Page 8 of Researching the Pole

Chapter 4

My stomach dropped.

Grant read over my shoulder, then quietly reached past me to open the door. Inside, he grabbed his duffel bag. “I’m going to change.” He disappeared into the bathroom.

The door clicked shut, and I stood frozen in the living room. It seemed I did that a lot in this room.

My brain spiraled. I’d shared beds with friends before on camping trips, at conferences. It was not comfortable, but it was fine. But usually the beds were king or queen sized. The bed in this cabin looked like a full. How would we fit without being mashed together?

Maybe I could just think of it as body heat transfer. It was godawful cold in Antarctica despite the cabin being heated. It could just be totally normal. But so far my reaction to him had been anything but. The way my heart kicked up when he looked at me. How I’d watched water run down his chest during the hosedown. The flush of heat every time he called me Doc in that low voice.

I forced myself to move, pulling out my laptop and the portable hydrophone receiver kit.

Work. I needed to focus on work. Water ran in the bathroom sink, the sound of Grant washing up. Walls were thin here. I set up the equipment on the small dining table. While I connected the cables, I was acutely aware of the water stopping, the bathroom door opening, the sound of him moving through the bedroom.

It took me an hour to finish setting the cables and finally I launched the monitoring software. Everything booted up fine and a breath of relief and exhaustion passed my lips. I slumped on the chair staring at my laptop screen. Would the seal start vocalizing in the next seven days? Would Grant be able to deploy the hydrophones accurately? Would all this work be for nothing? No one had captured male seal vocalizations this extensively before.

“Doc?”

Grant’s voice startled me from my half-doze state. I had almost fallen asleep sitting.

He was dressed in thermal nightclothes. I had seen Grant in jeans, in diving suit, in basketball shorts but never like this. In soft clothes. His big frame looked inviting instead of imposing.

He would be perfect to share body heat with, and he could be the big spoon—What! Where did that thought come from?

“I’ll…I think I’ll stay up…I need to set up some more.“

He shook his head and walked up to me. Gently he removed my hand from my keyboard and closed the lid. “C’mon. Time for you to hit the bed. You’re exhausted. You flew in today, then the long boat ride, and you went diving in below freezing temps. You need rest.”

I stared up at him helplessly.

“Should I carry you to bed, Doc?” He raised an eyebrow, that damn smirk was back.

“No!” I shot to my feet and scurried out of his reach straight to the bedroom.

He chuckled and followed me inside. I came back from the bathroom after brushing and changing into my thermal pajamas—navy blue with little white seals printed all over them. My sister had given them to me as a joke when I’d told her about the Antarctica assignment. That was when I didn’t know I would be sharing a bedroom with anyone. And not in my remotest dreams that anyone would have been Grant Reeves.

Grant was already in bed, propped up on one elbow. He’d pulled the thick blanket down on my side, leaving space. Waiting.

As I approached the bed awkwardly, his eyes traveled up my body slowly, then down again. They paused at my crotch.

“Cute,” he said.

Heat flooded through me. My body responded immediately, blood rushing south, and I felt myself getting hard. Right there. Standing next to the bed while Grant looked at me like that.

His gaze stayed fixed on the growing evidence for another long moment before lifting back to my face.

“I like the seals on your PJs,” he said casually. “Get in, Doc.”

My face burned. He’d seen. And now he was pretending it was about the pajamas, and I wanted to die. I climbed into the bed stiffly, keeping as close to my edge as possible. Grant pulled the thick blanket over both of us. The mattress was small enough that our shoulders touched despite my best efforts to minimize contact.

The room was filled by a silence heavier than the blanket over me. Just the sound of my breathing felt deafening—too fast, too shallow. Grant’s warmth radiated through the small space between us. I could feel every point where our bodies made contact through the layers of clothing and blanket. Shoulder. Hip. The outside of my thigh against his.

I was still hard. God, I was still hard, lying in bed next to Grant Reeves, and I couldn’t make it go away, couldn’t think about anything else.

“Remember Mr. P’s rabbit?” Grant’s voice cut through the silence, low and sleepy.

I blinked at the ceiling. “What?”