But I didn’t share any of thoughts with a young woman I barely knew. See? I could be good. Ish. “Are you warm enough in that suit?” I asked.
She nodded, but I wasn’t buying it. Women always got cold. They also frequently checked me out, which I was pretty sure she was doing right now behind those goggles.
Good. About damn time.
“Why aren’t you wearing a ski suit?” she asked.
Fuck, I guess she’d been checking out my clothes, not me. “Trust me, they don’t look as good on men as they do on women.” Particularly this woman. She was right, the suit was snug on her, and it showed off her thin waist and that juicy ass.
“But won’t your jeans get wet if you fall?”
Shit, she was adorable. “I don’t fall.”
Her mouth opened again, not in surprise but to askanother question. I’d seen this before. Nervous clients always stalled.
“Ready to start the lesson?” I asked.
“It hasn’t even started yet?”
I shrugged. “Not the fun part. Everything before this was preliminary. Like foreplay.”
“Foreplay can be fun,” she said, a little stiffly.
I grinned, pleased that she’d just made a borderline sexual joke. Progress. Zoe was a beautiful woman—there was no doubt about that. The question was whether she had any idea what she did to a guy.
But time to be a professional. “All right, let’s tackle the basics. Turning is all about shifting your weight from one ski to the other. Lean into it. Don’t fight the momentum.” I turned one way and then the other, demonstrating.
She watched me intently, like I was lecturing on quantum physics instead of explaining how not to make a fool of yourself on a mountain top.
“To stop, you snowplow—make a wedge like a pizza slice with your skis. Tips together, tails apart. Got it?”
She nodded.
“And keep your body loose. Relaxed. The more you tense up, the harder it gets.”
“Okay.” She wasn’t saying very much, but I could practically hear her likely panicky thoughts filling her mind.
“Ready to try?”
“Yes.” Her voice was so faint I barely heard it.
I led her to the bunny slope—the easiest route down, the one for beginners and little kids. I didn’t mention that part.
I stayed alongside her, close enough to catch her if she went down but giving her room to figure it out. She was doing okay for about thirty seconds. Then her skis crossed and she pitched forward, landing in the snow with a muffled yelp.
I pulled her upright, steadying her. “You’re okay. Shake it off.” In my peripheral vision, I’d kept an eye on her hips and ass, because let’s face it, what guy wouldn’t? But that made me see how rigidly she was holding herself. Skiing, at least amateur skiing, was about going with the flow, letting your hips move from side to side.
Zoe looked like she was wearing a full-body cast instead of a ski suit.
I encouraged her to loosen up—again—and we kept going. She fell again about a quarter of the way down. I hauled her up, made sure she was steady, and we pushed off again.
Halfway down, after I’d picked her up for the third time, she looked through a break in the trees at the advanced slope running parallel to ours. A guy in a red jacket flew past, carving hard and fast, kicking up a spray of powder.
“Who’s that?” Her voice had a note of awe in it.
“A show-off,” I muttered.
But honestly? I wished I could show off for her. Show her what I could really do instead of holding her hand while she took baby steps down a slope designed for six-year-olds.
