Page 47 of Silver-Tongued Devil
Lord have mercy. Dakota Savage was giving herself what looked like some very nice slow, sweet pleasure in his hot tub. She looked terrific doing it, too. And there was nothing at all wrong with his testosterone levels.
She opened her eyes, and that was when everything went south.
He jumped, and so did she. She leaped up, scrambled to cover herself, and the cord of her earphones pulled her phone straight into the water.
She was yelping, yanking at the cord, going underwater and grabbing for her phone, and he was saying, “Oh. Sorry. Let me…” He skirted the hot tub to get closer and reached for the phone.
“What are youdoing?”She was holding her drowned phone and backing away in the water, crouching down. “You weren’t supposed to be home!”
She didn’t seem to know what to do, so he said, “Here. Give me the phone. Let me see.”
“Getout,”she said. “I’m naked! Oh, my God. What did you see?”
“Sorry,” he said again. He decided it would be prudent not to answer that. “Give me the phone, and I’ll…” What? Give it the kiss of life? Too late. That phone was going to be fried. Kind of like his brain cells.
Her discarded painting clothes were on a chair, he saw now, together with a towel. “Tell you what,” he said, carefully looking beyond her. “Hand me the phone, I’ll get you a robe, and we’ll figure out what to do.”
“Could you please just goaway?”she said, but she handed over the phone, then dropped her hands to cover herself.
“Right now,” he said. “Going. Bringing you a robe.”
He ran upstairs and found what he was looking for in the back of his closet, brought it down, and called out from the other side of the bamboo, “I’m setting this right here. Come on inside when you’re ready. I’m checking about the phone.”
“You’d better,” he heard. “I can’t believe you stood there andlookedat me. Oh, man. I can’t believe this.”
“I didn’t mean to. You just surprised me. I didn’t know you were here.”
“You were looking.”
“Well, yeah. For a second. I was about to leave, I swear.” A lie for which he’d probably be struck by lightning. There was no way he’d been about to leave.
He was still talking through the screen of bamboo, and now, her arm came around it and started groping on the ground. He picked up the robe and put it in her hand, and she whisked it around the corner. “I’m leaving now,” he told her.
“You keep saying that,” she said. “Except that you don’t go.”
He went.
Dakota didn’t want to take Blake’s robe. She didn’t even want to come out. But what was she going to do, cower in the hot tub all night? Dash through the house and out the front door like the world’s biggest drama queen? She hadn’t done anything wrong. So he’d seen her naked. And maybe… all right, she needed to face it. He’d probably seen just about everything. That couldn’t have shocked him, though. He was a big, big boy.
And—herphone.She wasn’t sure which thing was worse. No, sheknewwhich thing was worse. And it wasn’t her phone.
She dried herself off hastily, pulled on the robe, yanked the sash tight, and grabbed her clothes. This whole thing had been one impulse leading to another, and it had been stupid. Story of her life.
Blake was in the living room, sitting on one of his gigantic too-many-cows-died-for-this leather couches, tapping at his laptop with a frown on his face. A single lamp cast a pool of light, but the rest of the room was lit only by the soft glow of the sun, sinking quickly behind the mountains. Shewasplainly able to see a rolled-up towel on the coffee table beside him, presumably shrouding the corpse of her phone.
“Congratulations,” she said, deciding “breezy” was her best tack. “Phone killer. And now you’re going to say that I shouldn’t have electronics near water, andI’mgoing to say that I wasn’t expecting a Peeping Tom, andyou’regoing to ask me why I was here this late, in your house like it was mine, and, ah… making myself way too much at home. I also parked my truck in your garage. Go ahead and say something about that, too, while you’re at it.”
“I’m not going to say that,” he said. “Any of it. Come over here and tell me which phone you want.”
He didn’t even look up, and she started to feel a little stupid. She’d been right. It wasn’t that big a deal to him. She dumped her clothes by the couch and sat down beside him. “Shouldn’t we try to dry it out first?”
“I looked it up,” he said, still clicking and scrolling. “It’s not likely to work. Besides, that phone’s old. Here’s the latest version. Unlocked. That way, you can use any carrier you want. Will that do? We’ll put on the protection plan, in case some other bozo throws it in the lake or something.”
She leaned closer. “That is over a thousanddollars.Are you kidding me? My phone is three years old.”
“Yeah. And we killed it. So—is this good? Or do you want to change brands? And do you have a backup for your data?”
“Uh…” She was having some trouble here. “Everything’s on my laptop, I think. Mostly, anyway. But if you’re buying things, buy me new headphones. I’m sure they’re just as drowned.”
