Marleigh
Ivaguely noticed Jordan roaring with laughter, but I was too stunned by my reaction to my new roommate to pay him any attention. I hadn’t thought much about what Jordan’s best friend would look like when Wrenley told me he was moving in for two weeks. The last thing I expected was to be wildly attracted to the guy.
My fingers itched to run through his thick red hair, and I could picture myself staring into his deep green eyes for hours on end. He was almost a full foot taller than me, and with all those lean muscles, it would be so easy for him to pick me up to move me wherever he wanted. Like in a bed. With him.
I shook my head, trying to clear the images of the two of us tangled up together that were running through my mind. Judging by the heat in his green orbs, I figured he might have been experiencing something similar.
Stretching his long arm toward me, he extended his hand. When my palm slid against his, I felt a spark jump from him to me. “Hey, Marleigh. I’m Clay Hensen. Your…new roommate.”
I wondered why he paused like that, but Jordan interrupted my train of thought when he asked, “You good with showing him the place?”
I dragged my gaze away from the hottest man I’d ever seen to meet Jordan’s eyes. “Pardon?”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He dropped the bags and boxes he was carrying and clapped Clay on the back. “I think it’s safe to say that the debt is more than paid in full. You owe me now.”
When he turned to stride away, my focus snapped back to Clay. “I don’t know Jordan very well, but that seemed weird.”
“Don’t worry about him,” he reassured me with a smile that made him even more attractive. “We’ve been friends for a long time, so it sometimes sounds like we’re speaking in code because of all our inside jokes. I’m sure it’s the same for you and Wrenley, right?”
“I guess so,” I agreed, still feeling like I was missing something that had just happened.
“And he was a little grumpy because I made him help me bring my shit over,” he explained.
“Oh! Um…do you want any help with your stuff since Jordan just bailed on you?” I offered.
“Nope.” He flashed me a sexy grin as he lifted the duffel he was carrying in his right hand, his biceps bulging. “All I need you to do is show me where you want me.”
I swallowed hard to keep myself from blurting out that anywhere with a flat surface would do.
“Sure, I can do that,” I croaked. Taking a deep, calming breath, I led him to Wrenley’s bedroom, right next door to mine. My gaze slid toward the king-sized bed centered against the wall shared with my room. When we moved into the apartment, my best friend and I had joked about how we could talk through that wall when we were feeling too lazy to get out of bed.
Although we had placed mine in a similar position, we’d never actually tested our theory about how easy it would be to hold a conversation from our rooms. But now that I knew I’d be sharing that wall with Clay, I couldn’t stop thinking about what I might be able to hear. Would he make sounds while he was sleeping? Or doing…other things that men might do to release tension when they were alone in bed?
All I did was stand and watch Clay as he brought his stuff in from the hallway, but my cheeks were bright red by the time he was done. Not from exertion. It was purely hormonal. And my reaction only intensified when he turned to me and said, “There, all finished.”
His words held no sexual innuendo, but that didn’t stop my overactive imagination—something I’d never struggled with until meeting Clay, a man who was almost a decade older than me—from picturing him finishing me off…in a very sexual way. “Um, did you want me to, um…show you the rest of the place?”
With twelve hundred square feet, the apartment was big by New York City standards, where the average size was under nine hundred. But the space felt a whole lot smaller with Clay in it. There was something larger than life about him. Or at least my attraction to him felt huge, which was alarming since we’d only met five minutes ago.
“That would be great.”
I turned away, and he settled his hand against my lower back. A shiver raced up my spine as his palm slid against me, unlike anything I had ever felt before. I wanted to lean into his touch, but I forced myself to move forward. He followed closely behind as I walked across the hall and nudged the door midway between our rooms open.
“This is the bathroom.” I glanced over my shoulder and flashed him a weak smile. “Sorry, but there’s only one, so we’ll have to share.”
He crowded against my back to peer over my head. “No worries. It looks big enough for us both.”
I assumed he was talking about us using the space at different times, but my brain went straight to us taking a shower together. With hot water beating down on our naked bodies as we writhed against each other.
Biting my bottom lip to hold back a moan, I barely resisted the urge to fan myself with my hand before I turned toward Clay. “It’ll probably be easier to share with you since I’m sure you have way less toiletries than Wrenley. I’ll pack up her stuff so it isn’t in our way.”
“If you box it all up, I’ll haul everything to the stadium for my next workout so Jordan can take it home,” he offered.
“Thanks,” I murmured, stepping farther into the hall and pointing over my shoulder. “That’s my room.”
He moved past me to open my door and peek inside. His eyes were simmering when he turned back to me and murmured, “You must really like pillows.”
The heat in my cheeks deepened to the point where they felt as though they were on fire. Most of my pillows were just decorative, and I tossed them onto the floor when I went to sleep. But I kept plenty of them in bed with me, and my libido amped up even higher at the thought of me throwing all of them with the others to make room for Clay’s big body.