The Billionaire's Illicit Twins - Holly Rayner Page 0,7

and the fan—which I realized now had been running since I’d been awake, and was probably what had woken me up in the first place—shut off.

Oh, God, someone was in my apartment.

Granted, I didn’t live in the best neighborhood ever, but I’d never had a problem. I kept my door locked and the chain on, and I’d never been bothered coming up the stairs to my place. I’d always done my best to look really unpleasant whenever I walked through the door, and it seemed to have worked. Men didn’t bother me. The guys outside the door who always seemed to pick up on every woman who walked past had never even opened their mouths in my direction. And everyone knew I didn’t have anything in here worth stealing.

Still. I had heard stories of other people being broken into. People who had been attacked in their own apartments.

God, I didn’t have any weapons in here. What was I going to do? How was I going to defend myself if someone came in here and tried to—

Ethan walked through the door of my bedroom, running his hands through his hair, and slid back into bed, making the entire bed rock with his large body while I stared at him like I’d never in my life seen a naked man before. When he noticed me looking at him, he smiled bashfully.

“Had to use the bathroom, and it took me at least fifteen minutes in there to figure out what was wrong with your toilet,” he whispered. “I fixed it for you, by the way.”

Okay, that was not what I’d been expecting. My toilet had been acting weird for months, and I hadn’t had the chance to call the plumber to come out and fix it. The manager of the building had essentially told me it was my problem—thank you, low-rent neighborhood—and so it had just sort of been on my list of things to take care of at some point.

And now Ethan freaking Parker, who I had somehow managed to pick up in a bar, had fixed it for me?

I thought to myself that I must still be in whatever dream I’d started when I first went to bed. I wasn’t awake. I was letting my imagination run wild. Because there was no way on God’s green earth that I would have him not only in my apartment, but also fixing my toilet. In the middle of the night. And then coming back to bed with a grin to tell me about it.

“Excuse me?” I asked, obviously lacking all language skills in the middle of the night.

Smooth, Bella, really smooth.

Good thing this was a dream and it didn’t really matter. Good thing the real Ethan Parker would never know I’d been so stupid in my dream. Good thing he’d never know I’d been dreaming about him in the first place. That could only lead to trouble.

“Your toilet,” he said, turning on his side. “The stopper was wound up in the chain, so it wasn’t getting the right sort of seal. Hadn’t you noticed that it wasn’t flushing right, and it was running all the time?” He paused, lifting his eyebrows at my general silence. “You have noticed that it hasn’t been working correctly lately, right?”

Well now he was starting to look at me like I didn’t use the toilet often. Like I wasn’t house-trained or something. Which made the scrambling in my stomach even more frantic.

“I… uh… yeah,” I breathed, still being incredibly sophisticated and charming. “I haven’t had a chance to call the plumber.”

He shrugged. “Well, now you don’t have to.”

I just stared at him, incapable of coming up with any answer to that, my brain flat-out refusing to start up and provide me with ideas.

I’d always thought my brain moved quickly before. It had gotten me through school and then into a highly sought-after job with one of the biggest law firms in the city. It had helped me through case after case, handing me answers to problems other people hadn’t been able to solve.

Right now, though, it was completely silent, telling me nothing more than that I was on my own.

Ethan smirked. “You could say thank you, you know,” he said softly. “Or you could kiss me again. I’d call that even.”

He reached out, slipped a finger under my chin, and lifted my face toward his, brushing his lips softly across mine, his breath feathering across my skin.

And I melted into him, realizing two things in that moment: One,