CHAPTER 3
“This is the living room,” Brynn waved her hand, spokesmodel style, as she gave the same tour she’d given a couple dozen times to tourists renting out the apartment.
“And this is a Murphy bed in case you have company.” She lifted her arm and tugged on the wall unit.
I can’t believe he saw me naked. I can’t believe he saw me naked. I can’t believe he saw me naked.
That sentence was playing over and over in her mind as she struggled to ignore the fluttering in her stomach. She tried telling herself that the uneasiness she was experiencing was the leftover macaroni and cheese that she’d warmed up for lunch earlier, but she knew better. Her butterflies were her body’s response to the man that was making the cozy apartment feel much smaller than it ever had before.
She pushed the bed back up into the wall and walked across the room and through the door that was directly across from it. Reaching up, she tugged on the string that hung from the ceiling fan and light to illuminate the tiny room.
“And this is the bedroom.”
A queen size patchwork quilt covered the bed that sat in the corner of the room. It had been plenty big enough for her, but thinking of Axel in it made it look like a twin bed.
Axel’s presence was more than just his impressive height and muscular frame. He filled the room with an overwhelming dose of testosterone that had her body shaking like she was a 1950s teenage girl seeing Elvis for the first time.
“Over there is the bathroom.” Her voice had a slight quiver in it as she motioned to the open door next to the antique dresser across the room.
She scooted past Axel and her breath hitched as she walked into the kitchen waving her hand over the two-person dining table that sat along the wall. “And conveniently you have a dining room and kitchen in one. It’s very handy if you need to grab a soda during dinner,” she joked, miming a reach for the fridge while she stood near the table.
Her nervous laughter at her not-so-clever joke filled the small space as she headed back into the front room.
“And that’s the grand tour.” She held her arms out as she spun in a circle.
When she stopped, she was facing him. Her head had to tilt up to meet his gaze and for the first time she understood the phrase “bedroom eyes.” She’d read the term in her books more times than she could count, but she’d never had a frame of reference for what that looked like.
Now she did.
And those bedroom eyes had seen her naked.
I can’t believe he saw me naked. I can’t believe he saw me naked. I can’t believe he saw me naked.
She inhaled slowly, trying to calm her frazzled brain. When she did she was overwhelmed with his very male scent.
She tried to remember the last time she’d had this kind of a reaction to a man. She’d had a couple of crushes as a teen, but she didn’t remember any physical symptoms.
This was the kind of over-the-top response that happened to the people in her books. Not in real life. She’d never experienced this in real life.
Maybe it was because he’d seen her naked. Maybe there was some kind of instant intimacy that had formed.
Oh lord. He’d seen her naked. It’d been years since a man had seen her naked.
It’s not a big deal, she assured herself.
Her mom had always said that Brynn reminded her of Lucy from I Love Lucy. Not just because she was a redhead, but also because she was prone to finding herself in embarrassing situations, although unlike the character, they were not of her own making.
She’d embraced her proclivity to humiliation even going so far as to name her pug after the iconic television character. Her pug, who earlier had contributed to her most embarrassing situation to date when she pulled off her robe in front of the man that had flipped every switch in her body to on.
So yeah, she was just going to chalk it up as another “Lucy moment.”
She could feel her cheeks warming at the memory and knew that her face was going to turn bright red if she didn’t make a quick exit. “Right, so, here’s the key.”
Brynn lifted the ring in her right hand and the key and crystal dangled in front of her before slipping from her fingers. She automatically reached out to grab them with her left hand at the same time that Axel took a step and reached out to do the same. Their simultaneous motions ended up with her hand cupping him.
Between his legs.
They both froze as her eyes shot to his.