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

to share a little secret with you.” His voice was a rumble in the dark, and it wound inside of her like a hot rope of light and heat, making her shut her eyes as if she could block him out that way. “I’m what’s commonly known as a self-made man. Mostly people say that as a code to let other people know that I don’t fit the usual profile. Guys like me who work construction jobs to help put themselves through college don’t usually end up running the construction sites afterward. If they do, that’s where they stop, but I didn’t stop. I turned my after school job into an empire.”
    “This is all fascinating, I’m sure,” she said. She wanted him to think he was boring her. She didn’t understand why he wasn’t. Why she wasn’t drifting off to sleep right that second. “You have my congratulations, I guess? Are you telling me this because you want me to call you Emperor?”
    She felt the bed move beneath her with the suggestion of his laughter, though he didn’t make a sound. The sheer, dizzying intimacy of that struck at her, so hard it left her ears ringing and that same bell tolling in her limbs, over her skin, knotted low in her belly.
    “I’m telling you this because it was quite an experience to go from the pure, physical straightforwardness of a job site to an intellectual classroom on the U-Dub campus,” he said quietly. “My father was a salesman, so I already knew how to pick out a liar at ten paces, but shifting back and forth between two such different worlds really made it into something of an art.”
    She understood the sudden autobiography now. “I’m not lying.”
    “Not in any real sense of the term, no, because you’re so bad at it.”
    “I have no idea what you think I’m lying about or more to the point, why you think I’d bother to lie to you at all,” Michaela said, still with her eyes shut tight because any minute, surely, that would make him disappear. “I’m glad you think highly of yourself. Confidence is great and probably really useful in your line of work. But I don’t think about you at all.”
    She felt a shift in the bed and then a dip, and then he was right there beside her, that long body of his making hers slide toward him in a sudden, alarming way, and her eyes snapped open to find him propped up on one arm.
    Right.
    There .
    That time, she heard as well as felt the little laugh he let out. “Liar.”
    He sounded very male and entirely too satisfied, and Michaela had to battle herself to keep from either venting her spleen all over him or worse, flinging herself backward to get out of his range. Either one would prove his point for him.
    She held herself still. Very, very still, sort of on her side and sort of still on her back, and afraid to move at all lest she accidentally roll right into him. But not immediately springing into action to get away from him had its own issues. Like the fact her heart was beating too hard against the inside of her chest. Much too hard. She was terrified he could hear it.
    “What would I have to stress out about, anyway?” she asked him, all of that tension in her voice. “It’s the middle of the night and we could be waiting out the snowstorm in a whole lot less comfort than this. Like in a car by the side of the road, risking hypothermia. Since we’re not, I couldn’t possibly be more relaxed if I tried.”
    But he didn’t answer. And tragically, Michaela’s eyes adjusted to what little light there was and she could see him again. That gorgeous face of his and those decadent eyes, so intent on what he was doing. On her. So narrowly focused. He reached over with his free hand and he did it so slowly she could have moved out of the way at any point. She could have batted his finger away. She could have stopped him with a single word.
    She didn’t do anything. She only watched in a kind of awe as his hand moved closer to her.
    Awe and something else that curled deep inside her like a thick, black smoke.
    He didn’t