Murder_ A Sinful Secrets Romance - Ella James Page 0,46

Nemo with apparent interest. Then, around eight thirty, his eyelids start to sag. I start to shake his shoulder but remember what he said. About his trouble sleeping. I remember how I used to hate to sleep alone. Here at my house, maybe he would sleep more soundly.

Maybe I just want to look at him.

FOURTEEN

GWENNA

I take care of real bears, but I sell plush ones. Right after the sanctuary opened, I used some money from my own savings to buy the two bear suits for visits to St. Jude Children’s Hospital. The first time I went—with my brother Rett—I thought about how nice it would be to hand out teddy bears to the kids there. So I reached out to a few toy companies. On sanctuary letterhead, of course.

I asked to buy some bears at half-off, just for distribution at St. Jude. They offered them to me at two-thirds off the regular price, and after a year of seeing happy sick kid pictures, they started donating for free.

When I asked for the half-off price and proposed selling them for twice that on the sanctuary’s web site, they again offered them at a two-thirds discount. Which is how it came to be that the large closet in my office and the top two shelves of my bedroom closet are filled with small, stuffed black bears.

I spend fifteen minutes packaging some orders, stepping into the doorway between office and den a few times to watch human Bear. I feel slightly strange about myself for not waking him, for watching quietly as he sags into the corner of my couch, his long legs covered with the blanket, his bearded jaw tipped up as the back of his head rests between the couch’s back and arm.

I tell myself I’ll wake him up at 10:00 p.m. if he doesn’t wake up first. To my kind-of surprise, he doesn’t. I package more bears and check some emails in my office, peeking in on him a few times here and there.

Around 10:10, I remember I washed a load of laundry earlier today and never turned it over.

I walk softly from my office toward the laundry room, stopping by the couch to stand there like a creeper. Now he’s got an arm around himself. His shoulders seem pulled a little more inward; he’s slouched deeper into the corner of the couch. He’s so big: long legs stretching across the couch, so his feet reach the couch’s other arm. I can’t lie to myself: I like him here. It feels deeply right to have a man in my house, covered in one of my blankets, dozing by the TV. It reminds me of my parents. Of my dad.

I watch the gentle thrum of his pulse in his throat for a moment before I make myself go to the laundry room. I happily—albeit a little nuttily—leave the fluorescent light on almost all the time for my pink gardenias, and feed them special fertilizer that I order from Australia. When the laundry room warms with the heat of the dryer, hot, gardenia-scented air spills into the cooler kitchen, so the fragrance wafts into the rest of the house. The moisture from repeated loads of laundry makes the plants happy.

It’s weird, I realize, but so am I. At 26, I finally don’t care.

I flip the load of laundry over, open the door into the kitchen, and get a thrill when I realize Barrett’s still asleep. If I didn’t wake him, would he sleep all night?

The way my heart pounds makes me feel pathetic.

I hover in the space afforded by the partial wall between kitchen and den. Then I step back into the kitchen and get a chocolate granola bar from the pantry. One of the things I can do for myself, for my battle-scarred body, is treat it well, so I try to eat healthy minus any baking I do.

I mill around the kitchen telling myself that I should wake him up. Instead I decide to unload the dishwasher. I don’t think the clinking of plates would twist his dreams in the direction of wartime. Not unless I really bang around—and I’m not going to. Maybe he’d prefer to wake up naturally to me shaking his shoulder.

Yeahhhh. Keep telling yourself that, honey.

I think about that way he looks at me. The quiet, soulful way. I like him. Lots. More than is logical, I would imagine…not that I’m too much in touch with logic.

Why do I like him? I wonder as I peer