Page 58 of Legally Mine

Chapter 13

Hot. I was hot. Every part of me felt like a ripe, sweating peach. I opened my eyes; thin streams of sunshine escaped through the blinds of my one small window. In my cloudy, hungover state, they felt like needles piercing my eyeballs. I looked down my body, to find myself thoroughly and completely wrapped up in man. Well, that explained the suffocating heat.

Brandon stirred. The arm across my chest and the leg over my hip just wound tighter, and he buried his face further into my hair. Part of me relished his touch, enjoyed the warmth of his skin, the familiar scent of him. The other part of me just wanted his giant, sticky limbs off.

That part won out. As slowly as I could, I slid from under his embrace, doing what I could to replace my body with a few of the pillows.

It had been an interesting night. When we had come back from the show, Brandon was fully primed to do more of what had happened in the broom closet. He had watched me move around the apartment with the focus of a jungle predator. After being tossed onto my bed not once, but twice, I had elected to change into my pajama shorts and an old New York Giants T-shirt in the bathroom, much to Brandon's obvious disappointment. Unfortunately, he didn't play fair. When I returned, he had stripped completely down to his boxer briefs, looking more like an underwear model than a CEO as he splayed his long, tanned body across my bed.

"You keep looking at me like that, I'm not going to be able to keep my hands to myself, Red," Brandon had said with a leer.

I bit my lip. "You're not exactly making it easy for me either. No one asked you to hop in my bed looking like David Beckham in an underwear ad."

For that I got another thousand-watt grin. "I never said I'd make it easy. Get over here. I'll let you keep those cute little shorts on, I swear."

He stayed true to his word, taking things as slow as I wanted. It was like spending the night together as if we were sixteen and our parents were in the next room. Frustrating, but also completely a turn-on.

And now it was a little awkward.

Brandon stirred again as an old wood floorboard creaked under my feet. I froze. He raised an arm over his head and blinked lazily awake.

"Morning," he said slowly as he caught sight of me.

He propped his head up on one ridiculously defined arm and smiled. My insides tightened. Anyone who looked like that first thing in the morning should be locked up.

"Hey," I said, raising a shy hand to my face, which probably had pillow-crease marks across one cheek. "Good morning."

I slumped into my desk chair, feeling unaccountably shy. Unlike the days when we used to spend weekends together, our conversation was stunted. Brandon was guarded, and I was too. The fact was, we had hurt each other badly, and there was going to be a certain amount of time needed to heal those wounds, which seemed a lot fresher at the moment.

Brandon sat up completely, and I flushed as the sheet fell down, revealing the cut lines of his torso. He smiled wider at my reaction; seriously, it was really unfair that I couldn't hide a damn thing I was thinking.

"What are you doing over there?" A long arm beckoned me. "Come back to bed."

I obeyed. Brandon draped a familiar hand about my legs and massaged my bare thigh.

"You don't make it easy for a guy," he murmured at the touch. "You shouldn't be allowed to walk around in shorts like these."

His hand moved to my inner thigh, fingers finding the hem of my admittedly microscopic shorts. My breath picked up a notch, and I bit my lip. Brandon smiled, then pulled his hand away, much to my obvious frustration.

"You set the rules, babe," he said as he leaned back into the pillows. He pulled me down to lay on his chest. "Anytime you want to break them, you let me know."

I sighed contentedly, happy to have resumed contact with his warm body even though I'd felt suffocated by it before. His hand drifted up my back and started playing with my hair, and we laid there a moment, content in each other's company. But the comfort was short lived.

Green eyes or blue?

It was the question that wouldn't go away, and that guilt that never seemed to dissipate completely blossomed in my gut all over again.

"You all right?" Brandon asked, as if sensing my sudden change of temperament.

I opened my mouth.

A loud buzzing of my phone on the nightstand tore through the room. Brandon handed it to me; it was a text from Bubbe, asking how my week had gone. Her message was a reminder of what I had left in New York, and also of other things Brandon and I still had not discussed.

I sighed, closed the screen, and pushed myself back off Brandon's chest, ignoring his disappointed grunt. As if on cue, his phone also buzzed on the windowsill, revealing several messages that had gone unanswered last night and this morning. No rest for weary CEOs.

I pulled on my vintage Levi's and a black tank top. Brandon watched appreciatively, but once he realized I really wasn't coming back to the bed, he sighed and got up himself. I stumbled at the sight of his almost-naked body in its full glory: v-shaped abdominal muscles, square pectorals, long, lean thighs and calves that all flexed as he stretched his hands to the ceiling.

He caught me ogling and flashed another grin. "We could still break some rules, Red." He clearly wanted to, if the tent in his briefs was any indication.