She saw his body stiffen before he turned, lips parted, and she realised she had shocked him. She found her hand slicing backwards and forward. ‘I didn’t mean by actual castration, Max.’ Another poor choice of word when his groin was mere inches away and she was now thinking about it. The size, the shape, the form... ‘I meant that their desire for me withers...’ Good grief, the inappropriate words were coming thick and fast now! ‘I mean it deflates...’ It was like a disease of the jaws! It was his fault. His shaving soap, his arms, his thighs and the intimate proximity of his masculine parts were scrambling her wits. ‘What I mean is...hisdesire, not his...um...desire.’ To compound her misery she found her finger was pointing south and felt her face combust.
Laughter rumbled in his chest. ‘You are blushing! Like a beetroot.’
‘Only because you have the wrong end of the stick!’ Suddenly every word coming out of her mouth sounded hugely inappropriate to him as well as her if the second bark of laughter was any gauge. ‘And by stick I meant stick and not...’
She could see the amusement dancing in his dark eyes. ‘And not?’
‘Sometimes I loathe you!’
‘Only sometimes? I must be slipping.’ He passed her a trowel and when she snatched it out of his hand couldn’t stop himself from grinning ear to ear. ‘In case you were wondering, I understood your initial statement perfectly, Effie. Without the need for all your hilariously inappropriate descriptive clarification. Your big brain makes them feel emasculated in the inadequate sense rather than the literal.’ To vex her he also pointed south, his lips twitching as he struggled to hold the laughter in.
‘Then why didn’t you just say so and put me out of my misery, you wretch?’
‘Where would the fun have been in that? I thoroughly enjoyed watching you flounder and that unflatteringly blotchy blush was the icing on the cake.’ He snorted again when her hands automatically sought her cheeks to feel the apparently unflattering blotches for herself.
‘You’re a miserable, reclusive curmudgeon. You’re not supposed to have fun. And certainly not at my expense when I am one of the few people who can tolerate you.’
‘That’s true.’ He jumped into the trench beside her making the six-foot-by-three-foot space feel overwhelmingly small. ‘I shall try to curb the urge in the future. Although to be fair, it would be much easier to do if you stopped giving me good reason. You are the one who used the words wither and castration in the same sentence and then dug yourself a bigger hole trying to correct them.’
‘You know the words fly out of my mouth before I’ve had time to consider them.’
‘Then try breathing in between them, Effie, darling.’ He was too tall. Too broad. Too everything while smelling sinfully too good. And he had called her darling, when no one had ever called her darling, and the endearment sounded wonderful on his lips. It all had a devastating effect on her pulse. ‘It might help prevent unnecessary embarrassment in the future.’
‘Good advice.’ And because it was and she was more mortified now than just embarrassed, and because he already had his back to her, she inhaled deeply and slowly blew it out. She didn’t usually allow herself to be so flustered with a man. Not any more at least. She blamed the fact she was today on three long days of not seeing him despite knowing full well he had always had the power to fluster her. Although bizarrely, as much as Max flustered her, he also liberated her, too. With him, she gave her big brain free rein and never pretended to be anything but what she was. He was her friend. Which was lovely and she should be content with that seeing as she had never had many of them. Except increasingly she wasn’t.
‘Do I intimidate you, Max?’ So much for breathing before she thought aloud.
He paused and she held her breath, unsure she truly wanted to hear his answer, but desperate for it all the same.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Another pause. Strangely loaded and significant this time as his answer mattered so much to her. ‘Because it is hard to be intimidated by a woman who cannot match a pair of shoes.’
Had he tempered his words? Sidestepped the question as he was prone to do when he did not want to honestly answer? Was he placating her, or worse—paying her lip service because he was kind beneath the bluster? He didn’t seem intimidated ever—but then their friendship had always been strictly platonic. Perhaps that had a bearing? Or was she reading more into the pause and his answer than he had ever meant because her feelings for him weren’t entirely platonic any longer and probably never had been? The feminine part of her was attracted to his physicality and the temporal part was attracted to the man beneath. Was she trying to read more into his words because she wanted more than friendship? Did he?
Of course not! This was all Eleanor’s fault. Because Eleanor had set her reading Gothic novels again and the unrealistic romance in them was doing strange things to her cynical brain and reawakening her curiosity of men. Every heroine looked remarkably like her in her odd head and every hero bore a striking resemblance to Max. This was exactly why she had stopped reading the rubbish!
Max had never flirted with her. Or flattered her with effusive compliments. Never given any clue that he saw her as a woman as well as an irritant. All clear signs he did not reciprocate her foolhardy blossoming feelings.
But then again, after everything he had suffered, after his fiancée’s cruel rejection, would he?
Too many questions crowded her mind, none of them she was brave enough to risk asking out loud. In case one slipped out and royally spoiled their friendship for ever, she bit down on her lip and tried to focus on the task in hand. Behind her, Max happily did the same although she sincerely doubted he was similarly plagued by questions concerning their unlikely but complicated relationship.
Did she intimidate him?
What sort of a blasted question was that to ask hot on the heels after he had only just discovered there had been multiple idiots who had apparently kissed her in the past. Idiots who were too stupid not to want to do it again! Because to his way of thinking, asking if she intimidated him was merely a polite way of asking if she emasculated him, which would be laughable if everything about Effie didn’t remind him hourly exactly how masculine he truly was.
The most masculine part of him was still reeling at the sight of her all flustered and damp in that worn shirt and those damned form-fitting breeches. And she had a smear of mud on her cheek, which he’d had the devil of a job not brushing away the second he had seen it. The only way he could stop himself was to pretend he did not want to hold her muddy hand when he had stupidly offered to help her out of the trench, because in that precise moment, had he hauled her up, he would have hauled her into his arms and likely scared the hell out of her.
What baffled him, what he still couldn’t wrap his head around, was how those idiotic men had found the strengthnotto kiss her because he was severely struggling with it.
Every day it got harder and, to make it worse, the urge wasn’t only fired by her pretty face and mouth-watering figure, but by her mind. The more he got to know her, the more he wanted to know her in every sense of the word. His unwelcome infestation of visitors aside, the past three days had been interminable because he had missed her. He’d even ridden twice in the pouring rain in the pathetic hope he would still find her here, tenaciously digging despite the foul weather. The linen shirt plastered to her skin and rendered translucent...
And those thoughts were not helping his discomfort at all. What had possessed him to work in the same trench as her? Mere inches away, but still too many miles apart for his liking.
Blasted torture!
