But that would be a third mistake.
And there were plenty of things she could wear right here in her wardrobe. Her hand shook as she slowly pulled open a drawer and extracted a pair of white cotton knickers and a white cotton, knee-length nightie. Her mother had embroidered tiny yellow daises around the modest neckline.
From habit she sank her face into it. It smelled of sunshine and home and a fierce shaft of nostalgia pierced her right through the heart. For a moment she wished she was back there. Where things were simple.
Where Adam couldn’t possibly be in her bed.
No matter how many times she’d fantasised about waking up with him, in her childhood bedroom, unchanged since she’d been seven years old, and her desires had been as innocent as Black Beauty wallpaper.
There was nothing innocent about her desires now.
She sighed inwardly as she shut the drawer carefully and then reached for her deodorant. Her still trembling fingers fumbled it and it thunked against the shelf. She made a grab for it as it rolled off the edge but it was already falling. It landed on the polished hardwood floor at her feet with a crash loud enough to wake the dead.
Or the devil anyway …
Adam sat bolt upright in bed, the sheet ruching around his waist. ‘What the hell …?’
Jess opened her eyes and poked her head around the edge of the door. ‘Sorry,’ she apologised. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’
Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear.
He was utterly magnificent.
His sandy blond hair, beyond messy, somehow cornered the market on sexy. His chest and six pack were beautifully delineated. He looked like he’d just come from riding waves in Hawaii instead of another humanitarian mission.
Jess hastily averted her eyes, chiding her lack of decorum. He was a brilliant surgeon doing vital work. Not a male centrefold.
Adam frowned, his brain heavily mired in the sticky web of jet lag. He really was getting too old for continually mixing up his time zones. Too old for running away.
‘Jess?’
He blinked in case he was imagining her because this was not the Jess he remembered. Sweet Jess with the cute ponytail. Jess of the bare feet, jeans and T.
He’d never seen her with her hair all loose around her shoulders like this.
Or in nothing but a towel for that matter.
What the hell was she doing in his room? ‘What are you doing here?’
Jess swallowed as he pinned her with his lapis lazuli gaze. It was too dark to see them but she knew from detailed memory that the blue was flecked with golden highlights. He rubbed at the tantalising stubble at his jaw-line. The delicious rasping noise sent Jess’s stomach into freefall as the image of him scraping it against her belly took hold.
‘Er …’ Jess felt unaccountably nervous and hopelessly gauche in the face of his potent male virility. Which was utterly ridiculous. Adam was hardly leering at her. In fact, he was frowning at her like she was an annoying little insect that had dared to wake him up.
Instead of an almost naked, fully grown, nearly twenty-four-year-old woman.
She’d seen the way he looked at women. He was not looking at her like that. He’d never looked at her like that.
She doubted her chastity was under threat. Jess cleared her throat. ‘Ah … this is my room.’
Adam’s frown deepened as her response registered. He looked around. Too-small bed, scatter cushions all over the floor, floral sheets. Romance novel on the bedside table.
Then it all came flooding back to him. The air-con in his room deciding to choose this sweltering day to break down. One on a list of many ailments suffered by his poor, neglected house.
The repairman not being able to get here until ten. His overwhelming weariness.
Adam ran a hand through his hair as the cogs slowly started to turn. ‘I thought you were on an early today. That’s what the fridge calendar says.’
Early on in their cohabitation the girls had devised a colour-coded system to keep track of each other. With four people coming and going on shift work, it made things much easier. Her roster was in yellow.
Jess frowned, wishing his logic was as easy to follow as the flex of his biceps, the path of his fingers. ‘So you decided to … try out my bed?’
Her heart beat double-time at the illicitness of her suggestion.
Adam pressed the pads of his fingers into his eye sockets. ‘So the calendar’s wrong?’
‘No. It’s right. I was called in last night, though … I only clocked off half an hour ago.’
‘Oh …’ Adam felt his interest pique despite the heavy cloak of fatigue. ‘Anything interesting?’
Jess couldn’t believe she was having this conversation.
In her room. In a towel.
With Adam. In a sheet.
‘Liver transplant.’
‘Ah …’
Jess waited for something more forthcoming but Adam collapsed back against the mattress, his abs unfurling like flower petals, his eyes closed.
Oh, brother! He really did look centrefold material now, reclining in her bed as if he owned it.
‘Adam!’ she said, still not game enough to touch him.
Adam, already falling back into the blissful folds of sleep, prised his eye open. He raised himself slightly on bent elbows. ‘What?’ he demanded crankily.
It hadn’t been her plan to wake him up but now he was he could damn well vacate her bed. ‘Why are you in my bed?’
He watched her mouth move but it took a moment for the words to compute.
He hadn’t noticed how pink Jess’s mouth was before. Like fairy floss. Was it lipstick or natural? It was a little too dark to tell. ‘Hmm?’
Jess noticed his heavy-lidded gaze on her mouth and almost lost her train of thought. She scrambled hard to get it back again. ‘You’re. In. My. Bed.’
He hadn’t noticed how her hair flicked up at the ends like that when it was freed from its ponytail or even that it was so long. It brushed her shoulders and fell forward over well-defined collar bones.
Had it always been so blonde?
‘Ah, but, Goldilocks,’ he teased lightly, a smile spread across his full lips, ‘your bed was just right.’
Jess felt her knees go weak as the smile warmed his face, taking it from sexy-but-tired to steal-your-breath sublime. She reached for the nearby wardrobe door and held on tight.
‘Adam …’
He sighed. ‘Sorry.’
His exhausted body protested as he curled into a sitting position again.
‘The air-con in my room is on the blink. A fix-it guy is coming at ten.’ He shrugged. ‘Your room was empty. And air-conditioned. I checked the calendar. Sorry … I’m just exhausted, I guess.’
He rubbed his right eye with his hand. It felt gritty and unfocused. ‘I think I’ve been in four different time zones in the last week.’
Jess felt everything solid inside her melt to liquid. He looked completely done in. She wanted to go to him, pull him down beside her, cradle his head against her breast, stroke his hair till he slept, hush him, tell him she was there for him.
Oh, God. She still had it