In a couple more minutes. Tate only wanted to steal one last taste of peace, before he went.
TWELVE
WHEN LYLA AWOKE suddenly, in the most perfect cocoon of peace and safety, it seemed odd that the hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end. Stranger still, was her certainty that she’d heard something abnormal in the room.
What was it, though? A cough? A creak?
Lyla held herself as still as possible, but her heart was galloping a thousand miles per hour and her breath felt frozen in her throat.
She listened for the sound again, but only heard the hum of the air conditioning. Out in the hotel hallway, a door slammed.
And very nearby, another human being was breathing deeply—just like they’d done on the phone last night. Lyla squeezed her eyes shut and struggled not to whimper. Who was it? Who’d gotten in here?
Right behind her, the sheets rustled and a deep voice murmured. Then a heavy arm draped protectively across her stomach, pulling her back against a broad, hard chest.
A bare chest. A warm chest. From neck to toes, Lyla was surrounded by a big, brawny male, and she knew without even trying that struggling would only cinch his grip tighter.
Fear thrummed through her veins for a full minute before reality took hold. Lyla peered down at the arm and did the simple math.
Her snuggly companion had to be Tate. There was no mistaking the deliciously masculine scent enveloping her, and she’d recognize that hand, that wrist—those golden hairs on his tanned and muscular forearm—anywhere.
Even the arousal nestled against her rear seemed like typical Tate, and if he were awake, Lyla could envision him being characteristically cavalier about it.
First mystery solved, then.
Her memory of the night before returned in pieces. The one bed. Their picnic on a towel in the center of the bed, followed by them bickering over where Tate would sleep. After that, an hour of Lyla holding carefully still at the outside edge of the mattress, wide awake in the dark and listening to every sleepy sound Tate made.
And, while all that might explain Tate’s presence behind Lyla to begin with, it did not explain how they’d ended up tangled in a cozy knot come morning.
Lyla had been so careful to hide how Tate affected her up till now. How could she have screwed up so badly while asleep?
Even worse was that the fear she’d woken with didn’t seem to be going away completely. Lyla suspected it wouldn’t until she saw—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that it was her hunky bodyguard wrapped around her like a friendly vine and not her creepy fan.
In order to do that, however, Lyla was going to have to roll over. She took a deep breath for courage, then slowly began wriggling around, pivoting on her axis under the weight of that steady arm, trying not to wake the man up.
On the flip side Lyla came face to face with—huge shocker—exactly who she’d expected to: Tate Monroe. She gazed at his face in stark relief.
He really was gorgeous. Tan and sandy blond, handsome without veering into pretty.
Since he was still asleep, she let herself study him for much longer than she normally did. Tate had a tiny scar that she’d never noticed before, high on his cheekbone under his left eye. His lashes were as long as a kid’s, long dark fringes against his skin.
And his lips were…Lyla exhaled. His lips looked perfect. She wanted a kiss from those lips of his. A really good one.
Tate sighed and rolled to his back, and the arm that had been sheltering her fell casually across his stomach. He was sort-of clothed and not armed—but Lyla had to assume that his cuddling hadn’t been social in nature.
Why would it be? It wasn’t like Tate knew she was secretly lusting after him—and he probably wouldn’t be inclined to do anything about it even if he did. Lyla needed to take the flicker of disappointment she felt and shove it down deep where it couldn’t cause more trouble.
Speaking of which, if she really wanted to avoid trouble this morning, she had to get out of this bed before Tate woke up.
While she puzzled out how to accomplish that, however, her predicament got decidedly worse. Tate murmured something that sounded an awful lot like her name, and then, with an intense look of concentration on his face, the hand resting on his stomach began to drift lower.
Lyla peeked at the bulge in his gym shorts, and it looked far more pronounced than it had before. Uh-oh.
Panicking, Lyla blurted out, “Tate! Wake up!”
His eyes popped open and he turned his head, and Lyla came face-to-face with her sleepy, grinning, impossibly-devastating bodyguard.
