Free The 48 Hour Hookup (Chase Brothers) by Sarah Ballance Page B

before that, not one of them had her back arching against a thick rug on a wooden floor, some kind of silent plea for his touch to inch lower. Good grief, was she really doing that? With a concentrated effort, she managed to draw a shaky breath and force her lower back to the floor. Which had the effect of tipping her pelvis toward his fingers until they touched the top hem of underwear that were terribly close to granny status. Not that anyone could fault her for that. How was she supposed to know the hottest HVAC guy on the entire planet was going to show up and send her into meltdown mode?
    “You see how responsive you are?” he asked. Not so sleepy now. More like he was about to devour her. “I can’t imagine what would happen if I actually touched you.”
    “I’m pretty sure you’re actually touching me,” she managed. Embarrassingly, she almost sputtered it.
    “And you’re not asking me to stop,” he said in a lazy, sexy bedroom voice. Which was so wrong. He needed a fully clothed on an old but freshly vacuumed rug voice. That , she might be able to resist.
    “I think stopping was already a rule,” she pointed out. She kind of hated that rule.
    He immediately removed his hand. “Shit. I’m sorry.” He sounded awake now. And apologetic. And not like he was going there again.
    She squeezed her eyes closed. Wanting him to finish what he’d started, however inadvertently, was out of line. Almost as wrong as feeling some kind of emotional attachment to a man with whom she shared nothing but a distaste for infamy.
    And a bed.
    Sort of.
    She had to get it out of her head that he was anything she wanted. They’d been thrown together by circumstance and nothing more. He wasn’t the only man in the world with green eyes. That he was the only one she trusted at present said a whole lot more about her flawed judgement than it did him, and it was a waving red flag that she needed to avoid him. The lodge was her safe place, and letting something happen with Liam was guaranteed to destroy that comfort zone.
    She was so not wanting him.
    Right.
    She felt like every cell in her body clamored to drag him back in, like she had one fingerhold on a precipice of logic, and the rest of her wanted to be flung.
    Flinging sounded fantastic.
    Then a phone rang. Moment broken. Body still on the verge of an epic cliché of an explosion, not quite up to speed on the fact that with an apologetic look, Hot HVAC Guy had slid out of their makeshift bed and now stood on the other side of the room, no attention paid whatsoever to his ringing phone. Instead he was staring out the window, both hands on his head like he was stretching for a coffee commercial, only what she could see of his expression wasn’t the blissful look of a man who’d just taken a deep breath of his favored morning brew. Nope. It was more the look of one who was re-evaluating his life’s choices after a narrow brush with death.
    Despite her completely imagined, at-best-implied insult, she couldn’t help admiring him. With his arms up, a hint of his abdomen peeked between his shirt and his jeans, which were just low-slung enough to make a sainted woman fall at the feet of the devil himself. His hair, unruly from sleep, begged to have fingers driven through it. Everything about him was so blatantly, casually sexy that it almost seemed unfair. She was probably a total mess, limbs still rubber because he’d grazed her belly with his fingertips, while he stood over there like it was…nothing.
    “Need me to leave you alone to deal with that call?” she asked. It was a pointed question, possibly a pathetic one, because the phone had long since stopped ringing. Clearly he’d been grateful for the escape, and she was irritated by the fact that she couldn’t be likewise appreciative, but he’d left her on the verge of an orgasm, and she wasn’t sure how he’d managed to move, let alone walk with the size of that erection pushing his jeans all out of sorts.