Ian’s gaze locked with hers and her breath caught. There was just something in the look in his eyes, the demand and the promise, that had her entire body humming with need. This was bad. This was so very, very bad. And she’d never wanted anything more. The reaction was so outsized, so out of character that the shock of it was a bucket of ice water tossed onto the fire that always seemed to sizzle to life around Ian.

“So you two got stuck in that cabin together for a week?” Alex asked, his voice sounding distant.

Unable to look away from Ian, she replied, “Three days.”

“Uh-huh. And the cabin lost power?”

“Yeah,” Ian said, the word coming out more like one of his sexy cabin grunts than English.

“Had to find a way to stay warm, huh?”

She flushed. “There was a fireplace.”

One that was warm enough to lie in front of naked for hours. Or was that because of Ian? Damn. She was scared the answer was the second one.

“Any chance there was a bear rug in front of it?” Alex looked from her to Ian, his grin getting bigger with each second. “I see.”

“You see nothing,” Ian said, his tone as harsh as his hold on Freya was gentle.

“You’re right,” Alex said. “It’s not at all what I was thinking. You two. Alone. A cabin. Sex pheromones flying through the air, rubbing up against each other.”

“Nothing happened,” Shelby said, surprised she wasn’t hit by a lightning bolt on the spot for that lie.

“Then maybe it should have,” Alex said. “Unleashing all this pent-up attraction upon unsuspecting folks like myself in the middle of a tin can shooting through the sky seems a mite dangerous.”

“You’re imagining things,” Ian said.

God knew she was right now, and pretty much all of them involved being naked.

“I am?” Alex laughed. “Fine. Whatever you two say. I won’t say another word about it.”

With that, the other man crossed his arms over his navy dress shirt, leaned his head against the headrest, and closed his eyes.

Relief swept through Shelby from her boots up her pleather pants to the dressy top she’d ironed this morning so she’d fit in with Coach’s requirement that everyone dress up during road trips to the tips of her multi-pierced ears. The last thing she needed now that she was officially on the job was to have someone figure out that she and Ian had had sex. On a bearskin rug. In front of a roaring fire.

Oh God. She was a hot mess, and she could only think of one way to make it through this cross-country flight. She closed her eyes and pretended to fall asleep. Immediately. She considered fake snoring but decided against it.