Married by Contract Read Online Free PDF Page B

ready right then. They’d had sex on the couch
and then against the wall in the hallway and then again in her bed.
    It had been a very good
night.
    But it was only Friday today,
and she’d have to wait until next Tuesday before they had sex again. It was
written in their contract, and she had been the one to insist on it. She could
hardly decide to change her mind now.
    The sex was supposed to be a
tension-reliever once a week. It wasn’t supposed to dominate her thoughts on
every other day of the week. She really needed to get herself together.
    Despite her mental efforts,
she kept imagining what she’d do with Nick on Tuesday. She imagined it in so
much detail that she was starting to turn herself on. Finally, she got out of
bed, threw on her workout clothes, and went to run on the treadmill. She
obviously had some extra energy to channel this morning.
    After a short warmup, she ran
herself hard, but it still didn’t get Nick off her mind. So she forced herself
to think about work. To distract herself, she even started to rehearse out loud
a tricky conversation she needed to have with her receptionist, who’d been
making personal calls and playing on her phone during work so often it was
getting to be a problem. Jenn always tried hard to correct behavior in a way
that didn’t hurt the other person’s feelings, so she tried out several
approaches aloud as she ran.
    She was feeling better—more
herself, more focused and ready for the day—when she finally got off the
treadmill and went to take a shower and get ready for work. Her mental flights
of fancy about Nick were obviously something she could control.
    At five-forty-five, she
hurried to the kitchen, still holding her jewelry and buttoning her
bronze-colored satin blouse. She liked the color and feel of the top and the
way it looked vintage and just slightly sexy paired with her brown skirt and
buff heels.
    “Hey,” she said when she saw
Nick standing in front of the coffee pot in his pajama pants and a T-shirt.
    He just grunted an answer and
didn’t turn from where he was watching the coffee fill up his mug.
    “You’re up early again.” She
randomly wondered how he could look so sexy in that old shirt and those ratty
pants. Then she remembered that she wasn’t letting her mind go down those
tempting paths.
    He just gave another grunt.
    She started pulling out the
milk, yogurt, and fruit for her smoothie. “Do you have another early stakeout?
You’ve been having a lot of those. Are they all for the same job?”
    He mumbled something that
might have been a yes.
    “What’s the matter?” she
demanded, frowning at him with the milk in her hand. He hadn’t even turned
around to face her.
    “Nothing.” He turned around then
and gave her a bland look that appeared a little cool.
    “Something’s wrong. Are you
not feeling good?”
    “I feel fine.”
    She made a face, since he was
obviously lying to her. He might not be sick, but something was definitely
bothering him. “Is your case not going well?”
    “My case is fine.”
    “Then what—”
    “Do we have to have an
interrogation first thing in the morning? Maybe I’m just tired.”
    She took a step back at his
tone. He hadn’t raised his voice, but there was a hoarse edge to it that was
impossible for her not to notice. “Are you mad at me?” She searched her mind
for something she might have done to piss him off, but she hadn’t done
anything. They’d had a friendly dinner in front of the television the night
before, and Nick had been smiling at her in that way she really liked—half
sweet and half amused. He definitely hadn’t been annoyed with her last night
when they’d gone to their separate bedrooms.
    As she was thinking, Nick
turned his back on her again to pick up his filled coffee cup. There was a
tension in his neck and shoulders she could recognize. It wasn’t like him at
all.
    She also couldn’t help but
notice that his hair—which needed trimming, as it always did—was