Page 54 of The Law of Attraction
Which was exactly what happened.
He must have sensed a change in her breathing, or maybe her muscles had tensed from trying so hard to stay still. Whatever it was that alerted him, she felt him stiffen behind her, and he rolled away with apologies spilling out of his mouth.
“It’s okay,” she said, refusing to look at him as she swung her feet over the edge of the bed. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Can we just pretend that didn’t happen?” His voice was agonized, and it hurt more than she expected it to.
“Already forgotten,” she assured him and fled to the bathroom, exhaling in relief as she shut the door between them.
Unfortunately, she’d left her phone by the bed and the power was still out, which meant it was pitch black in the windowless bathroom except for a faint strip of light leaking under the door. She had to feel her way to the toilet and then feel her way to the sink to wash her hands.
When she came out of the bathroom, Adam was sitting on the edge of the bed rubbing his face. His skin looked ashen when he glanced her way, but maybe it was just the wan gray light coming through the blinds he’d thrown open.
The rain was still coming down at a steady rate outside, but at least the wind and lightning seemed to have abated. It was definitely past dawn, but how long past was impossible to tell under the low ceiling of pea-soup clouds blotting out the sun.
Adam got up and shuffled past her without a word, clutching his phone as he disappeared into the bathroom. When the door clicked shut, Olivia went to get her own phone and check the time.
It was almost eight and her battery was at ninety percent. Hopefully it would last until the power came back on—and hopefully that would be soon. If she let herself think about all the work waiting for them that wasn’t getting done, she might actually throw up.
Her phone showed one whole bar of reception, up from zero last night, and when Adam came back out of the bathroom smelling of toothpaste she was attempting to download her email.
“Do you have a signal?” he asked. “Because I’ve still got nothing.”
He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which she’d known from their bout of inadvertent morning cuddling, but this was the first time she’d seen his bare chest in the light.
He was all taut muscle and smooth skin. Broad shoulders narrowed to a flat stomach framed by two perfect hipbones. Square pectorals stacked above the ridges of his abs like building blocks, with a narrow trail of dark hair running down the midline to his navel and below.
Of course she’d known he had a good body before—it had been obvious from the way his clothes clung to him—but there was something much too real and too raw about seeing him exposed like this in the feeble daylight coming through the window.
He didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, which kept running over his forearms in a way that made him seem vulnerable and unsure of himself. When he lifted his eyes to her face, she saw that same vulnerability in them, and it made her want to hug him.
But she was pretty certain that was the exact opposite of what he wanted, so she looked back down at the phone in her hand, which was struggling to display the images in a sale email from…
Adam and Eve.
There was a photo of a bright pink vibrator on her phone.
And now Adam was coming closer like he was going to peer at the screen.
Holy shit. Delete.
Her panicked thumb missed the trash button twice before finally hitting the mark and making the accursed photo disappear—just as Adam drew close enough to see what she was looking at.
“More like half a signal,” she answered in a voice that sounded like it had been squeezed out of a dying frog. “So far I’ve downloaded two whole emails, both of them junk.”
He paced to the window and gazed out at the rain. “I hate being cut off from information like this. How the hell are we supposed to know what’s going on?”
“We go find some other people, that’s how.” She got up and went to her suitcase. “Lemme put on some clothes and we’ll try the lobby.”
Other people would be good. Other people would provide a buffer between them, and more importantly, a distraction from the memory of Adam’s erection pressed against her ass.
Chapter Twelve
Olivia remembered to take her phone into the bathroom with her this time, so she could actually see to brush her teeth and do something with her hair.
When she came back out a few minutes later, Adam had pulled on a T-shirt, to her simultaneous disappointment and relief. But mostly relief. It was a hell of a lot easier to deny her attraction to him when he wasn’t flaunting his beautiful bare chest in front of her.
Unfortunately, he was still wearing his heather gray sweatpants, which were a lot to take. They clung to his hips and other assorted parts of him—parts that had recently been snuggled up against her, Olivia’s unhelpful brain reminded her—in an almost indecent way that did not leave as much to the imagination as she would have liked under the current circumstances.
