Other than the fact that she seemed a little frazzled and distracted, he couldn’t see anything that would demand her urgently pounding on his front door. He also registered that he wasn’t the only one doing a body scan. Her brown eyes skimmed over his bare shoulders and unclothed torso to the towel before they came back up to his, and she frowned.

“Do you always answer the door in a towel?” she asked, her voice testy.

“I wasn’t planning to answer it at all, but I started to get curious about who in my social circle was part woodpecker.” He smiled. She did not.

“Are you in love with Elizabeth?”

His smile dropped. “What? No. You know that.”

She frowned and didn’t look the least bit mollified. “I guess I do. But, Clarke, you can’t just wander around in a towel after I move in here,” she said. “There will be rules. You have to be fully dressed at all times. Same rules apply if you move into my place, if that’s what we decide to do. And that’s another thing, shouldn’t we know by now? Whose house we’re moving into? Shouldn’t we know how we’re going to deal with the fact that you apparently wander around in towels?”

His eyebrows lifted at her slightly incoherent babbling.

“I don’t just wander around in towels, Audrey. I just happened to be wearing a towel when I opened the door for my best friend who’s forgotten her key and her cell phone, because I just took a shower.”

She continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “And what about your women? What if they wander around in a towel, and you forget to mention that you’ve got a wife, except not a real one, just one who’s there for companionship? Which, by the way, has gotten me thinking, do we even need to be married for that? If we’re just doing this because we’re lonely, because we enjoy spending time together, why don’t we just move in together? We can be roommates without all the legal mess. Right?”

She finally paused to catch her breath, and as she looked up at him, it was the trust in her eyes that nearly undid him, the trust she’d always had in him to have all the answers, to do all the right things, to protect her.

He reached out and rubbed his hands reassuringly over her upper arms, giving her a quick grin. “Hey. What’s bringing this on? If you’re having second thoughts, you know you can just tell me, right? You don’t have to worry about there being hurt feelings—”

“Shouldn’t there be, though?” she burst out. “Shouldn’t there be feelings in a marriage?”

“Of course there are feelings,” he said, his hands stilling. “You know how much I care about you.”