Glancing down at her shoulder, she saw that her encounter with the barnacles on the piling had resulted in a two-inch gash with ragged edges and sluggishly seeping blood.
“It’s nothing a little Bactine and a Band-Aid won’t fix.”
“Oh, for the love of…” Emily sputtered. “My brain hates my eyes for what they’ve just seen.”
“What?” Chelsea spun around, expecting a crab or a lobster or maybe another big dead fish to be rolling up the beach toward them. But what she saw instead was Emily in fresh black yoga pants with one hand covering her bra-clad chest and the other covering her eyes.
What in the world?Chelsea frowned. Then her frown slid into a slack-jawed, bug-eyed stare because she figured out what had caused Emily’s outburst.
It was Dagan.
And he was naked.
Well, notcompletelynaked. He was wearing his skivvies. And. Nothing. Else.
Just for the record—God knowsI’mmentally recording this—his skivvies were a pair of black boxer briefs with a red elastic waistband printed with the letters SAXX. His shoulders looked impossibly wide, his various tattoos dark and menacing, and the smattering of hair on his chest was so crinkly and coarse-looking and…malethat everything that was female inside Chelsea sat up and starting panting like a good little doggie waiting for a treat.
Gimme, gimme, gimme!
She followed the hair on his chest until it became a single line that traveled down the center of his abdomen, leading to her own personal apocalypse. Andspeakingof her own personal apocalypse, the briefs presented a rather large bulge that apparently even icy water couldn’t shrink to a respectable size.
Blowing out a ragged breath, she shook her head and chuckled. Even to her own ears, it sounded weak and defeated. “Well, well, Z. The good Lord was just showing off when he made you, wasn’t he?”
Chapter 19
There were times in Dagan’s life—after Afghanistan, after Senator Aldus, the second time he’d had to haul his little brother to rehab—when he had seriously considered dragging a knife over his skin just so he could feel something besides guilt and regret.
The moment he heard Emily scream that Chelsea was bleeding was the moment he knew the knife was no longer needed. He feltsomuch more.
In the two seconds it had taken him to race from behind the piling he’d chosen as his changing room to the piling behind which the women had stationed themselves, he felt terror. Then, when he spied Chelsea crouched next to her backpack, looking whole and mostly unharmed, he felt the kind of relief that made his knees weak.
As if those two emotions weren’t proof positive that he was past the self-mutilation stage, the look on Chelsea’s face when she let her eyes drag over him had filled him with lust. But more than that, when she’d made that remark about God showing off, grinning that Chelsea grin of hers that was enough to move the loss that was this shitty-ass day directly into the win column, he was overcome by a wave of affection. Soul-shaking affection. The kind of affection he had never felt for another living human. The kind of affection he thought might skate precariously close to that crazy little thing called…love.
Holy fuckin’ shit, was he in love with Chelsea Duvall?
He searched inside himself and could find zero evidence to the contrary.
“Why do I suddenly get the feeling that I’m about as welcome here as a fart in church?” Emily muttered.
He was careful not to look directly at Emily. In fact, it occurred to him that he probably shouldn’t be looking directly at Chels either. You know, given she was dressed in nothing but her bra and panties—her ridiculouslycomplicated-looking bra and her far-too-sexy matching lace panties. Or were they called boy shorts? He thought maybe that was the right name for the scrap of lace that hugged her hips and rode high on her amazing ass to reveal the bottom half of each succulent, drool-worthy cheek.
In an effort not to spring a boner, he forced himself to stare down at his toes and concentrated on visualizing his middle-school gym teacher. Mr. Papazian had been three hundred pounds of hairy Armenian.
“How bad are you hurt, Chels?” Whoa. Was that his voice? It sounded like he’d run his vocal cords over sandpaper.
“Not bad,” she assured him. “It’s just a scrape, really. I didn’t do a very good job of avoiding one of the pilings on my way to shore.”
Movement from the corner of his eye told him Emily was shrugging into a sweatshirt, and he bit back the urge to tell Chelsea she could have avoided getting hurt altogether if she’d just manned a damned desk like she’d beentrainedto do. But Emily had said that comments like that didn’t actually express his concern, and instead made him sound like a jackass.
“Mind if I take a look anyway?” He was careful to pose it as a question instead of a demand. “Just for my own peace of mind.”
“Aww!” Emily cried, batting her lashes and clasping her hands together. “Look at you, Zoelner. Being all sweet and concerned and accommodating. Give me a minute to clean myself up from the puddle I just melted into.”
Convinced Emily was decent, he allowed himself to gift her with a steely-eyed frown.
“Ouch!” She stepped back. “Okay, okay. Stop shooting me with your eye bullets. I’ll leave you two alone. Just let me grab my stuff.” Her South Side accent turned it intoJust lemme grab ma stuff.
After bending to snag her socks and shoes, she shouldered her backpack and ambled past him. But not before she stopped to whisper in his ear, “Go get her, lover boy.”
