“Yo!” Emily called from behind one of the pilings. “Give a s-sister a hand, will ya? My zipper’s stuck!”
Ripping her eyes away from Dagan’s bold gaze actually made them burn. Or maybe unshed tears were backing up behind Chelsea’s eyeballs. Tears for a dream that might have had a chance to come true if only—
She stopped her thoughts right there.If onlywas for suckers and fools, and she was neither.
Marching behind the piling where Emily was, Chelsea found the woman gritting her teeth and wrestling with the zipper on her…uh…jeans?…with fingers that looked clumsy and numb.
“Exactly what kind of jeans are th-those?” Chelsea asked, her teeth chattering again now that Dagan’s nearness wasn’t causing her temperature to spike. She eyed the false pockets stitched into the front of Emily’s pants and the zipper that didn’t run down the front of the garment like regular jeans, but down the side of Emily’s hip.
“They’re not j-jeans.” Emily huffed out a frustrated sigh. “They’re l-leggings made to look like jeans, but they’rewaymore c-comfortable because they’re made from cotton and elastane and… Ow! Damnit!” Her frozen fingers slipped, and she scraped her knuckles down the length of the metal zipper.
“Oh, for P-Pete’s sake.” Chelsea dropped her backpack on the beach, ignoring the dirty names her wounded shoulder called her, and fished around in her boot for her glasses. That’s where Dagan had stored them to keep them safe.
Never accuse that man of not using his head.
After sliding her purple frames onto her nose—Mistake! Now she could see just how dingy and dirty it was underneath the pier—she approached Emily. “Let me give it a try.”
“Thanks.” Emily held up the hem of her dripping, long-sleeved T-shirt. The top sported a cartoon face with the words “Melk Man” printed below it. Chelsea knew the slogan was a reference to Melky Cabrera because it was impossiblenotto keep up with Chicago’s South Side team while living and working with Emily Scott. Come April, the woman ate, slept, and breathed White Sox baseball.
Squatting, Chelsea grabbed hold of Emily’s slippery zipper and gave it a good tug. Nothing. It didn’t budge an inch. She frowned and pulled the denim…er…elastaneout far enough from Emily’s hip to see that some of the thin fabric was caught in the teeth of the zipper.
“This wouldn’t happen with r-real denim,” Chelsea griped. If her fingers weren’t frozen into ten little sausages, she might be able to pick the fabric free. As it was, she had zero dexterity. It was going to require brute force.
“Butrealdenim is uncomfortable and hard to m-move around in,” Emily insisted, rubbing her arms and shivering so that Chelsea had a hard time getting hold of the recalcitrant zipper.
That was another thing about Emily. She might have one of those slim, long-limbed figures that most women would kill for—Chelsea included—but she never flaunted it. In fact, Emily usually hid her lithe physique behind floppy T-shirts and yoga pants.Comfortableclothes.
How wonderful would it be to still look chic and sexy in comfortable clothes? Chelsea had to rely on a good pair of Spanx, a support bra, and tailored pants and shirts in order not to look like she was wearing a potato sack.
“And s-supportive,” Chelsea argued around her chattering teeth. “Denim is supportive. It holds in all the w-wiggling. If I tried to wear these things”—she pulled at the elastic material—“it’d be ass and thighs and hips bouncing all over the place.”
“Braggart.”
Chelsea’s chin jerked back. “You think that’sbragging?”
“Have you looked in the mirror lately?” Emily asked, genuine disbelief in her eyes. “You’re a c-centerfold come to life, and I’m…” She wrinkled her nose.
“Slim and lovely,” Chelsea finished for her. “I’d trade you bodies so fast your head would spin.”
“Really? Where’s aFreaky Fridaydealio when you need it, huh?”
“Victory is mine!” Chelsea crowed, lifting a triumphant fist when, with a good, hard yank, Emily’s zipper finally came free.
“Thank you.” Emily groaned in relief. “I thought I was going to have to live in them.”
Offering a hand down, Emily pulled Chelsea to a stand. The jerk on her injured arm made the wound there grumble with displeasure, but she ignored it as the two of them shucked their wet clothes.
The shadows beneath the pier created privacy from the outside world, and the thick piling provided privacy from the men. But Chelsea still hurried to get changed. For one thing, the place was pretty disgusting. A dead, bloated fish lay on the shore not ten feet away among the litter the tide had left behind: a beer can, part of a fishing net, half of a small Styrofoam buoy, and… Was that a fork glinting among the pebbles? The whole place had a smell like wet cement and old decay.
With her jeans and sweater lying in a soggy heap, she rummaged around inside her backpack, looking for her favorite sweatshirt and a pair of clean jeans.Realjeans. Made of denim. But before she could find either, she heard Emily snort behind her and say, “Jeez, Chelsea. That bra looks like something invented by the Holy Roman Inquisitor.”
Chelsea glanced down at her flesh-colored bra with its one-inch-thick shoulder straps, industrial-strength underwire, and four heavy-duty hook-and-eye snaps that kept her girls both lifted and strapped in at the same time. Then she looked over at Emily’s dainty black bra with its cute pink bow between the wee cups. The thing’s straps were no bigger than spaghetti noodles. “Nowwho’s bragging?”
Emily laughed, and Chelsea shot her a dirty look before turning back to dig through her backpack. She had no time to play tit for tat with Emily—Ha!Titfor tat. Get it?—because she was about sixty seconds away from succumbing to hypothermia.
Once again, she was thwarted in her endeavors when Emily yelped and said, “Oh my God! Chelsea, you’rebleeding!”
“What?” she heard Dagan bark from somewhere nearby.
