He growled. “That would have been helpful in the beginning.”
She hip checked him, briefly interrupting his stride. “I help you more than enough.”
Truthfully? He kind of loved Josephine in a bad mood. “That’s true. You do.”
They tapped the hallway wall, turned, and continued, jogging in companionable silence for a few minutes. Until, “It’s the Beatles, isn’t it?”
“Nope.”
Wells groaned.
“You’re getting closer.”
“There’s that.”
“There’s also this.” She knocked on a random hotel room door and then sprinted ahead at three times the speed they’d been jogging. Leaving him in her dust. Making it look like he was the one who’d knocked. Wells boomed a laugh, but it cut off abruptly when the door Josephine had knocked on opened a few yards behind him.
“Uh . . . yes?” called an older man into the hallway.
Without turning around, Wells picked up speed.
Josephine had disappeared back into her room.
No. She wouldn’t. She would not close the door on him, leaving him out in the hallway shirtless, caught red-handed as a doorbell ditcher.
Spoiler: yes, she would.
Wells skidded to a halt outside her door and grabbed the handle, rattling it violently. Locked. “Oh. You are so wrong for this, belle.”
Her gasping laugh reached him through the door.
“Open it.”
“Son, did you knock on my door?” called the man on the other end of the hall.
“Sorry about that.” Wells gave a stilted wave. “Wrong room.”
Dude wouldn’t leave it at that. “Aren’t you that Whitaker fellow?”
Josephine was all but dying on the other side of the goddamn door. “You’ve had your fun,” he ground out, though he was also . . . smiling? “Let me in.”
The door clicked open and Wells stormed inside, letting it shut behind him while he watched Josephine huddle against the far wall of the room, face buried in her hands, shoulders shaking with mirth.
“Looks like you’re feeling better,” he remarked, wishing he could taste that laugh, feel it against his mouth.
“Much.” She scooped her phone off the bed, tapped the screen, and held it out, so Wells could see the dots sloping downward, her number beginning to come down: 267. Still high, but going in the right direction. “It’ll keep going down now that I’ve given it a kickstart.”
“I’m glad, baby.”
All right. That just . . . slipped right out.
They stared at each other for a few heavy moments, before heading for the bathroom at the same time, pausing in the doorway to search each other for objections, then going in together. Slowly. Wells pulled his shirt back on and replaced his hat while Josephine began another attempt at a ponytail.
“You know, it looks the exact same every time you do it.”
She hummed. “To the untrained male eye, maybe.”
“Give me a go.”
She paused in the act of gathering her hair, revealing that very edible neck. “You want to do my ponytail?”
“I want to do a lot of things to your ponytail.”
“What? Gross.”
Smooth, guy. “That didn’t come out the way I meant it to.” He moved to stand behind her, shaking out his hands. “I’m nervous about my first hair gig.”
“Seriously. I’ve seen you less nervous about a twenty-yard putt.”
Wells took the brush in his right hand and started pulling it through her auburn strands. At some point, he knew he needed to begin forming the tail, but holy shit, this was soothing. “How do women get anything done? I’m not exaggerating when I say I could do this for hours.”
“Throw in that ponytail comment and I think we’re working with a fetish here, Whitaker.”
Considering how it started, this morning was turning into the most fun he’d had in a really long time. Maybe even his entire life. Just being around her was . . . eighty experiences rolled into one. Relaxing, arousing, comfortable, arousing. Fun and interesting and right. And arousing. Was it a weird time to mention that he’d like to take a bite out of her neck? In fact, he was dying to untie her robe and look at her naked in the bathroom mirror, but now wasn’t the right moment. Not when she’d woken up feeling shitty.
“All right, here goes.”
Biting down on his bottom lip enough to draw blood, he used the brush to sort of urge sections of hair into his fist. When he was satisfied he’d gotten them all, he panicked, because he had no way to keep them in this perfect formation—