In Bed with the Bachelor (Bachelor Auction Book 5) by Megan Crane Page B

Then grinned. “You obviously never spent any time trolling the local Seattle bar scene on a given Friday night.”
    “The answer is no,” she said, resentfully. Why was she resentful? She put down her fork with a certain savagery. “Amos and I have not only never hooked up, it’s never been even the tiniest glimmer of a possibility between us.”
    “No worries if it was, though, right?” Jesse’s low voice was too dark to qualify as teasing then. And that gaze of his had gone unreadable. Moody, but unreadable. “You have an open relationship. You could theoretically have Amos at work and Terrence at home seven days a week.” His lips crooked. “But you don’t do that.”
    That danced down the back of her neck like a touch, light and worrisome, then pooled at the base of her spine. It took her a moment to pull herself back to the table, back from that little trip to their bed last night and all the things she shouldn’t have let herself say or do or feel.
    “Sometimes,” she said in a voice that sounded too obvious, too raw, “I have whole thoughts that aren’t about any man at all. Much less any kind of sex with any of them. At home or at work.”
    That crook of his lips went lethal. “Like now?”
    “Getting back to the point,” she said crisply, ignoring her competing urges to throw something at him or maybe throw herself at him, “Amos is the stereotypical geek who never spoke to a girl in his life, until he made all this money and they fell all over him .”
    “So you seem like you’d be exactly his type. Female.”
    “Amos’s tastes run to nine foot tall, one hundred pound gazelles who giggle at everything he says, do exactly what he tells them, and never, ever talk back. I’m like the annoying little sister who is and does absolutely none of those things.” She smoothed a hand over her hair, feeling the static reaction that reminded her there was a whole winter outside, and beyond that, an entire world that had nothing to do with the things this man stirred up inside of her. “Plus, he likes it when I run his company and his life and that would be tough to do if there was romantic drama between us. We’re purely platonic. We always have been.”
    Jesse eyed her. “But?”
    “But what?”
    “It sounded like there was a ‘but’ coming.”
    “Not from me,” Michaela said and it was possible, she realized, that it all came out a little bit defensive.
    Yet Jesse looked like he could listen to her forever, no matter how defensive she might or might not sound. “I’m guessing Terrence doesn’t buy that?”
    She knew she should shut this conversation down. It had never occurred to her before today how fluid and confusing betrayal was. She’d identified that having sex with Jesse Grey, while seemingly perfectly okay according to the promises Terrence and she had made each other, would actually involve a whole lot more than what she’d always imagined “casual sex” might entail. And there was no way that was good for her relationship. She might have talked around the subject last night, but that was the heart of it, wasn’t it? Terrence and she had agreed on that a long time ago—nothing that threatened their bond was allowed, but everything else was fine.
    Michaela had simply never considered how much ground everything else covered. Or how slippery the slopes were, how uneven the ground, between what was fine and what was dangerous. She hadn’t had sex with Jesse because she’d known in her heart that if she did, it would ruin her. It would ruin more than just her. It would be like a sledgehammer against all she’d held dear these last two years and the future she’d hoped to build.
    But conversations like this were water damage, there was no pretending otherwise. Drip by drip, while Jesse watched her with those unfathomably beautiful eyes of his. While she said things about her life, about Terrence, knowing full well what his take was likely to be. This wasn’t a safe space.