Page 15

15

Alana

I couldn’t sleep.

I had been trying for the last ninety minutes and was still trying to create pictures out of the shadows on the ceiling.

I was lying to myself. I told myself the problem was that I was trying to fall asleep much earlier than my body was used to. But I knew that the real problem was the body lying next to me.

Liam slept on his back, which was fine. Except with him lying in that position, the pictures I was making on the ceiling were anything but innocent and that was making sleep feel all the more elusive. Under the cover of night, I could finally admit to myself that he was still painfully attractive to me. In fact, he was more attractive now than when we were teenagers. It was rude of him.

“I can hear you thinking.” Liam’s voice was thick and gravelly. The tone vibrated through me and settled in between my legs. Great.

“I’m not thinking,” I replied.

“It was so loud it woke me up.” I felt the bed dip and I knew when I turned my head that I would be met with his face. I did not need to know what the moonlight slipping through the edges of the curtains was going to do to his bone structure.

“I highly doubt that,” I laughed quietly.

“You don’t sound like you’ve been sleeping. What’s up?”

I rolled onto my side to face him, accepting that it would be weird for me to have a full conversation with him—as it seemed to be where this was heading—with me staring at the ceiling.

Fuck the moonlight and fuck Liam Mulligan’s bone structure for managing to look better in the half-darkness. Men didn’t need cheekbones like that or eyes that damn near twinkled in the moon’s glow.

“I don’t remember the last time I was in bed before midnight and apparently my body has zero desire to go to sleep, so I’m just kind of lying here.”

“Why did you come to bed so early?”

Now that was the question.

“I dunno. I got swept up in everything, and everyone was talking about going to bed and then we had that discussion about the bed, and I thought I was tired. Today has been long, so I should be tired, but it seems like I’m not, so here I am. Wide awake.”

“Okay, why didn’t you get out of bed or read a book or something?”

Another perfectly reasonable question that I didn’t have an answer to.

“You were sleeping. I didn’t want to wake you up. Just figured it would be annoying if I left only to crawl back in at close to one or two a.m. or something.”

“It wouldn’t be annoying. ”

“You’re that deep a sleeper?”

“What the hell would you be doing other than getting into bed?”

“Nothing. Just, don’t worry about it, go to sleep. I’ll be fine. My body will get the memo.” I wasn’t so sure that it would, which meant I was also probably going to wake up at five a.m. like clockwork, too.

“No, I’m awake now. We’re having this conversation. Why won’t you do what you usually do?” He shifted his arm to bring it under his head. I watched his muscles flex in the moonlight.

“Let’s start here, what is your sleep schedule like?”

“It’s determined to stick to professional hockey time.”

“Meaning?”

“Bed by eleven, awake by seven.”

“Every day of the week? Your sleep hygiene is that good?”

“I don’t really have much say in the matter at this point. I sort of operate on autopilot with it all.”

“Why did we not think of this earlier as a reason why we shouldn’t share a room? There is no way your dad would have let his Golden Boy’s sleep schedule get messed up for a girl. Not when you could still get back on that ice.” I was going for joking, but the silence went on a beat too long.

“Don’t call me that,” he whispered.

“What, Golden Boy? You’ve been called that for years,” I pointed out. The first time someone took note of his ability on the ice, he was dubbed the Golden Boy. He was fifteen. His career lived up to the title.

“Never by you.” There was a vulnerability to his voice that I had never heard before. I nodded my head once. It wasn’t my favourite nickname of his anyway.

“Okay, I won’t. The rest of my point remains. You sleep well. How would it not be annoying to be disturbed by someone when you were mid-REM cycle or whatever?”

Another pause.

“What’s your sleep schedule then?” he eventually asked.

“I dunno. I’m in bed by one and awake by five most days,” I mumbled. I knew it was bad. I’d tried to fix it so many times over the years with no success.

Liam blinked very slowly. So slowly that I thought he might have been falling back asleep.

“Alana, that’s barely four hours of sleep a night. How are you functioning?”

“Ooh, a full name moment, must be serious. To answer your question, I function just fine. I sneak a nap in the middle of the afternoon to top up. I run a bakery and am the head baker. A lot of things depend on me.” It was a weak argument at best, but it was the only one I had.

“That’s…I…okay, turn over.”

“Why?”

“You don’t even sleep on your back most of the time, so I don’t know how you were planning on sleeping like that. Get comfy, which in your case, is on your side.” He twirled a finger around to make his point. I wanted to resist but turned over onto my side. He was right anyway; I’d forgotten that he would know that about me.

I felt the bed dip and rock before a blanket of body heat encompassed me. I waited to feel annoyed that someone was encroaching on my personal space but, once again, I found myself wanting to sink into his warmth.

“I’m going to hug you now,” he said, his voice a whisper in my ear. He waited a breath and then draped an arm over my waist when I didn’t object. He pulled me closer to him until his chest was flush with my back.

“You’ve gone from telling me you were sleeping on the floor to spooning. Quite the one-eighty from you there.”

“It’s all just one big ploy to get access to your fancy pillowcase.”

“It’s not fancy, it’s a necessity to keep these curls in check.” I flicked my hair, bundled in a pineapple on top of my head, to prove my point. He laughed softly, his breath brushing the back of my neck and making me shiver.

