by Amy Andrews
Ivy could almost picture her - a female version of Dean. Long, wavy hair, which she tossed when she laughed. Deep brown eyes and long eyelashes that curled at the ends just like Dean’s. “She sounds fun.”
“She was. I think.”
Ivy didn’t know what else to say. She’d never expected Dean to share something so private with her. He’d obviously had beautiful memories of his mother and she desperately wanted to ask more.
To know more.
To know her name and how she’d died and what had happened to him after. Her heart ached for him. For both of them.
But he broke eye contact abruptly, turning his attention back to her toes. “Why do women wear this stuff?” he asked, moving to her second toe.
Ivy blinked. Cleary the subject of him was closed. “Because it’s cute?”
He gave a dismissive snort as he started her third toe, on a roll now.
“You don’t think it’s cute?”
“I don’t really have an opinion.”
“Oh come on,” she cajoled, wiggling her toes at him, trying to lighten the mood. “According to Cosmo, men get off on painted toes.”
“Men don’t read Cosmo.”
“Maybe they should.”
He grabbed her fourth toe in a firm grip and her nipples ruched into tight points. He must have found her high-beam chakra.
“Is that why you paint your toes?” he asked, his head still bowed over her foot. “For men?”
Ivy shook her head. “No. I do that for me.”
“Good,” he said, his gaze capturing hers as he looked up. “Don’t ever do anything for a man you don’t want to do for you.”
She quirked an eyebrow. “Are you sure you haven’t read Cosmo?”
He laughed and all her damn chakras lit up.
“Last one,” he said, returning his attention to her foot, staring down her little toe before dipping the brush in one more time. In two skillful swipes he’d covered it.
“There,” he said, sitting back, inspecting the job. Even with a bottle of hot pink nail polish in his hands, admiring his handiwork, Dean Bennett was still the most masculine man she’d ever met. “Not bad,” he declared.
“Not bad at all,” she admitted. “For your first time.”
He flicked her a glance that told her he wasn’t going to rise to the bait.
She lifted her foot, offering it to him. “Blow?”
“Nice try,” he said, tossing her the bottle of polish and rising from the couch. “I need a coffee. Want one?”
“No thanks.”
Strangely, what she craved most of all after their satisfying session over her toes, was a cigarette. And she didn’t even smoke.
Ivy wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep for when she woke later that night. It was dark in the room, but she could hear a low murmur from the television behind her and the lights from the screen flickered around the walls and danced across the snowy white of her sheets.
She looked at the clock. Two forty five a.m.
She’d rolled onto her sore hip at some stage and it was throbbing. She eased off it, trying to dull the ache as she glanced over at the couch to find Dean had finally vacated it in favor of his bed.
Not that he was in it. But on it was an improvement. Even if he was still fully clothed and propped up with a few pillows against the headboard. It was hard to tell if he was actually asleep when he looked like he could spring into action at any moment.
She shut her eyes, banishing thoughts of a different kind of readiness. Her hip was already bitching at her, no point adding her hormones to the choir. She opened her eyes and swung her legs out of bed. She didn’t like taking painkillers, but they did work, and she knew she wasn’t going to get back to sleep with this level of pain.
Unfortunately, her pills were in the bathroom.
Ivy gritted her teeth as she pushed up from the mattress breathing in and out slowly for a few seconds before shuffling quietly past Dean’s bed and into the bathroom. She turned the light on once the door had shut behind her, squinting against its intrusion into her pupils.
Ignoring what she must look like, Ivy reached straight for the blister strip of tablets and popped two out, throwing them straight down. She filled one of the two glass tumblers with water and washed the pills down, wishing them Godspeed.
She shut her eyes and reached for the edge of the cool granite counter, bowing her head as she curled both sets of fingers around it and rocked a little from side to side, then circled her pelvis in a slow motion trying to find a position of comfort while the medication took effect.
The first thing she noticed when she opened her eyes were her pink toes, and she smiled thinking about how sexy Dean had looked painting them. But then her hip twinged and Dean was forgotten as her fingers tightened on the vanity.
Maybe a hot shower would help?
Mind made up, Ivy pulled her T-shirt over her head and wiggled gently out of her pajama shorts, placing them both on the vanity. She looked at her reflection, something which she’d avoided till this point, and eyed herself critically. Standing there in nothing but her white cotton fig-leaf underwear it was the same as it had always been.
“Never going to be a Flamenco dancer,” she whispered.
Even if she did have the figure for it and knew how to dance the damn thing, the world wasn’t ready for Snow White the Flamenco Dancer with pink hair.
God, her hair. Bed hair times 100. What a freaking mess.
She raised her hand to push it back into some kind of order clipping the glass tumbler on the way up, knocking it off the vanity. She cried out, trying to reach it in time, but it was too late. She sprang back as it smashed on the tiles louder than a sonic boom in the still of the night.
Ivy froze, staring at it dumbfounded, not even the bite of tiny splinters of glass speared into her shins registering as she stared at the mess blankly for long moments, her heart thundering.
Shit. Dean.
Maybe he hadn’t heard it?