Any remaining vestiges of her earlier unease flew clear away. The rascal.
“Good morning, Ms. Lawson,” Tate rumbled, his voice so rusty and sexy she wondered why any other man ever bothered to speak at all.
To cover up her all-hands-on-deck reaction to it, Lyla snarked, “For a soldier, you sure have trouble respecting a demilitarized zone.”
It was the best she could do given that she was waging an internal war, trying to prevent herself from pressing her whole treacherous body up against his mouth-watering frame.
Tate’s eyes registered Lyla’s proximity an instant later, and his entire demeanor changed. His morning-after face disappeared, and he wrenched himself back off that bed faster than Lyla would’ve thought possible—so fast, he might as well have been a bombing vaudeville act being yanked stage left with a cane.
“Are you okay?” he asked quickly.
Lyla nodded and glanced at the depression in the sheets he’d just vacated. Tate looked, too, and must have realized what she was wondering.
“I’m sorry. I must have fallen asleep.” He rubbed at the scruff on his jaw. “Actually, I did wake up around three, but then you kept saying you were cold, and I forgot we had those other blankets, so…”
Oh, Jesus. Sleeping Lyla was even more hung up on Tate than Awake Lyla was. This was bad.
“So…you tried to warm me up?” she guessed.
“I didn’t mean to stay that way. I’m sorry,” he mumbled, blushing mightily.
Tate’s gym shorts were riding low on his hips, and Lyla couldn’t help taking another quick peek at the drool-worthy wings of his hipbones peeking out of the waistband.
He glanced down and immediately yanked the shorts higher—and then left his hands casually linked in front of his crotch for good measure.
“Hard to teach an old dog new tricks,” he chuckled nervously.
And then Tate simply stood there, blinking down at Lyla like he expected her to do something. Abruptly, she became aware that he hadn’t been the only one crossing lines in his sleep. She herself was lying rather obviously in the dead center of the mattress, as well.
She coughed and scrambled back, standing up to face off with him once she reached her assigned side of things. Tate’s wide-eyed gaze flickered down, then came up to meet hers again. Lyla patted at her pajamas, making sure everything was where it was supposed to be.
Finally, when she was able to breathe like a normal adult, she said, “It’s okay. No harm done. But I did warn you that sharing the bed was a bad idea.”
Then she turned and began searching for the de rigueur coffee pot that had to be in the room somewhere.
“Wait. No, you didn’t. You said we should share the bed like grownups,” Tate argued. “I tried to crash on the floor, remember?”
Lyla squinted around the room. Was it a Monday? This day was starting off exactly like a goddamn Monday.
Tate relaxed from his paralysis, bent to grab a folded t-shirt off the top of his bag and pulled it on. Once his chest disappeared from view, she said a quick mental prayer of thanks, but left things vague as to whether the amen was for that too-brief view she’d gotten of Tate’s delicious pecs and abs—or for the arrival of all that preshrunk gray cotton he was now sporting.
“Have you seen the coffee pot? I could really use some caffeine,” she announced.
Lyla caught a glimpse of her hair in the mirror beh
ind the TV and wanted to groan. Hot messes had nothing on her right now, and Tate looked like a freaking underwear model. How was that fair?
He was moving around, folding up the pallet on the floor, and making the bed as neatly as if he expected the room to be inspected by a drill sergeant soon. Lyla was amused by it, but at least his neatness quirk meant that she wouldn’t end up leaving stray books or socks behind like she normally did.
“It might be over on that counter near the bathroom,” Tate said. “But I wouldn’t count on a big tea selection, Slick. This place is pretty basic.”
“God, that’s the truth.”
At least they were back on nice, safe ground now. There was absolutely no way to spin this discussion into something raunchy. And that was especially true once Lyla realized that she’d been talking to Tate from mere inches away, only moments ago—and she almost certainly had morning breath. So not sexy.
Sure enough, the brewer was where he’d indicated, but it came equipped with only a single pod of decaf hazelnut coffee and a couple of packets of powdered creamer.
