Since this was getting more interesting-and for damn sure, more distracting than a fistful of problems-Harm hunkered down on his haunches. “I suspect Ivan would be happier than a kid in a candy store to discover you were up here alone.”

“Yeah, there’s that issue, too.” She sighed. “This is the thing. I’m pretty seriously claustrophobic. Have been ever since going through that fire when I was a kid. None of my sisters can stand feeling trapped or locked in either, but I seem to have it the worst.” She paused. “On the other hand, I’m not the only one wandering around in the middle of the night. So what’s your excuse?”

“My excuse is that I seem to have given up sleeping. To add insult to injury, the less sleep I have, the stupider I get. So that’s pissed me off even more.”

“Ah, I’ll run for the hills then. I wouldn’t want to risk pissing off a hotsy-totsy corporate magnate.”

“I’m not a corporate magnate.”

“Well, you’re certainly crabby, whatever label you want to call yourself.”

His gaze narrowed with interest. “So why aren’t you running away?”

“You think I should?”

“Everybody else does.” It was her own doing that he ended up beside her. He could have stayed in that hunched position indefinitely. She was the one who lifted the blankets and unrolled a few extra feet of tarp. The tarp had obviously protected her from the damp deck, which she was willing to extend to him, as well.

Her kindness was definitely appreciated, because damn, it was cold up there. Only being half-prone next to her immediately provoked the idea of kissing her.

That idea had been growing on him since, oh, around a second after laying eyes on her. It’d be funny if it weren’t so incomprehensible. Inheriting the business had sliced his sex drive in half-or that’s what he’d been trying to tell himself. Since his uncle had died, he’d been hurling himself around the country nonstop, thrown into legal and ethical situations that just kept getting deeper and darker, so obviously, there’d been no time to meet a woman or form a relationship. Harm had rationalized for some time that all the stress had obliterated his sexual needs.