“You are seriously fucking with my meditation,” he said, his voice a grumbly low rumble in the dark.
Medita— Her eyes snapped open and she rolled onto her side to face him. “You meditate?”
He didn’t move. His eyes stayed closed, which gave her the opportunity to check him out—something that was especially easy because he’d stripped down to boxers and a T-shirt and slept on top of the covers while she’d been trying to fall asleep under the sheet. The man’s thighs were phenomenal. She’d never been much of a leg woman, but seeing the tree trunks Frankie stood on gave her a new appreciation. Was she a total dog for checking him out when all he was trying to do was meditate? Yeah. So what?
“Tell no one about this,” he said. “And I won’t drive off in the morning and leave you behind in this one-B-and-B town.”
She rolled her eyes at him, which for some reason was harder when she was laying on her side, because there was no way he’d do that. Frankie was a lot of things, but a total asshole wasn’t one of them.
“Tell me everything.” Because finding out the Mr. Manly Man firefighter meditated was way better than staring at the ceiling and wondering if the B and B owner had fixed the leak that had caused the brown stain or if their upstairs neighbors were going to fall through and land on their laps—and thoughts like that were why it took her forever to fall asleep. It sure wasn’t because of the man beside her.
Uh-huh, sure it’s not.
“Fallon got me started on it to help me fall asleep,” Frankie said. “Otherwise I’m up until three in the morning.”
“Even during”—she paused dramatically—“sleepovers?”
He opened his eyes and turned over then, and one side of his mouth curled in a half smile. “Is that your delicate way of asking about what happens after I fuck?”
“Past tense,” she said, her voice breathier than before, but she couldn’t help it. Their faces were only inches apart, and they were in a bed, for the love of stilettos, which meant she’d gone from just being awake to being aware and awake. “Fucked.”
His gaze dipped down to her mouth. “You’re a real hard-ass.”
Her pulse picked up, and a swarm of horny butterflies took off in her stomach. “Stop trying to avoid the question.”
He glanced up from her mouth, and she got the full force of those blue eyes of his. It didn’t matter they were in a darkened room, at that moment she would have sworn on a stack of designer shoes discovered in the 70-percent-off section of DSW that his eyes got darker as he stared at her. Then a lazy smile curled his lips—the kind that probably set girls’ panties up in flames. Not hers, of course, because he was Frankie Hartigan and she was not his type, but oh my, it was something.
“Yes, I have trouble sleeping,” he said, his voice lower, rougher than just being pulled out of his nightly meditation should have accomplished. “Even after I do dirty things to members of the opposite sex until we are both a sweaty, drained mess of satisfaction on the bed or couch or kitchen counter or hall floor or wherever it is that we got it on.”
She pictured that and her core clenched, because who wouldn’t have gotten the mother of all pornographic mental images after that?
“Usually men sack out after orgasm,” she said, letting her brain go on autopilot because somehow she’d lost total control of this conversation. “They’ve linked it to the release of a cocktail of brain chemicals and the hormone prolactin that’s released during ejaculation. So you should get at least a good post-sex nap. Of course, studies have also shown that men with lower prolactin can recover from sex faster for another go. Have you experienced that?”
He chuckled. “How do you know all this?”
“Everybody’s got to have a hobby.”
“And your hobby is sex?”
“Not really, but my dad’s a sex therapist so I grew up in a house where it was treated as just another part of life instead of something dirty or weird,” she said, her pulse still going a million miles an hour but her brain finally coming back from mental porno overload. “And yours seems to be trying to change the subject. Refractory time, how much do you need?”
“Not a lot,” he said without hesitation.
Oh, momma. She filed that information away for later jilling off fantasy time. “Well, I’m not a doctor or a scientist, but you probably have lower prolactin, so that’s why you’re not going to Snoozeville as easily after knocking boots.”
“Knocking boots?” One eyebrow went up. “What are you, a nineties R&B junkie too?”