Logan

I couldn’t get enough of the hot, naked woman beside me.

“I feel like I’m fifteen years old,” I said from flat on my back as I stared at Darcy’s bedroom ceiling.

She wriggled over to face me and propped her head up on her hand. “Lucky for me you don’t have a teenager’s body.”

I pulled her palm from my chest and placed a kiss on her knuckles.

“It’s all this sneaking around.” In the last few weeks, Darcy and I had fallen into a routine of sorts. Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights I stayed over at Woolton Hall. Regularly leaving the office on a Thursday was a new thing for me but I wanted to spend the night with Darcy. Sometimes she had dinner with my grandmother and me, but we always ended up back at Woolton, and I always headed back to Badsley before my grandmother woke, which meant I was sneaking out of Darcy’s bed before sunrise.

“Want to come to dinner tonight?” I asked.

“Only if you’re making omelets,” she said, then bolted upright, clutching her sheet to her chest. “Shit, no I can’t.” She looked at me, panic in her eyes. “You have to go.” She pushed me out of bed, her heels pressing into my arse.

“It’s only just before six. I’ll be fine.”

“I mean it, you have to leave. I totally forgot that Ryder and Scarlett are about to arrive. They’ll be here any second.”

Wait, what? She was trying to get rid of me? Our situation was unusual for me, but I’d dealt with it by not analyzing it. Over the last few weeks, I’d just done what felt right. What I wanted to do. Darcy and I had existed in a private bubble where we didn’t talk about anything in the future—we’d just agreed not to overanalyze things. It hadn’t seemed necessary to talk about what we were doing—but she obviously didn’t want her brother to know that we were doing whatever we were doing and it was…chafing.

She squealed as a car door pulled up outside and she rushed to her window, peering down to the driveway. “They’re here already. You’re going to have to hide.” She glanced around. “Maybe in the bathroom or my dressing room.”

I wasn’t anyone’s dirty little secret, but maybe that was how she saw me. “We’re not doing anything wrong, Darcy.” I wasn’t sure if I was talking to myself or her.

She groaned and pulled at my arm, trying to get me out of bed. “Come on.”

“I’m serious. Why can’t your brother know I’m here?” I couldn’t quite believe the words that were coming out of my mouth.

“And what are you going to say to him? Hey, you don’t mind that I’m banging your sister, do you?”

“I said I felt like a fifteen-year-old boy, not that I was going to act like one.”

She sighed dramatically and headed to the bathroom. “You’re impossible. I’m going to have a shower.”

I followed her. “Why don’t you want him to know about us?” I asked as she stepped under the spray, her toothbrush in her mouth as she tried to multi-task—something she always did when running late.

I’d enjoyed making her late on many occasions over the last few weeks.

She looked at me, water pouring over her face as I watched her from the end of the walk-in shower.

“Why don’t you want your grandmother to know about us?” she asked.

“I never said I didn’t—it just hasn’t come up.” She turned away from me to finish brushing her teeth.

“Darcy,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to say—it just felt that we were due for a conversation. I didn’t like the idea of her trying to hide me. Us.

Even though I’d fucked a lot of women, I’d never felt so intimate with a woman. Darcy and I had fallen into an early-morning habit of starting our days together. Things had developed when I wasn’t paying attention. I’d been deliberately looking away, but now I needed clarity. I wanted to know whether we were on the same page, except I wasn’t sure what page that was.

“What?” she snapped. “My brother and Scarlett are downstairs. They have toddlers and an American mother. There are no boundaries. They are probably about to burst into my bedroom and we’re both naked. Can we talk later?”

She was right. We didn’t have time and I didn’t know what I wanted to say. I rarely went into conversations without knowing the outcome I wanted, but like with most things, I found Darcy was the exception.

“I’m not sleeping with anyone else,” I said as if that solved everything. “I just want you to know that.”

She frantically covered herself with shower gel. “Can we talk about this later?”

Wait, wasn’t it customary for her to tell me she wasn’t sleeping with anyone else either? Granted, I was in unfamiliar territory, but I was pretty sure that was how these things were meant to go. Unless she was sleeping with someone else. “Are you?” I stepped into the walk-in shower, wanting to hear her answer clearly.

She tipped her head to the side. “Not unless you count Lane.”

It took a second longer than it should have to realize she was joking. “Funny,” I said, and she just shrugged as if we were talking about the fucking weather.

I’d spent my life avoiding conversations like this, dodging questions from women by being clear upfront that there would be no second time, no emotions and definitely no commitment. But here I was, with a woman I actually wanted to have this conversation with, and she was the one avoiding it.

“So you don’t want to talk about this?” Was she being cold or distracted or both?

“Not now. We haven’t discussed anything about anything and we don’t have time to start.”

Perhaps we’d both been avoiding having a conversation about where we were, how we felt and where we were headed. I had no road map, I’d never been here, felt like this. But we were at a crossroads and I wanted to know which road she saw us taking.