He frowned in concentration. “What?”
She tried again.
“Aw bum? Oh! All brown? With those big blue eyes, I expected you to be blonde. No, wait, I can see your hair now. It’s not all brown. It’s reddish, like whiskey aged in a sherry cask.”
Whiskey aged in a sherry cask? Good grief! This man knew his way around women. As if she hadn’t already guessed that!
He was talking slowly and continuously, as if he could sense the panic in her was still close to the surface, as if he had happened upon someone on the edge of a rooftop, and it was his voice that could talk them away from the edge.
He had to ruin her relishing the whiskey-aged description of her hair, by adding, “Your hair probably doesn’t usually stick out every which way, like this. It looks like you stuck your finger in a socket. Ouch! It is shooting off static, too.”
Trixie had recently had her long hair cut to a shorter length, mistakenly thinking that it would take less work. Instead, if it wasn’t tackled with a straight iron her hair looked very much like a gone-to-seed dandelion, waiting for someone to blow.
Now, her hair crackled under his touch as he unwound the tissue and batting from it.
“Electricity between us,” he said in that same mild, get-away-from-the-ledge tone of voice. Again, the light, teasing tone reminded her that he knew his way around women. So did the playful, faintly villainous wagging of the dark arrows of his brows.
But Trixie also knew he was one hundred per cent joking because there was no undoing a first impression. The tire man. The Doughboy. Someone whose hair looked as if they had stuck their finger in an electrical outlet.
“You have remarkably tiny ears,” he continued his calm narration. “Pierced, but no earrings. I wonder what kind of earrings you would wear? I’m going to guess nothing too flashy. Small diamond studs, perhaps?”
More like cubic zirconia, but if he wanted to picture her in diamonds, she’d take it as a bit of a counterpoint to the finger-in-the-socket remark.
She knew he was keeping up the one-sided conversation for her benefit only, and it did have a calming effect on her.
“Peaches and cream complexion, nose like a little button, no make-up. But if you did wear it? I’d guess a light dusting.”
Again, that sense that he knew way too much about women!
He had unwound enough of the tissue that he could stop unwinding and tear the remainder away from her face.
He regarded her with a surprised half smile tickling his lips. “And no bright red lipstick on those lips. They are quite luscious without it. In fact, I take it back. You look nothing like the tire man. Or the Doughboy.” His eyes moved to her hair, and the half smile deepened to a full one. “The electrical socket we can do nothing about.”
Her arms and hands pulled against the bindings. She was dying to pat her hair into place, but she was still bound fast. And aware, from the effort of trying to move, that something was wrong with her shoulder.
Still, she brushed that aside and gulped in a deep, appreciative breath of air. She wasn’t sure if she should say thanks, but before she had decided, he dropped the chatter and was briskly all business.
“Are you hurt?”
“Mostly my pride.” Her voice was a croak.
“Mostly?”
“My shoulder hurts,” she confessed, clearing her throat. “But not as much as my pride. I feel horribly stupid. Horribly.”
No, stupid did not cut it. She would have felt stupid if her neighbor, the lovely elderly Miss Twining had found her.
But to be found in this situation by Daniel Riverton?
While he was definitely the rescuer straight out of a dream, it was still absolutely mortifying. His picture had been gracing the cover of major business magazines for at least a year, including Calgary Entrepreneur which she subscribed to, and read avidly from cover to cover, since starting her own small business after being let go—fired, her mind supplied helpfully—from Bernard Brothers a year ago.
“What on earth happened in here?”
When he had introduced himself on the phone a few days ago, she had denied it could be that Daniel Riverton.
But, now with him standing in front of her, in the flesh—literally, she glanced greedily at his naked chest again—there was no denying it. And nothing—certainly not looking at his picture on the cover of a magazine, or listening to his admittedly quite sexy, if irritated, voice on the phone—could have prepared her for the man.
Maybe it was good she was tied to a chair. In her weakened state, four days with her nieces and now running on pure panic and adrenalin for the past hour—plus debilitating pain was shooting through her shoulder and arm—it was probably all that was preventing her from swooning.
Because he was literally in the flesh—his arms sleek and lightly muscled, his naked chest broad, and smooth, without a hair marring the silk of his skin, his pajama pants dipping very low on his hips, showing her that place where hard abs narrowed below his belly button, to an enticing V that made her mouth go dry.
No! she insisted on lying to herself, her mouth was already stuffed-with-cotton dry.
He had black hair, which looked impossibly well groomed even though he had obviously been in bed. And he had features so perfect it could have been the cover of GQ he had posed for rather than business magazines.
Or, with that perfect naked chest, one of those calendars that featured gorgeous men leaning on fire trucks or carrying saddles.
Trixie made herself look away from that, not that the perfect features of his face provided respite from the awareness of him that was thrumming through her veins.
Why did she feel faintly, ridiculously guilty that Miles had never made her feel this way? Miles had never rescued her from certain death, that was why!
Still, Miles with his pasty complexion and shock of thinning red hair, with his cute little tummy and pudgy limbs had been the antithesis of this man.
Daniel had high cheekbones, a perfectly shaped nose, a firm mouth saved from arrogance by the plumpness of his lower lip, a chin that was square and faintly dimpled.
His cheeks and chin were ever so faintly shadowed with dark whiskers, which added to, rather than detracted from, how gorgeous he was.
But it was his eyes that were absolutely mesmerizing. The magazine cover had not captured the true blue of them.
Trixie wondered, and hated herself for wondering, was this tingling awareness of Daniel the “something more” that Miles had left her in search of?
He began to unravel the rest of her binding, his way no-nonsense and firm. “There’s got to be a dozen rolls of paper on you.”
Trying to ignore the heated sensation being caused by his hands unraveling tissue from very personal places—that sizzling awareness of something more— Trixie tried to focus. He wanted to know what happened. Stick with the facts, ma’am!
“I was just so tired,” she said. “They never sleep. They’re from Australia. I mean Molly and Pauline are in a completely different time zone, as I told you.”
“And as I could not help but notice!” This said a touch grimly.
“It was your phone call that made me so anxious to not be noisy. I had just gone to sleep. They woke me up jumping on the bed. Then they wanted to eat. Then they wanted to play this game.
“They said their mother let them play it all the time. I was to sit in a chair, and they would wrap me in toilet tissue. I just didn’t see the harm. I was desperate to keep them quiet.”
For you.
Even