Read Online In Bed with the Bachelor (Bachelor Auction Book 5) by Megan Crane - Free Book Online

there in the room between them. Then he’d sauntered— sauntered— back to the bed as if he didn’t care if it took him all night to get there, and had sprawled out on the far side of the bed with the TV remote in one hand and the other behind his head like a makeshift pillow.
    On top of the comforter, with the suggestion of steam rising from his naked skin, though Michaela couldn’t be sure she hadn’t added that detail in, retroactively, as a part of the hysteria in her own fevered brain.
    “Sleep tight,” he’d rumbled, in what had been the jauntiest, most cheerful tone she’d heard from him yet. He’d even smiled. “Let me know if the TV is too loud for you, once you’re in that little cocoon you mentioned. I wouldn’t want to bug you.”
    And he hadn’t even glanced at her again after that.
    Which meant Michaela had no choice but to do exactly what she’d told him she would. She’d crawled into the bed, despite the fact his big, long, naked body took up more than his share of the mattress’s square footage and had been weighing down the sheets and covers beside. She hadn’t wanted to address anything involving his body, not its placement and certainly not its current state of undress, so she’d simply made do. She’d burrowed down as far as she could on the very edge of the bed, wrapping herself in the part of the comforter she could reasonably claim as hers and burying herself there, like an incensed burrito.
    While Jesse had proceeded to watch back to back episodes of deeply stupid sitcoms, as if he’d been placed on this earth purely to torture her with tinny laugh tracks and the inescapable fact of his perfect, goddamned body sprawled out so lazily only a few inches away from her tense, angry one.
    Eventually, he’d turned off the TV and climbed under the covers, seemingly unaware that Michaela was still lying there beside him as stiff as a plank of hardwood. But he didn’t do anything but switch off the light, and then there was nothing but the dark of the room and the slap and howl of the wind outside. The wheezing and periodic clanks of the ancient radiator and, slowly, the heat from Jesse himself warming up the bed they shared until it become unbearable.
    Soon, Michaela told herself, he would start snoring or drooling or something— anything— unattractive, so she could find him hideous at last. Then, and maybe only then, she was sure she’d fall asleep.
    But the minutes dragged on by and that never happened. Jesse simply slept. He didn’t encroach on her space, and he didn’t make any kind of advances and he didn’t even snore, for God’s sake. He simply sprawled there beside her, as unreasonably perfect asleep as he was awake.
    She thought she’d never hated anyone more in her entire life.
    “Stress any louder and you’ll wake the neighbors,” he said, in that low voice of his, all rough and tumble and much too close for her peace of mind. “It’s like a fire alarm.”
    They might as well have been sharing a pillow. His voice was all over her, and from close by. It was terrible. It made every part of her shiver into taut, pointed awareness and stay there.
    “I’m not stressing,” she told him, trying to sound anything but taut or aware . “I, uh, had a bad dream. I just woke up. I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”
    She heard him shift around in the bed and didn’t want to think about how close he really was. How easily she could roll toward him, or even slide her foot across the space between them and touch him. All of him. She reminded herself this was a king-sized bed, no matter how tiny it had seemed the more she’d looked at it all night, and it had more than enough space for two people to sleep comfortably without bothering each other at all. But she still entertained a fantasy or two of making a bed on the floor instead.
    Only the fact he’d know he got under her skin if she did that—and that it would amuse the hell out of him—kept her from it.
    “I’m going