He hedged, wanting to play it out longer. “I dunno . . .”

She kicked at him with one bare foot. He’d gotten her to dump the heels once they were in the privacy of his bedroom. No slippers necessary here. He grabbed her foot and squeezed. She closed her eyes briefly, but opened them again. “Tell me.”

“As shocking as it is, you were right.” She kicked with her other foot. He dodged easily. Using the non-foot-holding hand, he swiped the last two fries through the mayo-and-ketchup creation she’d made for him and popped them in his mouth. “I wouldn’t use it every time, of course, but it’s definitely not bad.”

“Not bad.” She snorted. “The first bite, your eyes lit up. Don’t lie.”

“Unexpected,” he went with.

“Unexpected that I kicked your ass in the taste department.” When he just stared at her, she shrugged. “Call ’em like I see ’em.”

He squeezed her foot once, then let it fall to the bed. “How was your day? You know, besides the whole kicking-my-ass thing.”

Her smile dimmed a little, and he regretted that. But he also needed to know if she was ready to start trusting him, talking with him about her day. If she was ready to let loose on everything that built up inside her.

“It was . . . hard.” She set her drink on the nightstand and stretched her arms up. The hem of her shirt rode up to reveal a delicious strip of pale skin, marred by pink lines from her waistband. He wouldn’t mind kissing those marks away. “It was harder than anything I thought it would be coming into this job.”

“What’d you think?” When she gave him a blank look, he rephrased. “With the job, what were you expecting?”

“Fluff,” she answered immediately, then blushed. It was adorable. “That’s probably rude to say, but it’s true.”

“Well, it’s a well-known fact Marines are the fluffiest of the services.” When she laughed, he shook his head in mock disgust. “We’re just so cuddly and lovable. About as innocent as a teddy bear and a bedtime story.”

She laughed at that, sitting up enough to clutch at her belly. “Oh yeah,” she said through gasps. “You’re regular stuffed animals, all of you. So harmless, so tame.”

“Exactly.” When she’d calmed down, he added, “No fluff jobs closer to home?”

“Oh, there’s fluff, but . . .” She picked at the edge of his pillowcase for a moment. “I needed to get out of there. Suffocating family, you know?”

He didn’t know. He couldn’t even begin to fathom what that felt like. To not only know who your family was, but to feel their presence so keenly in your life that you wanted to escape it. “Yeah,” he said, throat tightening. “Sure.” To buy him time, he added, “What’s so fluffy about this job?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She picked up her drink, set it down again. “Keep you all in line, make sure you didn’t completely lose your minds when traveling, arrange simple media stuff, not screw up ordering the travel bus for the right day. Basically, idiot-proof junk. At least, I thought it would be idiot proof.”

“Is that what you wanted?”

“No.” She gritted her teeth, then sighed. “If I tell you this . . .”

“It stays here.” He did some halfhearted attempt at a cross. “Confess your sins, my child.”

She groaned, turned her face into his pillow, then popped back up again. This playful side of Reagan, in his bed no less, was seriously turning him on and making him think decidedly unpriestly thoughts. “I only took the job because I couldn’t get anything else. I wanted to be Olivia Pope from Scandal. I wanted to be out there, tackling the world’s toughest, most ugly PR scenarios. I wanted to be hiding a politician’s love child behind my back while kicking the bra he wore last night at the drag show under the bed with my foot and smiling through it all for the press.”

“That’s . . . an interesting occupation aspiration.” He wasn’t sure what to say about that. “Do people actually act like that?”

“Of course they do. They just have Olivia Popes to hide it. But of course, Olivia Popes don’t come from Nowhere, Wisconsin, with a 5-point-5-year degree and zero experience. So . . .” She let her arms lift, then fall into her lap. “Here I am. And as it turns out, the moment this job turns into more than fluff, I’m floundering.”

She looked so disheartened, he wanted to change it immediately.

“Well, if you ever have to hide Coach Ace’s bra, please tell me where you put it.” She snorted a laugh, and he grinned. “I’m glad you took the job.”

She sighed and let her head loll against the headboard. “For all I thought it was just a filler . . . I’m glad, too. Half the time, I think I’m in over my head. And the other half, I’m running so hard on adrenaline that I’m pretty sure if I got enough of a running start, I could leap off the catwalk and fly.” She patted her stomach. “Apparently, a belly full of comfort food makes me mushy.”

That tired contentment, the sight of her sighing in happiness and exhaustion in his own bed, surrounded by his things, after they’d spent an evening together, filled him with his own brand of contentment. Crawling to her, he hovered over her. She blinked her eyes open and waited very still for him to say something.

“I’m really glad you took the job,” he repeated.

CHAPTER

11

Reagan waited for him to move . . . what felt like a lifetime of waiting. She’d have sworn it had been years since she first wanted to feel his lips on hers . . . not weeks. But he didn’t move in, didn’t push any farther.

And then it occurred to her. He was giving her the last bit of control. He wanted her to come to him, to give that last seal of approval on the act. To show, without a doubt, it was what she wanted.

She raised her hands to cup his jaw. The rasp of his five o’clock shadow under her fingertips excited her. Despite having shaven that morning, he already had a good head start on a beard. She explored for a moment, the trail from the tip of his earlobe to the slight dent in his chin, invisible to the eye but so easy to feel with fingertips. He watched her, warily, lips barely parted. His chest heaved, and she wondered if it was from excitement, or the effort to give her this chance.

Maybe both. It’s why her own heart was thundering loud enough to drown out a herd of stampeding mustangs.

Following instinct, she traced over his lips, to that sweet cupid’s bow in the middle of his upper lip, up to the tip of his nose. There, she grinned as she pushed in. “Boop.”

As if that were all the invitation he needed, he rolled her over to straddle him. He was flat on the bed now, the pillows pushed to the floor in his haste. And though the suit rode uncomfortably tight in the back due to her unbusinesslike stance, she’d never felt more powerful than when she looked down between her arms and saw Greg Higgs looking up at her with hunger in his eyes.

And it was that power that gave her the strength to take what she wanted. It wasn’t a surrender to temptation, she realized as she lowered her head to breathe in his clean, male scent. A surrender was too weak, to mild sounding. No, she was claiming what she wanted. She was making it hers. That was a power in itself.

“I’m claiming you,” she whispered as she nipped his lip. His eyes widened a little—in fear? No, in surprise—and he licked his tongue over the spot she’d bit.

“Is that so,” he murmured. “I won’t get in your way, then.”

“You won’t,” she agreed, then kissed him fully.

It was exactly what she’d needed. The immediate release of pressure, like letting the cork on a champagne bottle fly free, gave her limbs a weightless quality. Or maybe that was just Greg’s arms as he steadied her.

He lay quiet beneath her as her hands roamed his upper body, while her lips explored his. Though his muscles quivered while she touched and stroked, he allowed her the time to get to know his body. Let her make each new move against his mouth. When she chose the tilt of her head, he accommodated her and adjusted. When she swept her tongue against his lips, he opened invitingly.