Page 5

For a second, neither of us said anything.

His gaze drifted downward, unhurried, and came back up several degrees warmer.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, hello.”

Down the hall, someone applauded. Two claps.

Somewhere farther off, a voice called, “I give it a ten!”

I bent, retrieved what remained of my dignity in cloth form, and refashioned it around my waist. Salt-and-pepper man watched with the amused patience of someone witnessing a barn raised by a lone farmer. I straightened. His hand had come off my chest, not offended, almost tender, which was somehow worse.

“You all right?” he asked quietly. “Because from where I’m standing, you’ve got no reason in the world to be walking anywhere.”

“Yeah.” My voice came out low and wrecked, roughed up by the part of me still voting hard to stay. “Yeah, sorry. It’s not you, and it’s not the—” I gestured at the towel. “The wardrobe malfunction.”

He laughed, covering his mouth to muffle it. “It’s never me,” he said. “I’m a delight.”

“You seem like it. That’s kind of the problem.”

He tilted his head, letting it be true without making me explain. “You just get here?”

“Something like that.”

“You’ll warm up.” He patted my chest once, friendly now, the heat folded and put away without hard feelings. “Or you won’t. Either way, there’s a hot tub through there with warm water, warm company, and no towel to lose. A man could forget his own name in that room.”

That was, unfortunately, exactly the problem.

Forgetting my own name was the one thing I’d come here to do.

It was also the one thing I couldn’t manage, even with my whole body begging me to try.

In a blink, he was gone, vanished through a door left open.

I stood in the steam feeling every inch of the wonderfully aching and aroused situation I’d driven eleven miles to put myself into.

Fine, I thought. One look at the hot tub. One look, and then I’ll go home and admit this whole expedition had been a failure and eat something over the sink like a bachelor in a commercial for frozen dinners.

One look.

I could manage one look.

I rounded the corner into the pool room. The steam grew thicker, rolling off the water in slow columns, the light coming from somewhere beneath the surface so the whole room shifted and swam. Bodies moved, half seen and unhurried. At the far edge, beside the hot tub, a man stood with his back to me, toweling off.

Water dripped from the muscles of his lean, taut back. His hair, still wet and un-toweled, hung limply to his shoulders, pressing against his head and skin. The low light from the nearby pool shone up, illuminating golden skin that made me—

My heart stopped.

I don’t mean that the way people mean it when they’ve stubbed a toe. I mean the whole engine of me seized with one hard clutch behind my ribs. Everything, the heat, the ache, the pulse in my blood, went dead silent.

I knew that back.

I knew the breadth of those shoulders and the way they tapered down.

I knew that hair, dark with dampness, going to gray at the edges and curling a little at the nape.

His weight shifted onto one hip, the unhurried competence of a man drying his own arms like the room was his to take.

When he lifted the towel to his shoulder, I caught ink. Dark, full sleeves ran wrist to elbow to bicep on both arms, flowing as his muscles moved.