“Ivy!” The door knob rattled. “Ivy!”
Or maybe he had.
Ivy scrambled to bring coherency to her thoughts. To open her mouth and say something. Tell him she was okay. That it was just a broken glass. But nothing seemed to come out in those confusing seconds as time slowed right down and she watched in horror as the door came crashing in with a loud bang.
Dean stood there like an avenging angel, his stance wide, knees bent, his fisted hands held up and out from his body, the muscles in his forearms and biceps coiled tight like a ninja primed to spring.
If he was just a bouncer she’d eat her hat.
The pain in Ivy’s hip faded away completely.
Their gazes met and held briefly before his dropped lower, landing squarely on her chest.
Her very naked chest.
He stared at it, the sound of his breathing loud in the silence, his nostrils flaring as a tiny flicker of something lit his eyes. It looked a lot like desire and Ivy’s nipples tingled and ruched shamelessly in blatant response before she remembered she was practically naked in front of him and her common sense returned with an almighty wallop.
“Dean!” Ivy gasped her cheeks heating as she folded her arms over her chest and turned her back to him. “Get out!” she hissed, looking over her shoulder at him.
It was too late, of course, way too late. She couldn’t take back what Dean had seen and even now Ivy cringed thinking that he had a bird’s eye view of her butt cellulite.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” he said, also turning his back to her. “I heard the crash I just…reacted.”
Yes he had. Kind of like he’d done it before.
“Sorry. Here—” He picked up a towel from the rack under the vanity and passed it behind him. “Put this on while I clean up the glass.”
“I can clean up the glass by myself,” Ivy said irritably as she looked around at the thick, fluffy offering.
But not in a towel. She glanced at her clothes on the vanity then down at
the wide area of broken glass between her and them.
“Can you reach my top?” she asked. It seemed like such a ridiculously, everyday thing to ask him except for the being almost naked part.
“Here,” he said, passing it behind him.
Ivy grabbed it and threw it on quickly, pulling it down as far as it would reach. The hem only half covered her fig leaf but was modest by comparison and Ivy clung to the modicum of dignity that had been restored as she turned to face him.
“I’m decent,” she announced. Although that was now a relative term.
Her face burned as he slowly turned around and Ivy couldn’t quite meet his gaze. How on earth was she going to face him for the next few days?
A slash of dark red smeared the tiles near his feet. “You’re bleeding,” she said absently, latching on to it, grateful for any distraction.
He lifted his leg. A large piece of glass was embedded in the pad of his foot, fresh blood welling from the site. He reached for it and swiftly pulled it out without a single flinch, throwing the bloody shard into the sink.
Ivy winced. Jesus. That must have hurt like a bitch, but he’d yanked it out as if it were a tiny splinter.
“You need to get that dressed,” she said, taking a step forward.
“Stop!” he said, throwing his hands up to keep her back. “You don’t have any shoes on.” She looked down at her feet, her pink toes taunting her.
He threw the towel he’d tried to hand to her earlier onto the tiles over the broken glass, creating a fluffy pathway. Their gazes locked as he looked up. “Thank you,” she said.
He didn’t bother to acknowledge the thanks. “Walk over it carefully. I’ll just go grab the dustpan and broom.”
Ivy was about to protest but, like the ninja from earlier, he’d disappeared before she could muster a word. She walked across the towel gingerly, thankful that even if the mattresses were crap the hotel had good quality linen and towels. She glanced at herself in the mirror, her cheeks still carrying way too much color for her liking.
He appeared in the doorway. “Go sit,” Dean ordered. “I’ll get this cleaned up.”
Ivy was grateful he was being all brisk and businesslike, but she hadn’t suddenly turned into a child even if she did want to curl up and whine about how unfair life was.
“No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “You go and use that dressing stuff from the hospital on your cut. I’ll”—she grabbed the broom out of his unresisting fingers—“clean up.”
Thankfully he didn’t argue and Ivy was left to her own devices. She looked at the huge indent of splintered wood in the centre of the door and the broken lock, then down at the mess on the floor. The cops would have some explaining to do to hotel management when they left.
But that was the least of her worries. The biggest concern was that Dean had seen her breasts, her naked breasts.
And he’d definitely liked what he’d seen.
Ivy may not have had a whole lot of experience with men but she knew when a man looked at her with sexual interest, with desire. Her breath hitched at the mere thought.
Dean Bennett desired her…
She glanced in the mirror, shaking her head at the preposterous thought. “Don’t be stupid,” she whispered.
Dean was a healthy, virile man. Men liked breasts. Most of them, anyway. Naked breasts particularly. That flicker of something she thought she’d seen in his eyes, the slight flare of his nostrils was probably just normal male reaction to any female nudity.
It wasn’t her he’d desired, it was her breasts.
And they were stuck together in this room for God knew how long, so any breasts in a storm, right?
“Right,” she whispered and got on with the job.
Chapter Seven
Seth rallied himself for the third time and forced himself to concentrate on his injury. He was standing in the kitchenette, his foot in the sink, cool water running continuously over the wound. It had washed away the blood a good few minutes ago but all he’d been able to see was a slow-motion replay of Ivy’s breasts.
