As ifthatwasn’t sophomoric enough, she actually had the temerity to give him a nudge. He didn’t dare look at her for fear she’d add a wink.
“Do I want to know what she told you?” Chelsea asked after Emily had picked her way toward a distant piling.
Having pushed to a stand, Chelsea held a sweatshirt in front of herself. It was a crying shame to see all those luscious curves covered up, but Dagan took heart that he still had an unobstructed view of her sweetly turned legs and her delicate, unpainted toes. He had never been a foot man before, but the desire to kiss every one of those cute little digits was sharp.
And then work my way up.
No.No.None of that. He had more important things to deal with.
“Can I check your wound?” he asked again. He wasn’t sure why it was so important to him. Obviously she wasn’t hurtingthatbad. If she was, he’d be able to hear it in her voice, right? Like he’d been able to see the regret on her face down in the hold of Rusty’s boat when she gave him what amounted to an ultimatum.
Her mouth quirked. “How about we both put some clothes on first? Aren’t you freezing?”
He was. Goose bumps peppered his skin, and his bare toes ached all the way to the bones. “Two minutes,” he told her gruffly, then turned to trudge back to his gear.
After tugging on a dry pair of jeans and another thick wool sweater, he donned fresh socks and shoved his size twelves into his biker boots.Clodhoppers, Chelsea teasingly called them. He supposed that was as good a description as any. Though, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember the last clod he had hopped.
He wasn’t sure it had been a full two minutes by the time he finished wringing out his wet clothes and stuffing them in the front section of his backpack. Shrugging into his coat, he found himself back beside Chelsea’s piling.
There was a part of him—theguypart—that hoped to catch her in the process of shimmying into her jeans. He could quite easily imagine the wiggle of her lovely lady bits. But to his disappointment, she had already slipped into her denims and had pulled on her sweatshirt and coat.
Well, she’d pulled the latter two pieces of clothinghalfon, anyway. She had left her damaged arm uncovered, the left side of the sweatshirt bunched up around her neck. “Here. See?” She presented him with her arm. “It’s not so bad.”
She was right. The wound didn’t appear very deep. Still… “Barnacles carry tons of bacteria. When we get to Rusty’s, we need to clean this thing and slather it in ointment. Until then…”
He unzipped the side pocket on his pack and pulled out a roll of gauze.Always be prepared.He and Avan had gone through the Boy Scout program together, and that was one lesson that had stuck. “We’ll wrap it so it doesn’t ooze onto your sweatshirt.”
She adjusted her glasses. “I feel like this is much ado about nothing.”
Winding the gauze around her laceration, he tried his best not to look at the bottom edge of her bra or the smooth skin of her side where her waist dipped in dramatically before flaring out to her hips. When that didn’t work, he thought it best to force his mind onto something else.
“Shakespeare?”
“Huh?” She blinked up at him.
Eyes like hers should be outlawed. They were hell on a man’s self-control.
“Much Ado about Nothing?”
“Oh.” She shrugged. “Never read it. Watched the movie with Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh about a hundred times, though. Love the language. But Keanu Reeves was a weird casting choice for Don John, don’t you think?”
“The accent he used was pretty bad,” Dagan agreed, thinking it a marvel that after the day they’d had, they could still carry on a normal conversation.
But that was Chelsea for you. She was a phenom when it came to reading Intelligence. She loved fantasy novels and, apparently, Shakespearean movies about love. And she was the only person on the face of the planet he could be himself around. Talking to her…lovingher—yes, he was no longer in denial about that—was just so easy.
Whatwasn’teasy was trying not to keel over. Because when he leaned close to use his teeth to tear off the gauze, he was hit by the sweet strawberry-vanilla smell of her.
“You two lovebirds ready to rock and roll?” Emily called, stomping toward them as Chelsea tucked her bandaged arm into her sweatshirt and coat.
“Bloody hell, woman!” Christian complained. “Give me a moment to get into my shoes!”
Emily stopped in her tracks, her expression turning positively devilish before she swung around to smile at Christian, who was sitting on the ground, tying the laces on a pair of Italian-made ankle boots that probably cost more than Dagan’s last car.
“Now why did you automatically think I was talking to you and Ace?” Emily asked. “Is there something the two of you would like to tell the rest of us?”
“He should be so lucky!” Ace called, trotting out from behind a piling, fully dressed and carrying his backpack and the two folded float bags.
Dagan turned back to Chelsea, offering his hand. “You ready?”
