Teaser Tuesday!

His voice roughened. “You should go to bed.”

Her head moved slowly against the cushions, back and forth. No. “I’m too excited to sleep.”

He was perilously close to too excited himself. Damn, but she was pretty. Under her turquoise tank top, her breasts rose and fell. Her lashes fanned against her cheeks. The necessity of keeping their voices down and the lights low wrapped them in intimacy.

If she didn’t hustle back into her own bedroom where she belonged, he was going to sink down on that soft couch and dive into her like a swimmer into water. Conn rocked on his heels, stuffing his hands into his pockets. Right now, he was trying real hard to remember he had scruples about things like that. He wasn’t proud of the idea that he would take advantage of his role as Val’s protector to jump her bones.

To shock himself back to sanity, to scare her back to her room, he said deliberately, “I could help you to sleep.”

She chuckled. “You can cut the Big Bad Wolf routine, MacNeill. It won’t work.”

He was irritated. Curious. “Why not?”

“Because you’re being nice tonight,” she explained, still without opening her eyes. “I don’t buy it.”

Nice. Shit.

He tried to remember the last time a woman had accused him of being nice. Nothing came to mind. Patrick was decent. Sean was charming. Conn had been called smooth and, occasionally, generous. Never nice.

“Well, that puts me in my place,” he said acerbically.

She chuckled again, almost asleep. Her hair streamed over the overstuffed pillows and rolled arm of the couch. She was spread out like a banquet for his starved senses. He wanted to thread his fingers through that heavy fall of hair, to nuzzle the hollow just below her ear, to glut himself on the scent and the taste and the texture of her.

She sighed, and his breathing jammed, doing funny things to the rhythm of his heart.

If he had half the brains his brothers credited him with, he’d get the hell out of Dodge.

Instead, he eased down beside her, stretching one arm along the back of the couch. The soft cushions gave beneath him. She shifted as the springs adjusted to their relative weights. Her head rolled against his shoulder. She kept it there.

Hunger leaped inside him.

She rubbed her cheek against his shirt. “This is nice.”

Conn groaned silently. That word again. He ordered his libido back into its cage and slammed the door shut. And it was...well, not satisfying, precisely, but pleasant, he discovered, to sit in the half light with Val’s head resting on his shoulder and her hair tickling his jaw.

Even...nice.

From THE COMEBACK OF CONN MACNEILL, now on Nook and Kindle