He’d thought the toe-painting episode had been hard enough to forget. Nipplegate was a whole other level.
Snap out of it, man!
He turned the tap off and reached for a nearby kitchen towel, patting it against the minor laceration and the surrounding area. Hard to believe something that pissant could bleed so bloody much.
He removed his foot from the sink then hobbled across to the couch, sitting down with his leg up on the coffee table as he hunted through the bag of dressing supplies.
The tinkling of glass from the bathroom distracted him and, once again, visions of Ivy’s breasts rendered him useless. Full and round, perfectly crowned by the palest of pink nipples, a couple of light blue veins just visible beneath the skin.
He’d spent a long time watching her behind the bar night after night trying not to think about what they might look like. Trying to be the professional his integrity and her father demanded he be. And he’d succeeded through sheer force of will.
But that was no longer possible.
Not when he’d wanted to sink to his knees in front of her and bury his face in them and to hell with the broken glass. They’d hardened as he’d stared at them and his dick had followed suit, his mouth salivating at the thought of sucking her nipples deep into his mouth.
His cock pushed against his zipper again. He felt like a teenager who’d seen his first ever porn and had lost about a hundred IQ points.
And this was not the time to suffer an attack of dumb.
That could be terminal when there was a guy out there possibly trying to kill them.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen plenty of naked women in his life. He’d faced death countless times so he’d lived hard. There’d been women, one-night stands mainly in a bunch of different places. The odd one or two had stuck around for a while but he didn’t really have the personality or the wherewithal to be a good boyfriend.
And he was okay with that.
As someone who had grown up being pushed from pillar to post, a transient life was in his DNA. Transient women even more so. Staying anywhere too long or with anyone too long had felt counterintuitive to the lifestyle he’d been baptised into and there hadn’t been any woman that had piqued his interest enough to try.
Pale pink nipples filled his head and he pushed them away. Not Ivy. Ivy was nothing like the women he usually hung out with.
Nothing.
He didn’t understand why he’d been so fixated on her these last months. She was too different. Too innocent. And she was in his care. Under his protection, for fuck’s sake.
The reasons for which were now clear and completely justified.
Whatever it was that caused this fixation was highly inappropriate to be feeling. She was the very definition of off-limits and he needed to remember that every time an image of her naked breasts taunted him. That and the inevitable accident he would meet if the Colonel ever read the content of Seth’s mind and knew the despicable things Seth wanted to do to his daughter.
So no more breasts, man.
Get your shit together.
Shaking the images off, he reached for a sticking plaster in the bag of goodies the hospital had supplied. Unfortunately his brain switched to her back view and that incredible tattoo.
The tantalizing glimpses he’d already seen had been spot on. Vibrant green leaves, maybe a vine, starting in the small of her back, winding around her spine like a trellis. It disappeared behind the brush of pastel curls at her shoulder blades so he hadn’t been able to tell where it stopped.
He’d have killed to check it out more. To have walked closer and inspected it thoroughly. To have pushed her hair aside and found out how much farther up it traveled. But he’d barely had time to register it, to take in the big picture before his body had reacted to her horrified, “get out!” and he’d spun himself around.
The plaster packaging was covered in what looked like three-lea
f clovers. Like Ivy’s underwear. White cotton and a fig leaf had been something else.
Totally unexpected.
Whenever he’d pictured Ivy’s underwear, and God alone knew he’d pictured that a little too often, he’d always imagined she’d be into something ultra-feminine. Satin and lace. Soft and pretty. Pastel like her hair.
Nothing had prepared him for cute and comical. Somehow it was sexier than any lacy scrap of lingerie his dirty mind had conjured up.
Somehow, it was so very Ivy.
And God help him, he’d wanted to rip them off with his teeth. Which did not help the state of his hard-on.
“All done.”
Seth started as Ivy’s voice intruded into his inappropriate thoughts. He dragged them back with difficulty as Ivy walked briskly past. She was back in her pajama shorts now and she did not look at him as she headed for her bed.
His heart pounded as he came up with about a dozen different ways to explain why he’d kicked the door in like some gorilla and assuring her he hadn’t meant for what happened to happen.
Clear the air.
God alone knew what she thought of him ogling her breasts like that.
“We should ask the cops for a vacuum cleaner tomorrow just in case I missed any slithers and make sure we wear shoes when we go in there in the meantime,” she said as she climbed in between her sheets as if he hadn’t just walked in on her semi naked.
“Okay,” Seth said as he watched her disappear beneath the covers and roll on her side away from him.
She didn’t look like she wanted to talk about it. Not that he could blame her. But, given it was his actions that had cocked things up, then good manners dictated he be the one to apologize.
Properly.
Seth stuck the plaster over the small cut on his foot as he figured out what to say. “About…before,” he said tentatively to her back. “I’d like to apologize for bursting in like that. I woke when I heard the smash and you weren’t in your bed and I just reacted.”
“Its fine,” came her muffled reply, her back still firmly turned.