Free Sleeping With the Opposition (Bad Boy Bosses) by J. K. Coi

the basement, he’d intercepted and dared her to say anything about it. He behaved similarly when the bucket of grout needed to be opened.
    She was trying, but Leo had never quite met anyone with such a complete and total lack of coordination as his haunting, beautiful, intellectually accomplished wife. It was something he hadn’t really known about her before, and her frustrated grunts and huffs as she struggled to chisel out the old mortar and painstakingly laid the new tile made him want to chuckle…but he valued his life, and so he’d kept it to himself.
    The entire day had been a strange combination of new revelations and the familiar. He was used to working with Bria, but not like this. At the office, they’d had four years to fall into a routine. They’d each known what the other excelled at and divided the work accordingly. A hundred times this afternoon, he’d wanted to step in and take over, but that hadn’t been their deal.
    “That’s good. I think we’re done,” he said now, swiping his hand over the new tile with a grin, but when he remembered that ultimately she’d been learning this skill in anticipation of the day he moved out of the house and left her alone for good, his smile faded. “Now we just let the grout dry, and tomorrow, we’ll sponge it down again.”
    She looked doubtful. “It still looks cloudy. What if we wipe it a little more?”
    “After it’s dried. Too much now, and you’ll wash the grout we just laid right out of the grooves.” He shuddered to think what she would do to this house if left to her own devices, but when it came to this particular project, he was still going to win.
    “You did good,” he murmured. Even though the day had turned out much different from any Saturday they would have spent together before the miscarriage, he still felt like he’d gotten a little piece of his wife back today. “We could have hired someone to do this, but how fun would that have been?”
    She glanced down at the floor and grinned. “I did do pretty awesome, didn’t I?”
    His fingers grazed hers as he took the sponge away before she could get scrub-happy.
    She glanced up, her breathing quickening ever so slightly. He noticed because he noticed everything about her. He couldn’t stop noticing, like her essence had been shot right into his bloodstream. Her cheeks flushed with the sudden awareness of him as well. She looked down at his hand on hers and didn’t jerk away. They were crowded into the en suite bathroom, kneeling together on the floor closer together than they’d willingly been in weeks, and Bria was smiling up at him.
    “Bria,” he murmured, swiping his thumb across the gray smudge on her cheek and the line of her stubborn jaw.
    She closed her eyes, and he slowly bent and pressed a whisper-soft kiss to her lips. When her mouth opened under his, he groaned silently but used every ounce of his control to hold back, drinking up her sighs like honeyed nectar and letting the both of them simply feel the kiss without pressing for more, until she leaned into him the littlest bit.
    His hand instinctively curved to the back of her neck, but she stiffened and clasped his wrist. She didn’t push him away but wasn’t encouraging him, either. He stopped and their gazes met. Her eyes were like liquid glass, and he winced at the vulnerability and pain there. He saw himself in her eyes. Frustrated and angry and fighting not to be broken. He fought to control his own feelings.
    Her fresh, uncomplicated scent teased him, a reminder of sunshine and flowers, and better times. When this was all over and she was gone, would that scent continue to haunt him for the rest of his days?
    Maybe, but if she was haunting him, he was determined to haunt her, too.

Chapter Six
    After that kiss, Leo left her alone in the en suite bath, suggesting they both get cleaned up before dinner. She was tired, but their deal was for an entire day during the weekend, so she couldn’t back out and spend