as possible and run for it? She tried to remember if the door squeaked when it opened and closed.
Jake decided for them. He grabbed her hand, but only for a second. Once he had her attention, he dropped it and made a quick one-two-three countdown motion with his fingers, his eyebrows raised. We go on three?
It was too bad. She liked his hand. It was big and warm and pleasingly rough.
She nodded in answer to his silent question, but, choking back laughter, she held up a finger of her own. Yes, but hang on a sec. She had to turn her head away for a moment to get herself back under control. She was glad they seemed to be able to communicate via ESP. When she felt like she wasn’t going to burst out in hysterics and undo all their painstaking progress, she turned back to him and nodded.
To her surprise, he took her hand again. He’d taken it to begin with as a nonverbal way to get her attention—she’d thought. And his other was stabilizing the pizza box he had balancing on his forearm. He was standing between her and the door. Wouldn’t he need a hand free to push the door open? Or to do their countdown for real?
Apparently not. He turned so the shoulder of the pizza-box arm was angled toward the door. Winking, he mouthed, “One, two…three.”
A burst of happy adrenaline surged through her as they clattered through the door. “Keep going!” she whispered as they tore through the dining room and skidded around the sharp turn they had to make to mount the staircase.
“Go, go!” he urged, and she let loose a peal of laughter as they raced up the stairs. She couldn’t keep it in anymore.
She hadn’t been thinking about where they were going other than away from Karl. But of course they were going to her room on the third floor. It was the only place they would be guaranteed privacy. They laughed all the way up. Jake had a low, rumbly chuckle that scratched not unpleasantly against something tender inside her.
When they reached her door, she had to drop his hand to fish her key out of her pocket. Well, she had to drop his hand because their little caper was over. Because that was the only reason she’d been holding it in the first place.
Wow, though, she missed it. Like, already. But also in the broader sense. She missed physical touch. Affection. She should probably wonder how much of it coming from Rufus in recent months—years?—had been genuine, but going down that road wasn’t going to be productive.
“Well, we showed him,” Jake quipped, his eyes twinkling. “We should be spies.”
That was another thing she missed: being in cahoots with someone. Feeling like it was you and your coconspirator against the world. It had been a long time since she’d had that with anyone, unless you counted the illicit pizzas she ordered for Maya.
Jake ran his liberated hand through his hair. Which drew her attention to both that damn hand and his ridiculously attractive hair.
Heat pooled low in her belly.
She had thought she was going to be dead inside for a long time. Or at least for the five months Erin had informed her was her allotted get-over-Rufus window. But in fact, like on that night on Jake’s deck when she’d laid her head on his shoulder, it suddenly felt like something inside her was waking from a long hibernation. Something she’d thought was dead had been only, it turned out, dormant.
She sighed and glanced at Jake as she unlocked her door. He grinned and waggled his eyebrows at her.
He was only doing it because, like her, he was enjoying the echoes of their covert operation.
Right?
His eyes slid down her body, but he jerked them back up, like he’d been caught doing something wrong.
She looked down at herself. She’d tried to spiff herself up for the auction, so she was wearing a dress. It was a wrap style that closed in front like a robe. It was low cut—lower than the dresses she wore at the clinic—but she was pretty flat chested, so the cleavage effect wasn’t as dramatic as it would have been on someone else. But things had gone a little askew during their dash upstairs, and the V had shifted so she was showing quite a bit of side-boob on one side—one of the downsides of small breasts was that there wasn’t a lot of terrain there to keep