He glanced up at her, then looked back to his task quickly. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I will try to make this as painless as possible.”
Despite the fact his touch was incredibly tender—or maybe because of it—it was one of the most deliciously painful experiences of Becky’s life. He carefully cleaned the scrapes, dabbed an ointment on them and then wound clean gauze around her leg.
She could feel a quiver within her building. There was going to be an earthquake if he didn’t finish soon! She longed to reach out and touch his hair, to brush the salt and sand from it. She reached out.
A pan dropped in the kitchen, and she felt reality crashing back in around her. She snatched her hand back, just as Drew glanced up.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure,” she said shakily, but she really wasn’t. What she felt like was a girl who had been very drunk, and who had done all kinds of uninhibited and crazy things, and was now coming to her senses.
She had kissed Drew Jordan shamelessly. She had shared all her secrets with him. She had blabbered that he was masterful, as if she enjoyed such a thing! Now she had nearly touched his hair, as if they were lovers instead of near strangers!
Okay, his hand upon her thigh was obviously creating confusion in the more primal cortexes of her brain, but she had to pull herself together.
“There,” he said, rocking back on his heels and studying the bandage around her thigh, “I think—”
She didn’t let him finish. She shot to her feet, gazed down at her bandaged thigh instead of at him. “Yes, yes, perfect,” she said. She sounded like a German engineer approving a mechanical drawing. Her thigh was tingling unmercifully, and she was pretty sure it was from his touch and not from the injury.
“I have to get to work,” she said in a strangled voice.
He stood up. “You aren’t going to work. You’re going to rest for the afternoon.”
“But I can’t. I—”
“I’m telling you, you need to rest.”
She thought, again, of telling him he was masterful. Good grief, she could feel the blush rising up her cheeks. She had probably created a monster.
In him and in herself.
“Go to bed,” he said. Drew’s voice was as caressing as his hand had been, and just as seductive. “Just for what is left of the afternoon. You’ll be glad you did.”
You did not discuss bed with a man like this! And especially not after he had just performed intimate rituals on your thigh! Particularly not after you had noticed his voice was seduction itself, all deep and warm and caressing.
You did not discuss bed with a man like this once you had come to your senses. She opened her mouth to tell him she would decide for herself what needed to be done. It would not involve the word bed. But before she could speak, he did.
“I’ll go scout a spot for the wedding. Joe will be here in a while. By the time you wake up, we’ll have it all taken care of.”
All her resolve to take back the reins of her own life dissolved, instantly, like sugar into hot tea.
It felt as if she was going to start crying. When was the last time anything had been taken care of for her? After her father had left, her poor shattered mother had absconded on parenting. It felt as if Becky had been the one who looked after everything. Jerry had seemed to like her devoting herself to organizing his life. Even her career took advantage of the fact that Becky English was the one who looked after things, who tried valiantly to fix all and to achieve perfection. She took it all on...until the weight of it nearly crushed her.
Where had that thought come from? She loved her job. Putting together joyous and memorable occasions for others had soothed the pain of her father’s abandonment, and had, thankfully, been enough to fill her world ever since the defection of Jerry from her personal landscape.
Or had been enough until less than twenty-four hours ago, when Drew Jordan had showed up in her life and showed her there was still such a thing as a hero.
She turned and fled before she did something really foolish. Like kissing him again.
Becky found that as much as she would have liked to rebel against his advice, she had no choice but to take it. Clear of the kitchen, her limbs felt like jelly, heavy and nearly shaking with exhaustion and delayed reaction to all the unexpected adventures of the day. It took every bit of remaining energy she had to climb the stone staircase that led to the wing of the castle with her room in it.
She went into its cool sanctuary and peeled off her wet clothes. It felt like too much effort to even find something else to put on. She left the clothes in a heap and crept under the cool sheets of the welcoming bed. Within seconds she was fast asleep.
She dreamed that someone was knocking on her door, and when she went to answer it, Drew Jordan was on the other side of it, a smile of pure welcome on his face. He reached for her, he pulled her close, his mouth dropped over hers...
Becky started awake. She was not sure what time it was, though the light suggested early evening, which meant she had frittered away a whole precious afternoon sleeping.
She wanted to leap from bed, but her body would not let her. She felt, again, like the girl who had had too much to drink. She tested each of her limbs. It was official. Her whole body hurt. Her head hurt. Her mouth and throat felt raw and dry. But mostly, she felt deeply ashamed. She had lost control, and she hated that.
Her door squeaked open.
“How you doing?”
She shot up in bed, pulled the sheet more tightly around herself. “What are you doing here?”
“I knocked. When there was no answer, I thought I’d better check on you. You slept a long time.”
Drew Jordan looked just as he had in the dream—gorgeous. Though in real life there was no expression of tender welcome on his face. It did not look like he was thinking about sweeping her into his big strong arms.
In fact, he slipped into the room, but rested himself against the far wall—as far away from her as possible—those big, strong arms folded firmly across his chest. He was wearing a snowy-white T-shirt that showed off the sun-bronzed color of his arms, and khaki shorts that showed off the long, hard muscle of equally sun-bronzed legs.
“A long time?” She found her cell phone on the bedside table. “It’s only five. That’s not so bad.”
“Um, maybe you should have a look at the date on there.”
She frowned down at her phone. Her mouth fell open. “What? I slept an entire day? But I couldn’t have! That’s impossible.”
She started to throw back the covers, then remembered she had slipped in between the sheets naked. She yanked them up around her chin.
“It was probably the best thing you could do. Your body knows what it needs.”
She looked up at him. Her body, treacherous thing, did indeed know what it needed! And all of it involved him.
“If you would excuse me,” she said, “I really need—”
Now her brain, treacherous thing, silently screamed you.
“Are you okay?”
No! It simply was not okay to be this aware of him, to yearn for his touch and his taste.
“I’m fine. Did your brother come?” she asked, desperate to distract him from her discomfort, and from the possibility of him discerning what was causing it.
“Nope. I can’t seem to reach him on my phone, either.”
“Oh,