She gripped the arms to stop it happening.
Tried to focus on her breathing, and being calm.
She had to, because the second he made contact he looked at her. As if he needed to gauge her reaction before he proceeded. And he really scrutinized her, too. His gaze trailed over every curve of her face, in a way that only added to the strange tension running through her.
But she must have hidden it well enough, because he turned back to her ankle.
He slipped his whole hand under that curve, cupping it so tenderly it didn’t seem real. A man like him, taking such care? She could hardly believe it. Yet he carried on that way. He lifted her leg like it was made of glass, and turned it with even greater care than that. She barely felt a thing, despite how sore her ankle was.
And she could seewhyit was sore now, too.
A hole had been ripped in her woolen pantyhose, and dead in the center was a slashing line of purple and red and black. A deep bruise and a little blood where something had pressed hard enough to break skin. Nothing broken, she thought, or even sprained. But enough to make him suck air over his teeth and shake his head.
“Okay, kid, gonna have to get these stockings off you,” he said.
And of course she knew he didn’t mean it the way it sounded. It was completely obvious in about twelve different ways. But it didn’t matter. Her mind immediately went to him reaching underher skirt. She imagined him ruffling it right up, and getting hold of the elastic, and then yanking them down.
Roughly, too.
Like a man impatient to make her naked.
Ridiculous, she knew. Yet her cheeks flamed all over again. She flamedeverywhere. Her chest, under her arms, her forehead. She felt as if she were glowing in the dim light of her store. And over something as small as him just widening that hole, so he could wrap her ankle.
Though it didn’t feel small when he did it.
He ripped the material. Both hands right on it, tearing it open so cleanly and powerfully that the stocking separated into two pieces. Her breath caught at the sound of it, at the sight of his white-knuckled hands. Then again when she saw how much of her leg it had exposed.
Practically up to the knee.
If this had been Victorian times, everyone would have been scandalized. She felt scandalized anyway—and not just because of what he’d done. She was also now remembering what he’d said. That word he’d used.Stockings, he’d saidstockings, even though he should have had no way of knowing she was wearing anything of the kind.
My skirt must have flipped up enough to reveal the tops of them when he got me out of the car,she thought, and now her whole body was molten lava. She felt ten seconds away from melting right off the chair and into a puddle of goo in his lap. And still there was more to come. Still there was another turn of that tension screw.
Now he had to rub antiseptic on her, and wrap the whole thing up.
A boring thing, under any other circumstances.
But not in this inexplicably thick silence, spinning out endlessly. Not in this sudden strange heat, as if it were somehow themiddle of a stormy summer. Not when he was so bizarrely good at doing this. She’d always heard he was oafish, blundering, a beast about things. And she supposed he still was, in many ways.
Yet at the same time, he had this rich vein of practicality about him.
He handled things. Someone needed getting out of a car, he got them out. If they couldn’t walk, he carried them. And when a bruised ankle required binding, he held said ankle with one hand and expertly bound it with the other. Truly, the whole thing took him no more than thirty seconds.
It just felt longer.
It felt endless.
She watched that roll of bandage wind around her ankle, once, twice, three times. By the fourth, she was holding her breath. By the fifth it felt like her lungs were about to burst.Just tell him to stop now, her brain shouted at her. But he was so intent on the task, so diligent about the whole thing, that it didn’t seem normal to.
Instead, she tried to let out a slow, steady breath.
Only it didn’t come out slow and steady at all. It came out shaky and loud, and of course the moment it was out, his head snapped up. His eyes met hers, so intense for a second that she could almost imagine he was feeling the same thing.
If she hadn’t been told five seconds earlier that he liked some other woman.
Maybe evenlovedsome other woman.
It was utterly preposterous to think.
