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

speak. He moved his hand to her shoulder where it poked out from beneath the comforter and she didn’t understand what he was doing. What that faint touch was. Almost like a tickle, if smoother, and she shuddered. There was no chance to hide it or repress it, and only once she realized he could see her shudder did Michaela realize her tank top strap had migrated down her arm and he was smoothing it back into place.
    He was concentrating on his task with a ferocity that made that first shudder kick over into another, and still he took his time. He moved the strap into position and then he ran his fingers down the front of it, just an unobjectionable inch or so then back again, to make it lie flat.
    If it had been her mother, her cousin, someone she worked with, anyone else, she wouldn’t have cared. If it had been anywhere else but in this bed, where she couldn’t make herself forget he was completely naked, she doubted she’d even have noticed so innocuous a touch. If he was even slightly less beautiful, less… Jesse, maybe it really would have been innocuous. There were a thousand ways this could be a perfectly nonchalant, unmemorable moment between two people who felt nothing for each other, and Michaela was sure every last one of them shot through her in that instant.
    But there was nothing the least bit nonchalant about that hard, hungry look on his face when he raised it, at last, to hers. Michaela forgot how to breathe. She forgot how to function. Her shoulder had taken on a bright red, burning pulse of its own and she was fairly sure she’d forgotten her own name.
    Hers. His. Everything but the tension that crackled between them and seemed to set the dark on fire.
    “Tell me, Michaela.” And his voice. That voice . Like he was buried deep inside of her already, God help her. “Exactly how open is this liberal relationship of yours?”

Chapter Five
    ‡
    “N o,” she said abruptly. And then again, and far rougher, “ no . I can’t.”
    Michaela didn’t know who was more surprised. Her or Jesse.
    She moved, then. She pulled herself away from him, from the hunger she could see on his face as easily as she could taste it inside of her and from the echoing pull of it deep within. She hurled herself away until she was sitting up with her back to the headboard and a nice, healthy space between her and this man who tempted her more than she’d realized she could ever be tempted.
    By anyone or anything.
    Jesse didn’t say a word. He didn’t come after her. He simply stayed where he was, propped up on his side with the better part of his impossibly beautiful and, she was all too aware, completely naked body tucked away beneath the covers. The radiator cranked out heat in hisses and clanks from the corner, or maybe that was Michaela’s own pulse, making that mighty racket.
    It took her much, much longer than she thought it should to get her breathing under control. She gave up on regulating her body temperature. It was a lost cause, clearly, unless she wanted to strip off all her layers and… she didn’t. She really didn’t want to do that. She had no idea what would be left of her if she did.
    “So maybe the relationship is not so open, then,” Jesse murmured after what could easily have been hours. Days. The judgment she searched his face and couldn’t find was there in his voice, and it made her tense. “Shocker.”
    “I get that you have a burning need to make me into a liar here,” she threw at him, with maybe a little more aggression than necessary. Or maybe not. She wasn’t the naked person in the room. She hadn’t done the touching. “But that’s your personal stuff coming out, I think. I’m not a liar and incidentally? Having someone call you one repeatedly isn’t exactly the most charming thing in the world.”
    “I didn’t realize I was trying to be charming.”
    “Probably because pigs would fly first.”
    “Michaela.” He waited until her gaze inched to his. “I don’t