“Ugh,” Lyla said, showing him.
Thankfully, she’d discovered early on this trip that Tate wasn’t only a meticulous bed-maker—he was also a rabid caffeine addict and a ferocious coffee snob.
He’d been sheepish when she’d confronted him about it, but also unapologetic. Let me tell you a little story about MREs, he’d said, and you tell me if I’m crazy.
It worked in Lyla’s favor, anyway—even though they were driving from town-to-town on the world’s strangest book tour, every morning Tate still managed to find some kind of gourmet coffee purveyor to get his fix. And, as Lyla had learned, where there was gourmet coffee, there was almost always gourmet tea, too.
Knowing he’d find a way to caffeinate them somehow, she attempted to put the one-two punch of her waking terror and subsequent temptation by Tate behind her. Instead, she focused on their ultra-polite dance around the close quarters of the hotel room, as they showered and dressed and got ready to leave for Pittsburgh.
Trying not to come into contact with her titillating bodyguard, as it turned out, did nothing to dispel his allure. Tate’s magnetic pull hung around in the air like the steam from his shower—enticingly fragrant, seductive and heavy with desire, whenever Lyla tried to breathe it in.
Thank God he was all business and didn’t feel the same way. She didn’t know how this arrangement was supposed to work if he did.
TATE GRABBED HER arm just as they were getting ready to leave and upended everything.
“Lyla, listen…” he sighed, looking conflicted. “I’m not a professional bodyguard, you know? I’m just a guy. I’m doing my best to look out for you, but…I don’t really know how to avoid crossing some lines.” He looked down in consternation. “I feel like I’m supposed to reassure you right now that that—” he gestured at the pristine bed behind him, “—will never happen again.”
Lyla swallowed, but it did nothing to ease her abruptly dry throat. “Do you want to make that promise?”
Tate shook his head. “Actually, no. I don’t,” he admitted softly.
“Then don’t.” Lyla’s heart jumped around in her chest like an overexcited squirrel.
“And you’re okay with that?”
“Yeah.” And then some.
“You’re sure?”
“Tate.”
“Okay, okay. It’s just—I keep wondering what on earth Red could’ve been thinking, sticking us together like this. He knows me, and presumably, he knows you.” Tate frowned a bit, then tacked on, “But I hope to hell he doesn’t know you as well as he knows me.”
Lyla laughed, “Trust me, he doesn’t.”
“He had to be crazy to think nothing was going to happen between us.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t think that. Maybe this was all one big fix-up,” Lyla shrugged.
Tate growled, “Swear to God, if I find out that fucker made up this whole stalker thing, I am going to murder him, bring him back to life, then murder him again.”
“Tate, Red would never—not in a million years—do something like that. Come on.”
“You’re probably right.” He didn’t look convinced, but he did relent. “Let’s get out of here, sweet cheeks, and find you some English Breakfast before you turn into a toad.”
“I think you have it backward. I’m a toad before the tea. After it, I turn sweet and kind and lovely.”
Tate winked at her. “If you say so.”
“Speaking of toads,” she muttered, grabbing the handle of her suitcase and rolling it into the hall, “Just because we’ve established a détente doesn’t mean you can start calling me things like sweet cheeks. I was barely okay with sweetheart.”
“What if I only do it after you’ve had caffeine?”
“No.”
“Only in private?”
“No.”
“Only in bed?” he grinned.
“Tate! For crying out loud!”
He only laughed, pecked Lyla on the cheek, and hoisted the rest of their bags to follow her out.
FOR THE NEXT hour on the road, Tate was more fidgety than Lyla had ever seen him. He kept pulling on the brim of his baseball hat, readjusting the truck’s sunshade, and holding up one hand to block the sun’s glare. He’d shift in his seat, then do it all over again.
To make matters worse, traffic was terrible on their way out of Baltimore, and Lyla didn’t know how long they’d have to plow through it before things eased up. She was a little worried she was going to be late for the first book club meeting she had scheduled later that morning.
