his arousal facing away from Jessie.
    “What?” she asked as she too looked over her shoulder. An expression of confusion clouded her gorgeous face for a moment before she blinked and nodded. “Oh, that. I know. I saw that when I came in. We could tell Margie, but I figured that I’d just call a locksmith in the morning.”
    Then with no further comment, she turned her head back as if the fact that she was not going to sleep on the couch was completely unrelated to the fact that she was not staying downstairs with a door that anyone could just walk through.
    “I already called one,” Zach explained.
    “Oh, okay.”
    He saw the back of Jessie’s shoulders shrug underneath her form-fitting, sleeveless black dress, which hit her right above the knees. He could see the outline of her back as she leaned casually against the countertop. Her dress perfectly hugged her hourglass figure, leaving little to the imagination. It reminded him of something that Audrey Hepburn would wear in one of those movies his mom had liked to watch when he was a kid. Even though Jessie looked nothing like the film star, she definitely embodied the same classy, sex appeal that Audrey had so effortlessly exuded.
    “Well”—she pushed off the countertop and clapped her hands—“I’ve got a long day tomorrow. Goodnight.”
    Shit . He’d gotten so distracted by studying the curves of Jessie’s backside that he’d totally abandoned their very important conversation. The only positive thing to come out of his realization was the fact that blood had once again begun traveling to his brain, so he was no longer sporting wood.
    Zach turned around to face her as she reached out to gather her jacket and purse. “Jessie, I can’t let you sleep down here alone.”
    She froze, and he watched as the arched brow above her right eye lifted. Her dark-brown eyes stared directly at him with a coldness that he suspected might make a lesser man shiver.
    “You