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Am I sorry? Regretful?

Not really. She might be the dumbest person on earth, but she’d make the same decision again.

Yep, I am the dumbest person on earth. I’ve learned nothing.

He was already awake. She could tell by his breathing.

“I can hear you thinking,” Sam said.

“I’m not thinking.”

“I can practically see the wheels turning in your head.” He shifted, propped himself on one elbow, and looked down at her; his hair was flat on one side, yet he still looked incredibly handsome. It really wasn’t fair. Her hair probably resembled a rat’s nest, plus the morning breath that no one could avoid. “So let me go first.”

Am I going to hate this?

He wore a neutral expression, from what she could tell, but to be fair, she hadn’t had a drop of caffeine, so she might be reading him wrong.

“Fine.”

“I don’t regret last night.” He said it flatly, sounding like he meant it. “I want to be clear about that before either of us gets out of this bed. If you regret it, then that’s something different. If that’s the case, I will make sure that it never happens again. We go back to working together. If you decide that you can’t do that, I’ll make sure to find another position for you in the firm at the same salary.”

“Did you rehearse that?”

Because it kind of sounded like he did. He’d sped up toward the end as if he was trying to remember all the words he’d memorized.

“Since about four thirty.”

Most men wouldn’t have admitted it, and she liked that he did. He wasn’t the typical guy that she’d dated in the past.

She sat up, pulling the sheet with her, and pushed her hair out of her face.

“I don’t regret it. I said what I said last night, and I meant every word of it. I’m not going to sit here this morning and take it back because the sun came up. I don’t do regrets, Sam. I own what I do.”

He looked relieved for about thirty seconds before being worried again.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay.”

“It’s still a problem.”

“It’s absolutely still a problem.” She almost laughed. “I answer your phone. I sit twelve feet from your door. Your sister already looks at me funny, and Frankie has known me for a week.”

“Frankie looks at everyone funny.”

“Not like that.”

Sam sat up too, and scrubbed a hand over his face. He looked amazingly sexy with the morning stubble on his jaw.

“I don’t have this solved,” he said. “I’m not going to stand here and pretend I do. There are ways to handle it. You could report to someone else. There’s a policy, and if there isn’t, I run the company, and I can write one. But I’m not doing any of it on a Tuesday morning in a hotel in Boston with a flight in four hours. We’ll figure it out. Both of us. Not me deciding and telling you.”

That was the part that got her. Not me deciding and telling you.

“I’m ordering room service. I’m ordering a lot of it,” he said. “Are you hungry?”

“Good, I’m starving.”

They ate at the little table by the window with the Garden four blocks away and out of sight. Eggs, toast, bacon for him, and a stack of fluffy pancakes for her. There was a pot of coffee that she desperately needed, and before she knew it, she’d had two cups with cream and sugar.