Free Out of Control by Teresa Noelle Roberts Page A

friendship and flirtation hovering just out of the range of vision.
    But he’d kissed her thoroughly. He’d hinted at a desire to date, or at least to mate like minks. He’d done the same when she came in to fix the window. And today, he’d done a hell of a lot more than hint and kiss. It might not have been screwing, but it was certainly sex, or close enough to it to have a similar emotional impact. On both of them, she’d thought.
    Then he’d bolted, leaving her horny and boggled.
    Well, fuck him if he can’t take a joke.
    Or rather, don’t fuck him.
    Maybe moving in here had been a big mistake. Great as the apartment was, the attractive neighborhood scenery was more like poison ivy when it turned that lovely glossy wine red in autumn—tempting to look at, but you’d regret it if you touched it.
    And she’d called his name when she came.
    Which worried her more than a little. She’d never been one for calling a lover’s name when she came—and certainly not if she was just masturbating and fantasizing. But with Drake, it just slipped out, and she hadn’t even fucked him yet.
    Jen rearranged her clothes with quick, angry jerks—angry at herself as much as Drake. She’d invested too much in this hope, this promise of desire, and if she wasn’t careful, it would distract her from work. Determinedly, she rinsed her hands. She looked for a towel, but she hadn’t put one out yet. She ran her damp fingers through her hair instead, fluffing up the disheveled curls.
    At least this bathroom had a tiny linen closet. Once she located the towels, she’d be able to arrange them by color.
    Jen sighed with pleasure at that thought, an image pleasant enough to distract her from her confusion and frustration over Professor Hot-and-Cold Stuff.
    Towels. Towels arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way so she could find the color she wanted—and right in the bathroom, not shunted into a distant drawer or the top shelf of her clothes closet where she could barely see them.
    She could change towels whenever she wanted. The bathroom was hers alone, not shared with others who didn’t care about the color of the towels and used any old thing they could find. She’d want to change towels a lot, she expected, due to the simplicity of this bathroom. Luckily, towels were always cheap at thrift shops, because she knew she’d want a wider range of colors.
    Okay, maybe she and her sexy new landlord had a few things to work out. But she was renting an apartment with a big claw-foot bathtub and her own, unshared bathroom and a turret—an honest-to-God turret!—for her bedroom, at an astonishingly good price. Not to mention the stained glass window.
    She wandered into the bedroom to revel in the way the light broke through the jewellike panes of the window. The image was slightly different from the actual view in this room, which was just a sliver of lake and the curve of a neighboring hill, but she suspected it echoed the view from Drake’s room.
    She wondered if she’d ever get to see that view. Then she shook herself.
    This would be a good time to head to the studio for an hour or two. A bike ride would finish clearing her head. And the route took her past a thrift store, where she might find more towels in pretty colors.
    Her daypack was crammed full of stuff from the move, not to mention a few stained glass tools she’d forgotten to return to the studio. She dumped everything but the stained glass tools onto the bed, thinking with a kind of malicious but healing glee that the additional disorder in the already messy room would irritate Drake to no end.
    If he ever knew about it. Who knew if he’d ever find himself in her bedroom again, given the weird way he’d been acting? And maybe that would be for the best.
    Although, she admitted to herself as she ran outside, taking care to use the back stairs rather than go through Drake’s part of the house, if he did come on to her again, she wouldn’t say no, good idea or