I closed my eyes and made myself follow the steady rhythm of his chest moving against me.

Just as I was about to fall asleep, I remembered what side of his body he was sleeping on. I tried to shuffle out his grip, but he held me firmly in place.

“Where are you going?” he mumbled.

“Are you okay to lie on your shoulder like this?”

“Len, can you leave me to worry about my shoulder, which is fine? Relax.”

I shifted around and got back into a comfortable position as Liam pulled me in tighter. I almost made a joke about the fact that I could feel the soft outline of his dick against me but fell asleep before I could get the words out.

I woke up to the smell of sea salt and, for a moment, felt disorientated. Then I noticed that my head was resting on something solid and cotton. My fingers tangled in something soft, the steady pulse of a heartbeat in my ear.

I opened my eyes slowly, briefly expecting Kai to be the body underneath me. When I tipped my head up, I saw Liam. His eyes were looking down at his phone and the other arm was resting on the headboard. There was a sprawl of lilac and black ink peeking out of the bottom of his T-shirt, covering the underside of his bicep that I hadn’t noticed before. It looked a bit like the Stanley Cup. At some point in the last twelve years, he had started needing to wear glasses, and I hated the tug of desire that pulsed through at the sight of them.

My breath caught when his eyes flicked down and caught mine.

“Oh, you’re awake,” he said, sounding wide awake.

“What time is it?”

“Just after ten.”

So much for my body clock being dialled into five a.m. wake-up calls.

“How long have you been lying here?”

“I woke up a couple of hours ago. Didn’t want to wake you,” he replied as he locked his phone and put it on the bedside table.

“You’ve just been lying here for hours waiting for me to wake up?”

“It’s not like I had anything else to do, and it seemed like you might need the sleep. I was going to get out of bed when you moved off me, but you never did. How did you sleep?”

I did a quick body scan and found that I felt more rested than I had in months. Maybe years.

“I slept really well.” I was rewarded with a big smile that made the edges of his eyes crinkle.

“Good. I’m gonna grab a shower now if that’s alright with you.”

I lifted off him and he climbed out of the bed. As I fell back onto his pillow, I took in the broad expanse of his back and the curve of his ass in his boxers. I felt my face flush at the fact that there had only been two flimsy layers of cotton between us when we were spooning.

It would have been so easy to slip things to the side and—

As Liam moved around the room, two questions came to mind. One, when was the last time I’d been even remotely this turned on? And two, where had I packed my ‘just in case’ vibrator?

The answer to the second question was probably the packing cube with all my underwear. The answer to the first was about three weeks before Kai and I broke up. Which meant it had been three months since I’d felt the need to have any kind of sexual release.

Yet, less than a day in Liam’s presence had changed all that. One hug, pressing me against a firm body. Solid, competent hands cutting up some vegetables. Being engulfed in his warmth as he slotted in against me and held me while I fell into one of the best sleeps I’d had in a long time. A threadbare T-shirt against the planes of a broad back and boxers that teased along the lines of a truly God-tier ass. It was maybe even better than mine. Damn hockey players.

A collection of seemingly innocuous things that, when combined, had me scrambling for my suitcase the moment my bedroom door clicked shut behind Liam.

By the time I found my vibrator, I had already wasted three minutes. I guessed that, at most, I had ten. Liam was not the kind of person who liked to stand under the hot water and ponder the meaning of life.

Luckily for me, I was so on edge that by the time I got back onto the bed and turned the vibrator on, settling it on my clit over my pyjama shorts, I could already tell that I would finish quickly.

It took less than a minute for me to find the bliss of relief and thirty seconds after I turned the vibrator off, Liam walked back into the room. I was pretty sure it wasn’t obvious what I had just done. My skin didn’t visibly blush, so that wouldn’t give me away, and the covers hid enough of me that he wouldn’t notice the muscles of my lower stomach and thighs still twitching as I recovered.

“You still skip breakfast?” Liam asked, and I sighed internally in relief that he hadn’t seemed to notice anything.

“Not in a substantial sense. I save that for lunch and dinner, but I eat in the morning,” I replied. No signs of breathiness or tells of desire in my voice either. Good.

“So, when you said you wanted breakfast in bed, what you meant was brunch?”

I forgot about that. That whole conversation felt like it took place a lifetime ago.

“Yeah, sure.” I wasn’t serious about it anyway. There was no way he was going to actually do it; the dare wasn’t real and so neither was the forfeit.

Liam shook his head at me with a smile on his face.

“I’m going downstairs.”

“Good luck.”

“Why would I need luck?” Liam hesitated, his hand hovering over the door handle.

“Yesterday was just a warmup. They can’t wait to get one of us alone and try to get more details. The morning is prime time to get that info because your brain is still waking up and you’re less likely to be guarded.”

“Shit, good point. How long will you take to get ready?”

“Twenty minutes.” If I didn’t procrastinate.

“I’ll wait,” he said as he dropped onto the bed, reaching for his phone and revealing the waistband of his boxers and the cut of his lower stomach again. I felt another pulse between my legs, and the slight pressure of squeezing my thighs together sent another aftershock through my core.

I hoped he didn’t notice as I shifted my vibrator somewhere on the bed where he couldn’t feel it.

I thankfully managed to walk out of the room on steady legs.