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What was it about men—this man in particular—that looked so fucking good in blue jeans and a T-shirt? Was it the way the denim taunted her, clinging lovingly to his firm arse and strong thighs? Or maybe how the soft cotton of his shirt stretched thin over his arms and torso, showing off muscles he definitely didn’t have the last time she saw him?
Was it wrong to be jealous of a T-shirt?
But then she didn’t look the same as she did at seventeen either.
Not by a long shot.
She’d always been slim, but years of daily training had added lean muscle to her slender frame. And the hair she’d always worn as long as possible in school was now trimmed to a more sensible shoulder-length.
“Morning,” Mia said, sitting up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes to hide the fact she’d been ogling Ollie. “Did you open the curtains?”
“Guilty,” he said, entirely too cheerfully for Mia’s liking.
A morning person she was not.
“What time is it?” she grumbled.
“Around nine. I thought you might like a sleep-in now that you’re old and retired.”
Mia flipped him off, then tossed back the covers and gingerly shifted her feet to the floor, testing her leg before putting any weight on it. “I didn’t retire, you arse. I was medically discharged. Big difference.”
When he didn’t respond, she glanced back over at him and saw him staring at her. More accurately, he was staring at her legs—her very long, verynakedlegs—and working his way up from there. And it wasn’t as if she was actually naked, she was wearing the same thing she always wore to bed: cotton undies and a tank top.
It wasn’t her fault the clothing hugged her lithe figure like a second skin, and she could have been mistaken, but was that Ollie’s tongue flicking out to moisten his lips?
A little shiver of excitement skittered over her flesh, and she wasn’t ashamed to admit she liked him looking at her. She’d always liked Oliver Bennett looking at her, and she had first-hand experience of all the things he could do with that tongue.
Resisting the urge to press her thighs together and give herself—and her increasingly wet pussy—away, she said, “Can I help you with something?”
Quickly shifting his gaze elsewhere, Ollie cleared his throat and pointed to her ech-bag on the floor at the foot of the bed. And the walking stick her therapist had insisted she start using to aid her mobility. The one Mia had stubbornly left in the car with the rest of her stuff when she’d visited her parents’ graves.
“I, uh, drove your car over and brought your gear inside. Is that really all you brought with you?”
Mia shrugged. “Eighteen years of living on army bases,” she said, trying to make it sound less pathetic than it actually was. “I don’t own a lot of stuff so I tend to travel light.”
Oliver grinned again and scrubbed one hand across the nape of his neck. “Yeah, I get it. Until recently, the only stuff I owned were some tools, a pair of boots, three pairs of jeans, and about fifty T-shirts. And well, my, uh….” He cleared his throat and pushed away from the door frame. “Never mind. I’ll let you get dressed. Do you need anything?”
The sudden change of topic made Mia grin. As did his T-shirt, which she’d only just noticed had the words “Blacksmiths Like It Hot And Heavy” printed across his muscled chest. It was a distracting sight, to be sure, but not as interesting as Ollie’s embarrassment.
“Hang on. Back up,” she said. “Finish what you were going to say. A pair of boots, three pairs of jeans, fifty T-shirts, and….” She stared at him expectantly.
He dropped his chin to his chest and sighed heavily. “My re-enactment gear.” After a moment he lifted his gaze, his deep blue eyes narrowed slightly as they bored into hers, like he was expecting her to ridicule him. “My Viking kit. Clothes, boots, weapons, shields—”
The thought of tall, sexy Oliver dressed as a Viking had Mia far too curious to make fun of him. What she really wanted to ask him was if he wore leather pants like they did in the movies and on tele but decided to stick with something safer. Something more like neutral ground. “Do you have one of those big tents with the cross-beams?” She crossed her arms at the wrists to demonstrate her meaning.
One corner of Oliver’s mouth hitched up in a half-grin and he nodded. “Yes.”
“Are the beams carved or plain? And do you have the whole demountable bed set-up, or do you sleep in a swag on the ground?”
Now his grin stretched all the way across his face and both eyebrows slid up as he stared at her, his question silent yet obvious.
“What? You honestly think I would have survived almost two whole decades in the army if I didn’t like camping?”
“Ohriiight, you’re asking me about the bed I sleep in because you ‘like camping’. Uh-huh.”
Heat prickled over Mia’s body in all the right places as Ollie turned the topic around on her and made it decidedlynotneutral ground.
What the fuck was she thinking?
