“I’ll tell her you said it while holding Freya. It’s true. You just did. And you”—Alex turned his focus onto her, pulling her into the discussion from the sidelines—“were staring at him like you were ready to take a bite out of him—in the good way.”
“You’re mistaken.” There, that almost came out as if she wasn’t lustily remembering every touch, every stroke, every kiss that had happened between them.
Alex lifted an eyebrow. “Am I?”
Ian’s gaze locked with hers and her breath caught. There was just something in the look in his eyes, the demand and the promise, that had her entire body humming with need. This was bad. This was so very, very bad. And she’d never wanted anything more. The reaction was so outsized, so out of character that the shock of it was a bucket of ice water tossed onto the fire that always seemed to sizzle to life around Ian.
“So you two got stuck in that cabin together for a week?” Alex asked, his voice sounding distant.
Unable to look away from Ian, she replied, “Three days.”
“Uh-huh. And the cabin lost power?”
“Yeah,” Ian said, the word coming out more like one of his sexy cabin grunts than English.
“Had to find a way to stay warm, huh?”
She flushed. “There was a fireplace.”
One that was warm enough to lie in front of naked for hours. Or was that because of Ian? Damn. She was scared the answer was the second one.
“Any chance there was a bear rug in front of it?” Alex looked from her to Ian, his grin getting bigger with each second. “I see.”
“You see nothing,” Ian said, his tone as harsh as his hold on Freya was gentle.
“You’re right,” Alex said. “It’s not at all what I was thinking. You two. Alone. A cabin. Sex pheromones flying through the air, rubbing up against each other.”
“Nothing happened,” Shelby said, surprised she wasn’t hit by a lightning bolt on the spot for that lie.
“Then maybe it should have,” Alex said. “Unleashing all this pent-up attraction upon unsuspecting folks like myself in the middle of a tin can shooting through the sky seems a mite dangerous.”
“You’re imagining things,” Ian said.
God knew she was right now, and pretty much all of them involved being naked.
“I am?” Alex laughed. “Fine. Whatever you two say. I won’t say another word about it.”
With that, the other man crossed his arms over his navy dress shirt, leaned his head against the headrest, and closed his eyes.
Relief swept through Shelby from her boots up her pleather pants to the dressy top she’d ironed this morning so she’d fit in with Coach’s requirement that everyone dress up during road trips to the tips of her multi-pierced ears. The last thing she needed now that she was officially on the job was to have someone figure out that she and Ian had had sex. On a bearskin rug. In front of a roaring fire.
Oh God. She was a hot mess, and she could only think of one way to make it through this cross-country flight. She closed her eyes and pretended to fall asleep. Immediately. She considered fake snoring but decided against it.
Hours later, when the captain announced they were landing, she opened her eyes and did a fake stretch, as if she hadn’t spent the entire flight with her ears attuned to Ian’s every shift in his seat. Not that anyone would know that. Against her better judgment, she snuck a peek at Ian. He was still holding Freya, but he was looking right at Shelby.
One side of his mouth curled up in a smirk that all but screamed that she wasn’t fooling anyone.
Way to go, Shelby. They obviously should be meeting the plane to give you your Oscar.
So even though she knew he knew, and he no doubt knew that she knew he knew, they both kept their mouths shut on the team bus to the hotel. She ditched him in the hotel lobby, making a quick break for the shortest check-in line. However, her hotel luck turned out to be the same as her grocery store luck, and she picked the line that barely moved. Once she finally had her room key in hand, Ian was nowhere to be seen. Sending up a quick thank-you to the fates, she hustled to the hotel elevator so she could hide in her room.
Chicken? Me? Cluck, cluck.
She stepped inside the crowded elevator just as the doors were closing. And it wasn’t until the mirrored doors shut that she realized Ian was in the back of the elevator car. At the opposite corner stood Alex. Heart hammering in her chest, she glued her gaze to the numbers lighting up on the elevator panel. With each stop, the elevator emptied out a little, but Ian and Alex remained. It wasn’t until they hit the twentieth floor—her floor—that all three of them got off.
Alex took one look from her to his brother and back again before rolling his eyes. “Yeah, absolutely no unfinished business between you two at all.” Then he shook his head and headed down the hall.
Ian answered with a noncommital grunt that sent her straight back to the cabin. Her skin flushed all of a sudden, and she kept her gaze on the room numbers and not the hot hunk of man next to her. They stopped at the same time.
Not again.
He jerked his head to the door opposite hers. “This is me.”
“I’m right here.” Was that relief making her stomach sink? Yes. Had to be. There was no way it was disappointment.
He nodded and headed for his door, rubbing the back of his neck. After swiping his key card and turning the knob, he paused. “I’ll see you for dinner, then.”
“Yeah,” she said, her mutinous body perking up in inconvenient places. Not a date, boobs, it’s work. “You and Alex get to have brotherly bonding that I’ll tell the world
