Jordan found Briana early the following morning, sleeping on the a sofa in the rec room, in the basement of the precinct. Curled up in a blanket, her blonde hair covered most of her face, but he could tell nevertheless that she was asleep. He sat down next to her on the very edge of the sofa and very gently brushed a few strands of hair out of her face.
Briana awoke instantly. Opening her eyes, it took a while before they focused on Jordan. "What time is it?" she asked sleepily.
"Almost 7am," came his answer, upon which she closed her eyes again and pulled the blanket tight around her.
"I can sleep another three hours..." With that she just left him sitting there, ignoring him just like he usually did.
Something stirred inside of him; maybe it was anger. He was not used to being treated like nothing had happened. In fact, he was only used to treating others that way.
Jordan wanted to shrug his shoulders, get up, and leave. But for some reason he stayed where he was, looking down at Briana, feeling his face soften as he remembered making love with her. No, he corrected himself immediately. He had fucked her; it was sex, nothing more. Only in the end it had felt like more; he could not even remember ever being as gentle as he had been with her.
The peculiar turn his thoughts took scared him to no end. Nobody was supposed to break down the wall he had built around himself so carefully. But for some reason he had been disappointed and upset when he woke up an hour ago, noticing that Briana was gone. When she had gotten up after sex, he thought she would come right back, and he had drifted off to sleep.
Now he watched her sleep on that sofa, and he felt the urge to hold her. He hadn't been fair to her. Briana knew enough about him to understand that he was not willing to give anything. Hell, he had treated her badly ever since she had started working with him, just so that she would not even entertain the idea of being attracted to him. He shook his head at the thought of pushing her away in the very beginning, hurting her on purpose to stop her right in the tracks, wiping that open smile off her face that he knew could get to him if he did not stop her.
Sex was not the issue. There were plenty of women he could find attractive and go to bed with without ever slipping into the twilight zone of a relationship. But Briana did not belong to that group of women. Briana was attractive. From the very beginning he had liked her long curly hair and her bright green eyes. Her laugh was intoxicating and her casual style refreshing. Heck, he would have liked to go to bed with her the very first day.
But Briana also had character. It wasn't just the color of her eyes that were startling. She had a way of looking at people and seeing beyond the obvious. She might have been blonde, but she did not fit into any cliche. She was smart, resolute, and tenacious. And Jordan knew from the very beginning that he had better watch out.
Jordan had heard about Briana breaking up with her lawyer lover of two years because the idiot had had an affair with his secretary. He also knew that Briana had moved out of their apartment right away and therefore did not have a place to stay. Without thinking, a couple of days ago, he had offered her to stay at his place, wondering later if he had become insane, especially after giving her a key to his apartment. And when he had found her in his bed last night, he could not help but being angry at her for being attracted to her despite all his good intentions of detachment.