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Grimacing, her head is pulled to one side while her hands are busy covering her chest. Something else seems to be hurting her.
“Hey, you need help there?” I finally utter something.
“My earring,” she mutters, fiddling with her tangled hair. Her bracelet is precariously close to the knot it may soon add to her plight.
I fly stealth fighters. My callsign is Mettle. Yet, in her presence, I’m as brave as a sedated chihuahua.
“Hang on.” Despite my stiffened fingers, I manage to untangle her hair. But something is still tugging her. Her head remains in the same slanting position. I swipe her hair back to find the real source of her predicament. A faint iris fragrance drifts through my nose. If heaven has a smell, this will be it—the scent of its angels.
My mind starts painting what that heaven may look like. Even just knowing her name would take me somewhere beautiful.
For goodness' sake!
I save myself from further embarrassment by focusing on the problem in front of me. The longest part of her earring has been caught in the lacy strap of her dress—the one that’s still intact, anyway.
She restrains her hiss as my clumsy digits tug on the diamond earring—and, subsequently, her earlobe.
“Sorry, I’m sorry.” Give me radars and propellers any time. By the grace of God, my hands aren’t made for this kind of delicate operation.
After a few attempts, I manage to separate the earring from the dress. “Here we go.”
“Can you—” She turns sideway, hitching her bare shoulder, signaling to me to do something to fix her snapped strap.
If I was the regular Clayton, I would’ve asked if she’d like my help long before she asked. But I’m anything but regular at the moment. I only act on her command.
I pick up the severed strap from her grip, brushing her smooth shoulder in the process.
Had I not learned my lesson in love, I would’ve introduced myself or made small talk to make her feel at ease. But this not-so-little Miss Sunshine is rendering me helpless that now, it’s me who needs to feel at ease.
Unable to make myself useful in dealing with satin and lace, her dress starts to unravel again.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Keep going,” she urges, not moving an inch as if she was a mannequin. By now, her frantic effort to cover her chest has stopped. She seems content to let me see it bare—only loosely obscuring her nipples with her palm.
I start again. She lightly tilts her face, stretching the curve where her shoulder meets her neck, giving me more room to maneuver. Her scent travels to me, and her smooth skin spreads right in front of my sight like an invitation. An invitation that’s so goddamn hard to ignore.
“Here we go,” I tell her.
She adjusts the reinstated strap and smooths a hand over the bodice of her dress. If Rob saw that knot I had just tied, he would send me back to sailing school.
Facing me, she tousles her long, wavy hair and arranges it, so it covers the repaired spot. “How do I look?”
Dazzling, devastating.
“Um—good as new,” I answer.
The corners of her red lips lift. Then her eyes land on mine.
I don’t do love, and I don’t do speechless and awkward, either. But now I find myself thwarted out of my comfort zone and into a supercell of a different kind.
“Look, I—please forgive me if I ever made you feel uncomfortable.”
“It’s too dark to see anything here, mister.” She takes a few steps away from me into the rays of a rattan-shaded lamp.
Like hell it is!
I blurt, “I was just looking at your eyes."
