Page 81 of Colliding with Ten

He crooked his finger. “C’mere.”

I hesitated, clutching the towel around my waist. “I feel like this is the part where I regret agreeing to this.”

“It’ll be okay, I promise.”

He reached for the bandage around my knee, and warmth curled in my gut as his fingers touched my skin. As he unwrapped it, every nerve in my leg lit up at his touch.

His voice was soft. “Do you trust me?”

“Unfortunately,” I whispered.

His mouth went half-tilt, which made my stomach dip as he eased the ice pack away.

“Ready?”

He stayed crouched, looking up at me with reassurance that everything was going to be okay.

I swallowed hard. “Uh-huh.”

He huffed a laugh. “You look so scared. There is nothing to be scared of. You don’t even have to do the ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes!” I shrieked at him.

“We’ll start small.”

I nodded, took a deep breath, and dropped the towel from my waist. The second my toes touched the water, I regretted it.

“Oh my God,” I gasped, gripping the tub's edge. “This is actual torture. Did you fill this straight from a glacier?”

Lennox had one hand braced against the porcelain, the other holding me as I eased in inch by inch.

“You’re fine,” he said with a smug grin.

“I’m not fine, I’m frozen.”

He chuckled under his breath. “You said you trusted me.”

“Yeah, well, that was before my blood turned to slush.”

He laughed again, and this time his laugh made me want to laugh. But I couldn’t, because a grimace was frozen on my face.

When the water hit my thighs, every nerve screamed. I clenched my teeth and muttered through them, “I curse the day you were born, Monroe.”

“Got it.”

“It’s so cold,” I hissed, shoulders hunching. “I’m, oh God, I’m turning into a popsicle.”

He chuckled, enjoying himself. “Two minutes.”

“That’s forever in dog years,” I said through gritted teeth. I lifted my hands out of the water, fingers pale and trembling. “Look, I’m blue. I can’t even feel them anymore.”

He looked at my hands and reached for them. His palms closed around mine. The heat was instant. Warmth radiated through my fingers and spread up my wrists, chasing away the sting of the ice.

Our eyes locked. My breath faltered as the heat kept going, threading up my arms in lazy, pulsing waves until it settled somewhere low in my core.

I wanted to make a joke, but my brain wasn’t taking calls. I didn’t know if it was the cold or the way he looked at me while his thumbs made circles over my knuckles.

Focusing on me, he rubbed my fingers between his, coaxing warmth back into them. The calluses along his palms, earned from years of throwing a football, felt rough against the chill of my fingers. He lifted my hands closer to his mouth and blew a slow breath of warm air onto them. It hit my skin like a spark. A shiver moved through me that had nothing to do with the cold, and I swear I forgot how to breathe. The world narrowed to touch and temperature: the icy sting biting at my legs, the molten warmth in my core, and him at the center of everything. Every thoughtful thing Lennox did made it a little harder to remember all the reasons nothing between us should ever happen. The look he gave me wasn’t just concern as his eyes fell to my lips.