He had peeled off his sodden trousers as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Of course, for him, World’s Sexiest Bachelor, it probably was.
Except for the part where he’d warned her he was doing it, giving her time to turn around.
Except for the part where he’d unearthed a container full of bedding, snapped off the lid, and tucked a blanket around himself.
He should have looked like an idiot with his flowing red tartan blanket tied in a knot at his taut stomach. Instead he looked like a chieftain, his shoulders and chest bare, his arms rippling with sinewy strength. There was a warrior cast to his face, remote and focused, as he had turned his attention to getting a fire going in the old stone fireplace.
“I can’t get my jeans off,” she wailed.
“What?”
“I can’t get them off,” she said, annoyed he was making her say it again. He had heard her the first time!
The soaked denim, which had probably been a touch snug to begin with, was stuck to her now. Her hands were so cold she couldn’t make them do one thing she wanted them to do.
He turned and looked at her. “Are you asking me to help you get your pants off, Miss Pringy?”
“No!” Then with sudden rueful understanding, she said, “You like making me blush, don’t you?”
“If I was considering a new hobby that would be it. I could while away hours at a time thinking up things like—”
“Now is not the time for games, Joshua! I’m just telling you I’m stuck. Just hand me a blanket.”
He came across the room toward her, without the covering she had ordered, and his own blanket slipped. She held her breath, shamelessly hopeful, but he stopped and reknotted it, moved toward her.
“Just relax,” he said soothingly, looking at the situation with what struck her as an annoying bent toward the analytical. She had the button undone on her jeans, and the zipper down. She had wrested the uncooperative, sodden, freezing fabric about three inches down her hips and there it was stuck, hard.
“It’s because you’re tense,” he decided.
Taking off my pants in a room with the World’s Sexiest Bachelor, and I’m tense. Go figure.
“It’s because my hands are too cold.” It was true her hands felt as if they had turned into icy basketballs at the ends of her wrists. But there was another problem. She was just going to have to admit it and get it over with.
“The jeans might have been a little too tight to begin with. Marginally.”
“They looked fine to me,” he said, apparently thinking about it. “More than fine. Great.” She might have been thrilled that he’d noticed in different circumstances.
As it was, the jeans had been a bit of a challenge to get on, and that’s when they’d been dry. What little devil of vanity had made her think her rear end looked good enough in them to put up with a tiny bit of discomfort?
“Look, no matter how reasonable a choice they were when they were dry, they won’t come off now. They won’t fit over my hips. There, am I blushing enough for you?”
His lips twitched.
“Don’t laugh,” she warned him.
“I won’t,” he said, but she could tell he was biting the inside of his cheek. Hard. He didn’t speak for a minute, containing himself. “Let me help,” he finally managed, and then choked. “I sound like a butler.”
“Only one of us here would know what that sounded like,” she warned him, but it was too late.
He was laughing, moving toward her with singleness of purpose written all over him.
“Don’t touch me!” There. Self-preservation finally rising to the occasion. Where had that fine attribute of character been when she had been sobbing her heart out in his seemingly sympathetic ear?
“I can’t help you without touching you.”
“I don’t need your help.” That was a lie obvious to both of them. “You’re laughing at me.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“Try harder.”
“Okay.” He crouched down, and was looking at the area where the soaked jeans were bound up around the wideness of her hips. Oddly enough, the way his eyes rested there, briefly and with heat, before returning to her face did not make her feel like a whale. At all. In fact, his laughter seemed to have died, too.
“Yes, you do,” he said firmly, “need my help.”
“Okay, then.” She was shaking too hard to deny it any longer. She closed her eyes hard against her humiliation. “Just be quick.”
“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that in this particular situation,” he muttered.
“We are not in a situation,” she warned him, “or not one you’ve ever been in before.”
“You’re absolutely right about that,” he said.
His hands settled around the jeans. Her skin was so cold she actually felt scorched from the heat of his hands. She had to resist an impulse to wiggle into that warmth. Instead she made herself stand rigidly still. She opened her eyes just enough to squint at him undetected through the veil of her lashes.
He yanked with considerable strength, enough that she saw that lovely triceps muscle in his arm jump into gorgeous relief. Unfortunately the jeans did not budge, not a single, solitary fraction of an inch.
“Your skin feels like ice-cold marble,” he noted clinically.
Somehow in her imagination, she had imagined him saying softly, Your skin is like silk that’s been heating in the sun, soft and sensual.
When had she imagined such a thing? Practically every damn minute since she had met him, a dialogue of lust and wanting running just below her prim surface.
“Can’t you relax?”
“I doubt it,” she moaned, and then made the confession that made her humiliation complete. “You’re going to have hurry. I think I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Dannie, it would be really inadvisable for you to get us laughing right now. Really.”
“Believe me, I am nowhere close to laughing.” But his lips were twitching again. How had she ever thought he was handsome? He wasn’t. He was like an evil leprechaun.
“Someday you’ll see the humor in this,” he assured her. “You’ll tell your kids about it.”
No, she wouldn’t. Because a story like that would begin with, “Did I ever tell you how I met your dad?”
And he was not going to be the father of her children. Though suddenly she was aware she had a secret self that not only conducted entire conversations just out of range of her conscious mind, but wished things. Impossible things.
Green-eyed babies.
She told herself she had just gotten over another man. This was rebound lust, nothing more. But she was very aware of quite a different truth. There never had been another man, really, just a convenient fantasy, a risk-free way to play at love, a safe way to withdraw from the game while pretending to be engaged in it.
Joshua tugged again. The wet, cold, thick fabric shifted a mean half inch or so.
“Ouch. Who invented denim? What a ridiculous material,” she complained.
“There’s a reason they don’t make swimsuits