Page 50 of Sexy as Sin
Willow didn’t say anything, but she didn’t tell him to take her home, either. In fact, she didn’t speak for the rest of the drive down the back roads, nearly empty in the wee hours, which were apparently the only time that Byron Bay’s laid-back craziness subsided, and headed up the winding driveway. Dave pulled to the gentlest of rolling stops and said quietly to Brett in the rearview mirror, “She’s asleep, mate. Want me to carry her in?”
“No. But come up and wait on the porch a minute, please.” She’d hate being carried unless Brett were doing it, and he couldn’t do it. He got himself out of the car, opened her door, touched her shoulder, and said, “Willow. We’re home.”
“Oh!” She jumped, then rolled her head back, swallowed, and said, “Right. Right. Coming.” After that, she climbed out of the car, hitched her sheet around herself, and made her barefoot way through the gate, up the stone stairs, and into the house. “Oh,” she said, standing in the middle of the living room. “Sheet.” She unwound it, swaying on her feet, and handed it to him. “Thank you. I’ll go sleep in your guest room. Just in case.”
“No,” he said, “you won’t. Go back to my room and lie down.” He grabbed the sheet as best he could, opened the door, thrust it at Dave, and said, “Take that back to the ER and tell them thanks very much for the loan. Also, what’s your hobby?”
Dave, a stolid hulk of a man who doubled, Brett suspected, as a bodyguard, blinked at him. “My hobby?”
“Yes. What do you do when you’re not working?”
“Watch the footy, then,” Dave said.
Brett waited a moment for it to sink in and make sense. It didn’t happen. “Uh... foot races? Foot modeling? Foot fetish?”
Dave stared at him like he was nuts. “The footy, like. The football.”
“Soccer?” Brett hazarded.
More astonished staring. “Nah, mate. Soccer’s for mung beans. I’m from Geelong. Aussie Rules, of course.”
Giving Brett, again, zero clue. “Got it,” he said. “Thanks. See you Monday.”
“Ten-fifteen,” Dave agreed. Brett’s follow-up with the surgeon. By which time, he would have figured out what Aussie Rules meant, and where Geelong was. Not to mention the meaning of “mung bean.”
It really was a different country.
She woke up late. At least she thought it was late. Not five-thirty, anyway, even though the unfamiliar room was shrouded in dimness.
It took her a second. It took her, in fact, moving to sit up and feeling the uncharacteristic weakness.
Right. She’d been poisoned by the food she’d cooked, she was in Brett’s bed, and she wasn’t making meatballs for the Haier-McGill wedding right now. It was time to deal with all of that.
At least she wasn’t repellent anymore. A few hours ago, she’d been sitting on Brett’s bed feeling exactly that when he’d come in from the front of the house. “I’ll sleep in the guest room,” she’d offered again. “I’m disgusting.”
In answer, he headed into the bathroom, and she thought,Yeah, mate. You don’t even have an answer, because there isn’t anything honest you can say,and considered how much she needed to stand up and how hard that felt, only to have him come out again holding something.
Folding toothbrush.
“I felt about twenty times better in the hospital,” he said, “once they gave me one of these. This is the one I used on the plane. Nearly new.” He tossed it to her, and she reached for it and missed. It landed on the bed, and then the rest of the things did. The PJ pants and T-shirt he tossed next, which unfolded in midair.
“I need a shower,” she said. “I don’t care how I feel, I’m not getting into bed with you without one.”
“Then let’s go do it.”
“You holding me up?” she asked with a look at his leg.
“I’d say,” he said, pulling off his T-shirt, which she was too weak to appreciate properly, then sitting on the bed beside her and getting the PJ bottoms off, “that we’re holding each other up. Works for me.”
He’d done it, too. He’d given her a few minutes’ head start, then had come into a bathroom that not only redefined “luxury” but was bigger than her living room and kitchen put together, opened the glass door of an enormous Carrera marble shower stall, where she was standing under the spray of one of the many showerheads, and eased himself to sitting opposite her, on the marble bench that ran across one entire wall. After that, he lifted a spray wand off its holder, pressed a button on the wall beside it, and said, “Come over here and choose a scent for us.”
The heat and the ecstasy of being clean at last were reviving her a bit, but she was more than ready to sit down. He scooted over, indicated the line of tiny bottles in a custom-built niche, and said, “I don’t know which.”
“You take scented showers?” she asked, trying for some sauciness that was hard to come by.
That hint of a smile. “First time. Which one?”
Lavender. Eucalyptus. Lemongrass. Tea tree. A few blends. She lifted something calledBeg Me, unscrewed the cap and took a sniff, and said, “This one. We’ll be girly and sexy.”
