Joss Wood - Your Bed or Mine?

Naked?

Ooh, Tori thought, wiggling under the covers, a nice firm, lump-free bed. High thread count, clean cotton sheets, a decent feather pillow. Thank you, Isaac, for being in Amsterdam or Paris or somewhere else exotic doing cocktailbar stuff and leaving your room empty for me to borrow. She sighed happily. This was a million times better; she could get a decent night’s sleep in this comfy bed and she’d feel so much better in the morning: stronger, bolder, better able to cope. She rolled over on her side and dropped her hand to the mattress…

Except that wasn’t a mattress. Tori froze. It was warm and hairy and the muscles underneath her hand contracted and released.

She’d known enough male bodies to immediately realise that she was holding a very muscular male thigh and because she could feel something that felt like a testicle brushing her pinkie finger, she suspected that her hand had landed quite far up his thigh—far as in ‘far too close’.

Okay, she really hadn’t planned on feeling Isaac up this evening. And why did she immediately feel guilty? Because of Poppy, she realised. Poppy and Isaac had something cooking; what it was she wasn’t sure but it was something…

And while she had many, many, many faults, stealing her best friend’s man—potential man—wasn’t one of them.

If she was desperately lucky, then Isaac would be asleep and she could sneak back out and keep her mouth shut for ever and ever and ever…

Tori, trying to be very stealthy, lifted her thumb off his thigh, then her index finger, middle and ring finger and finally her pinkie. Pulling her hand away, she sighed with relief when there was no reaction from the body and slowly started to inch her way out of the bed.

A deep, sexy-as-sin voice growled at her through the darkness and pinned her to the bed. ‘Where are you going? It was just starting to get interesting.’

‘Isaac?’ she whispered and held her breath, desperately hoping that Isaac had acquired a slight accent she didn’t remember him ever having.

‘Nope. Sorry.’

Sometimes, Tori thought, you are the statue and sometimes you are the pigeon. Obviously her day to be the statue wasn’t quite over just yet.

The bedside light snapped on at the same moment that Tori bailed out of bed, the hounds of embarrassment snapping on her heels. She was halfway around the bed and still eight feet from where she dropped her robe—serve her right for being a slob and just dropping clothes on the floor—when she realised that he could see her in all her naked, jiggling glory!

‘Eeep!’ She instinctively slammed her forearm against her boobs, cupped her pubic strip with her hand and stood there with her mouth hanging open, a deep red flush covering every inch of her body.

Help, help, help, help, help…

What to do…? What to do…? What to do…?

Seeing the corner of the loose duvet draped over the corner of the bed, she yanked it up and bailed underneath it, only taking another breath when she knew that every inch of her body was covered. Of course, she could still feel the long, long length of him—they were only separated by the sheet—but at least he couldn’t see her!

Dear Lord, who was he? She was going to kill Poppy, slowly and with an evil smile on her face.

Tori felt fresh air slide in under the duvet and knew that he’d lifted it up to look at her. She turned her face into the mattress and gnawed the bottom of her lip.

‘Hey there…’

Ooh, he had the nicest voice. Deep, mellow, like an aged whisky on a freezing winter’s night.

‘Want to come out from under there so that I’m not talking to your—admittedly gorgeous—tortoiseshell head?’

Tortoiseshell? Say what? Tori frowned while her brain turned over his words. Huh, he must mean her hair and the various shades of colour. Browns, reds, blondes…tortoiseshell. Dave, her hairdresser, would love that description.

Okay, so not the point.

Tori pulled her face out of the mattress, breathed deep and lifted her eyes and found herself looking up at a bigger, broader and—obviously—hairier chest than hers. He had just the right amount, she thought, a perfect black T that dusted his pecs and drifted into a luscious line that flowed over a stone-hard A-pack. The sheet covered his hips and she managed to contain her sigh of disappointment. Her eyes ambled upward again, noticing a crescent-shaped scar on his lower rib, the flat masculine nipples, muscled shoulders, thick arms, an angular jaw covered in black stubble, a wide mouth tipped up in amusement and eyes the colour of…

‘British racing green,’ she murmured, the words sliding out of her mouth.

‘Excuse me?’

She wanted to wave her hand but instead she held the duvet to her chest. ‘Your eyes, they are the exact shade known as British racing green,’ she said, blushing and ducking her head into the mattress again. She sounded like such a twit; she’d snuck into his bed—naked—and she was wittering on about his eyes.

They were beautiful but…really?

Oh, fudge. Her face flared and she hoped he didn’t notice. There was only one way to get out of this situation and that was to brazen her way through it. She wasn’t in PR for nothing, she decided, and had plenty of practice.

Taking all her courage in both hands, Tori kept the duvet firmly in place and wiggled her way up so that she was sitting upright, the duvet tucked under her arms.

‘Hello,’ he said, his mobile mouth quirking up in a half-smile.

‘Um…hi.’ Tori pushed her hair out of her face and straightened her shoulders. ‘Sorry about this.’

‘I got to see a gorgeous naked girl. No need to apologise.’

Ignoring the flare of heat that she knew was still staining her cheekbones, Tori pushed her hand through her hair and smiled her patented I’m-a-girl-of-the-world smile. He didn’t need to know that she was feeling anything but and her spirit was, well, not broken…cracked, dented, bruised? Bruised. That was the perfect word for how she was feeling…along with battered, drained and a healthy dose of smarting.

But since she had many years of practice of hiding her feelings she just kept that stupid smile on her face and carried on bluffing. ‘So, I guess the question is, who are you and what are you doing in Iz’s bed?’

‘Matt Cross and I’m renting the room for the month while Isaac is away. And that raises the question, what are you doing in Izzy’s, Isaac’s, temporarily my bed?’

‘I heard there was a good-looking guy in it and thought I’d check you out.’ Tori regretted the words before they even left her mouth.

‘If that was true then you wouldn’t have spent the first five minutes burrowing under the covers whimpering with embarrassment,’ Matt calmly stated.

So the guy wasn’t afraid to call BS. Good to know.

‘So, give me another explanation,’ Matt asked, after bunching up a pillow and placing it between his head and Iz’s iron headboard.

‘I’ve just had a really bad day and I wanted a decent night’s sleep. The bed in the boxroom is a torture device and I knew that Isaac was away so here I am.’

‘Here you are,’ Matt agreed. ‘So, I’m presuming you’re Tori of the bad boyfriend and the Frantic Fairy story of earlier?’

‘How on earth do you know about that?’ Tori demanded.

‘I was in the hall when you were concocting the story for Izzy and Poppy. That has got to hurt like hell.’

Concocting? That was an interesting, very truthful, turn of phrase. Tori cursed silently and bit her lip. She was sitting in bed, naked, with the hottest man she’d—literally—stumbled across in her life and he knew that her boyfriend had brought home another woman for a threesome. And he was sympathising with her…