“Lemme see,” he said, and I spun around so he could survey the shibari crisscrossing my back. He gave the knot a tug. “The water didn’t help; it’s basically cemented now.”
He was close enough to me that I could feel the warmth of his hands hovering near my back, but I noticed that he took care not to let his fingers brush against my skin as he worked the knot.
“You can’t just pull the whole dress off?”
I shook my head. “I tried. Wide ribs.”
He snorted softly. “That’s a thing?”
“Yup, something brand-new for me to obsess about. My big-ass ribs, in addition to my wonky thumbs, the vein in my forehead, my double chin, my concave ass, and my weird eyebrows.”
Owen paused with one hand still tugging the string. “Are youserious?”
I glanced over my shoulder at him. “Well, yeah, I think every woman has a list of random things that she hates about herself. I have more—shall I go on?”
“God, no.” He resumed fiddling with the knot. “That’s some warped thinking.”
I didn’t answer him because I was too focused on the way his hand was now resting against my skin. Lightly, almost ticklish, but the gentle contact was enough to send warm ripples along my back.
“I can’t find a single thing wrong with you,” he murmured as he worked, so softly that he might’ve been talking to himself.
I swallowed hard as he slid a palm beneath the strapping.
“Okay,nowI see what’s going on. It’s twisted with another part.”
Owen’s efforts to maintain some sort of boundary between us seemed to be lost as he focused more on winning the knot war. Every knuckle brush against my back made me catch my breath.
Still so fucking touch starved. Still left quivering from the most basic of human contact.
But then again, it didn’t feel basic to me. Owen was now bent at the waist with his warm fingertips brushing against me in unpredictable rhythms. I had to fight to keep from moving closer to him.
“Come this way,” Owen said as he tugged the straps and gently leash walked me backward toward a small desk lamp, the only light in the foyer.
I was instantly reminded of the scene I’d written inChristmas at Whiskey Ranchwhere my hero Blaze lassoed a very ornery Nellie and pulled her across the barn to where he was standing. When she kicked up a fuss, he’d flicked the rope around her body again and then secured her wrists together so she was basically helpless. And then he’d kissed her, long and hard, because they both knew it was exactly what she wanted.
After asking first, of course, because I was a consent queen.
Just thinking about the scene made me blush, because what came next involved Nellie bent over a saddle rack with her hands still bound together while Blaze buried himself in her from behind.
Yeah, I could use some of that right now.
I let out a long, slow breath through pursed lips and flicked my eyes back to Owen in the reflection of the mirror above the light.
Owen’s movements slowed, like he sensed that the knot was about to pull free and he wanted to prolong the moment.
“Almost there,” he said softly.
He pulled at the tangle and the dress went tight against my chest. I glanced at myself in the mirror to confirm that, yes, my nipples were at full attention.
This time not from the cold.
Owen was focused, squinting a little, and lit like a Vermeer painting with half his face in shadow and the other bathed in the golden light. He was as clean-shaven as I’d ever seen, though the hint of scruff remained, like a stain in a coffee cup.
I let out a little sigh. He’d never looked better.
“And there... we...go,” Owen murmured as the straps finally pulled free. “Wait, hold on. One last tangle.”
He didn’t know that I was staring at him in the mirror. I watched him as he gently unwound the thin string from around the other straps, smoothing them to the side with his palms like he was cleaning condensation from a mirror and sending goose bumps racing down my arms. The dress skated down my shoulders and I had to clutch my hands to my chest to keep it from falling off my body.
