a yawn ripped out of him. He shifted in the bed, throwing one leg out from underneath the covers. The puffy wall she’d created between them deflated a little, allowing her to see Daniel in all his ripped, relaxed glory, one arm propped behind his head. Wiry, dark blond armpit hair on full display. She swallowed hard and jerked her attention back to the TV screen.
Right when two characters were leaning in for a hot and steamy kiss.
She hurried to flip the channel. When she landed on the next random selection, it was a movie where the hero and heroine were tearing each other’s clothes off. Ugh, not helping! She hurried to turn the channel again.
“If you wanna watch porn, I don’t really care,” Daniel teased, already sounding half-asleep.
“I would hardly call that porn.” The next channel she settled on featured puppies on the screen. Lot and lots of puppies. “Here we go!” she exclaimed, tossing the controller back onto the nightstand. “This is my kind of show.”
Really, she had no idea what they were watching. She just knew it wasn’t active sex and stood no chance of stoking the fire between her legs to even more intolerable heights.
Daniel laughed softly. “This is a dog competition.”
“Mm-hmm.” She nodded slowly, watching as a finely groomed poodle followed around his equally finely groomed owner. “Yep. I love dogs. And, you know, watching them compete.”
Daniel smirked, looking over at her. “You never fail to surprise me.”
“What?” Her cheeks went hot, but for a different reason this time.
“Bad karate, Taylor Swift-loving, dog show extraordinaire Jackie.”
The smile in his tone was enough to make something deep inside her wrench painfully. Really, the fact that he saw her—was actively seeing her—around his distracted work lifestyle felt like a small victory. Even though they had nothing between them except business.
“That’s me,” she confirmed. “Gotta problem with it?”
He laughed again. “Not at all. I love dogs too, you know.”
“Oh yeah? Why don’t you have one then?”
Daniel frowned. “Well, I’m never home. It wouldn’t be fair to the poor thing.”
“Did you have one growing up?”
He scoffed. “Hell no. My dad would never have allowed it.”
She relaxed back into her pillow, finally feeling a tinge of tiredness. Maybe it was the ultra-soft bedding. Maybe it was the innate calm of watching poodles run in circles. “That sucks.”
“Yeah, well, he values work above all else. Even childhood memories.”
She frowned, looking over at him. She didn’t want to criticize his dad—she didn’t know him well enough for that—but it seemed to her that he should have had a dog if they had the money and space to get him one. As for her, she’d always wanted a dog too—but foster kids rarely had much of anything to call their own, especially not anything as unnecessary as a pet. She’d stayed in some houses with dogs, but she hadn’t let herself get too attached, never knowing how long she’d stay with a family. If she’d spend three Christmases with them or one. Nothing was ever guaranteed to last, so somewhere along the line she’d just started expecting everything to end prematurely. It was a defense mechanism as much as a razor-edged outlook. But at the same time it protected her, it also kept her from getting too deep with anyone. So she kept her mouth shut.
Daniel didn’t say anything. They watched the hoop sequence of a particularly lethal looking Dalmatian, each murmuring occasionally about a dog’s spectacular coat or the insane shoes of a breeder, before Jackie noticed the time.
“We should probably hit the hay,” she said, reaching over to turn off the light and TV.
“Night, Jackie,” Daniel murmured, already sounding halfway to dreamworld.
When darkness consumed the room, she lay rigid on her side of the bed for a few moments. Wondering if every breath and distant rustle was really Daniel at her side, suffering from the same pent-up attraction, or if it was in her head.
One thing was for certain: this sexual repression might kill her if she let it go on for too long.
She just didn’t know how to keep it business while also getting what her body demanded.
6
Daniel woke up the next morning at four a.m.
He didn’t plan it, hell, he didn’t even want it. But his body was flushed with so much anxiety that it forced him out of bed and up to his laptop.
This was the way of it recently. And the worst part of it all was that when his brain woke him up early on mornings