He pulled out his phone for the first time in hours and indeed found her unread text. “Shit,” he said again.

“You’re a jackass, you know that?”

Aidan scrubbed a hand down his face. Lily hadn’t even been back in town twenty-four hours, and she was already screwing with his head. As much as he wanted to get laid, all he could see were her moss-green eyes when he closed his own. “I’m sorry, Shelly.”

She looked shocked. “Good-bye sorry, you mean?”

He couldn’t believe he was going to do this, turn away a sure thing with no strings attached. “Yeah. This isn’t working for me.”

Shelly paused. “Let me get this straight—all the casual, easy sex isn’t working out for you?”

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

She was looking and sounding pissy now. “Your job is your life, Aidan, and I get that. You’ve said you don’t have time for a real relationship, and I get that too. I don’t want one either. But I do want honesty. I deserve that much.”

She was right about his job being his life. But he also did want a real relationship … someday. And though they were compatible in a lot of ways, Shelly wasn’t the one he wanted a relationship with.

Just as he wasn’t the one for her either.

“You do deserve honesty,” he said. “And okay, yeah, this is about more than my work, but I don’t know what exactly it is. That’s the truth,” he said when she gave him a skeptical look.

She stared at him, the temper still clear in her eyes. “You’re funny and hot and magic in bed, but I don’t play second fiddle, Aidan. Not even for you.” She slipped into her sandals and headed toward the door. “You’re going to miss me, you know.”

But when she was gone and he looked at his empty bed, he felt nothing but a little ping of relief that he could have the entire thing to himself.

Chapter 7

The next day, Lily woke up early because her toes were missing. When she cleared the cobwebs from her brain, she realized she was still in possession of ten toes—they were just frozen. Overnight, the temps had dropped, and she could in fact see her own breath inside her apartment.

Damn. It’d been a long time since she’d experienced the fifty-degree drop between night and day that Colorado called normal. Huddling under the covers, she wished for a magic blanket warmer. Or a really warm man.

The image that came to her wasn’t her usual fantasy of Channing Tatum and Chris Hemsworth.

It was even more embarrassing.

Aidan. Naked. Heated. Willing and able to share that heat …

Gah.