RUNAWAY by Christie Ridgway Page A

down to pick up the lamp and replace it on the table. His flannel robe was belted around her waist and its hem hit her shins. He breathed a sigh of relief, and then another when she straightened. The plaid lapels criss-crossed at her throat, effectively covering her from neck to nearly toes.
    He downed half the water in one chug and then set the glass on the bedside table. “Thanks. And again, sorry to have disturbed you.”
    She stared down at him. “You’re not going to be able to get back to sleep, are you?”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “But it does matter.” She sat on the edge of hismattress. “You need a lot of rest because your body’s been traumatized, not to mention your psyche—”
    “Psyche?” he scoffed. “I’m a man, sweetheart. I don’t have a psyche.”
    She didn’t even pretend to find him funny. “Your mind, then. When a friend dies like that—”
    Something hot rose from his belly like a red tide. “I told you to stay out of my head, Izzy.” Yeah, he was physically weakened, not to mention impotent against the damn dreams and the dark moods that were blanketing him, but he didn’t want her pecking at his broken pieces. “Just go away.”
    He knew he sounded like an abrupt, ungrateful SOB again. Just what he was.
    With only the light from the hall filtering into the room, he couldn’t read her expression. Her body language said “stubbornly staying,” as she didn’t move her cute little butt an inch. “How about a bedtime story?”
    “For God’s sake,” he ground out.
    “No, really. Let me tell you about Melvil Dewey. Did you know he was instrumental in siting the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York?”
    “Never knew, never cared,” Owen answered.
    His dismissal didn’t dismiss her. For a second he’d thought he’d won his solitude, because she stood up. But then she made her way around the king-size mattress to the other side of the bed. Under his astounded gaze, she propped the pillow against theheadboard and stretched out beside him. There was a healthy thirty inches or so between them, but hell, they were sharing the same bed!
    “Well, then this should have you snoring in no time,” she continued calmly, as she crossed her legs at the ankles. “While Melvil was working in the library at Amherst, he started designing a hierarchical system for the books that would classify all human knowledge. He came up with the decimal-based scheme. There are ten top-tier or ‘main’ classes that are divided into ten subordinate sections. Each one of those one hundred subordinate topics are broken into ten more divisions. That’s a thousand sections that can be referred to by an integer. And each of these numbers can be infinitely divided again using fractional numbers. Now…”
    He tuned her out then, though the fact was his attention had begun to wander when she’d said “decimal-based scheme.” Not that he had anything against numbers. But with her so close, her slender figure flat against the same mattress that supported him, he could only think of her body. He could only think of that slip of nightwear she wore beneath his utilitarian robe. It was apricot colored, he thought, which reminded him of Bryce’s chocolate-and-apricot fairy, which only made him think of all the flavors of Isabella Cavaletti. The ones he knew, and the ones he’d yet to sample.
    The disturbing nightmare, his frustration over hisphysical condition and her irritating stubbornness over not leaving him alone with his sleeplessness, all of those were receding as Izzy took over the forefront of his focus. He could smell a faint note of her perfume, he could sense the warmth of her skin just a few inches away, he could hear her words wash over him, which made his mind jump to her mouth and the way it felt against his. Pillowy soft, with that wet heat inside.
    Oh, God. That made him think of Izzy’s other hot, wet places. His erection hardened to full arousal.
    One wrist was in a cast, and he