“You know,” she said to Tate after a while. “Working from home sure has its perks. I forget what rush hour looks like most of the time.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. I should’ve thought about this when we were deciding what time to—”
Tate braked suddenly and honked at a white sedan that had cut him off. “Dude, seriously?” he griped.
After several more minutes of stop-and-go, Lyla wondered, “Do you think we’ll be late getting to Pittsburgh? I should call those ladies and give them a heads-up, if so.”
Tate squinted at her. “I wouldn’t worry about it just yet. Unless we hit crazy construction or something, we should be good to go once we reach the Pennsylvania turnpike. We can make up time then.”
Lyla watched him carefully weave the big SUV in and out of the cars. He’d insisted on taking the wheel today, as he normally did, and despite his obvious discomfort, Tate’s driving skills were exemplary.
It just seemed like the bright sun was torturing his eyes. Lyla abruptly remembered Red asking Tate about it, back in that first meeting.
“Hey, Tate?” she asked. “Is the glare bugging you right now?”
“Yeah, a little,” he admitted. “But it’s okay. Pretty soon the sun will be high enough in the sky for it not to matter.”
Lyla checked her watch. It was still really early—no wonder Tate didn’t sound convinced.
“Where are your sunglasses?” she wondered. “You want me to find them for you?”
Tate’s neck turned red. “Broke ’em by accident last night. I’ll grab some more at a gas station or someplace, once we’re out of this mess.”
“You can borrow mine until then.”
Lyla fished around in her purse until she found her sunglasses—her big, black, Hollywood-starlet-sized sunglasses. Tate would never accept them, but she held them out anyway.
He glanced over three times before he finally chuckled, turned his hat backward, and grabbed for the shades.
“All right, Slick, you win. Hand them over. And no photos, you got it?”
“Cross my heart.”
Tate put them on, and the total effect was…comical, to say the least. But once the glasses were in place, the tension left his shoulders bit by bit, and his body relaxed back into the seat. Soon, he was turning on the radio and tapping his fingers along with the music.
Lyla managed to st
ifle her giggles, but she couldn’t stop staring at the silly picture he presented. Tate noticed, of course.
“God. Red and Luca would have a field day if they could see me now,” he muttered.
“Somehow, I think you’d have it coming to you.”
“Lyla,” Tate growled through his grin, “We will never speak of this again. You hear me?”
“Whatever you say, Marilyn. My lips are sealed.”
He blew her a loud kiss, and Lyla smiled so hard her cheeks hurt.
THIRTEEN
AT THE FIRST rest stop they came to, Tate bought three pairs of manly shades from a tourist cart out front, cut the plastic ties off with the utility knife he had in his pocket, and returned Lyla’s ridiculous oversized sunglasses to her—hopefully forever.
He stashed one of the spares in the center console of the truck, and the other in a special holder than unfolded from the ceiling of the SUV. He hadn’t even known that was there before Lyla discovered it for him.
She ran in to use the ladies’ room, and Tate walked around the truck, kicking tires and making sure everything still looked good to go.
By the time she got back, however, his butt was parked on the driver’s seat and Tate was clutching his head in his hands, while the world looped sickeningly around his skull.
Fuck, it’d come on fast this time.
“Tate?”
He cracked an eye and saw Lyla’s shoes come into view through his fingers.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Got a little light-headed for a minute,” he explained. “Probably because I slept like shit last night.” The simple act of speaking made him want to toss his cookies.
Tate slept like crap most nights, but the bigger problem was that he was not supposed to take his meds on an empty stomach. And even though he’d put those freaking protein shakes in the hotel fridge last night, they’d been warm and gross this morning and he’d had to toss them out.
He’d sacrificed the three sports bars to Lyla because she’d been hungry, and he wasn’t a goddamn Neanderthal who would keep them for himself. She didn’t need to know the extent of the sacrifice, however.
The Hero Was Handsome (Triple Threat Book 3) Page 11
