Falling for the Good Guy (Can't Resist #2)(15)

Within minutes, they were back inside the house, a completely muddy mess. She let Sammy loose in the kitchen and then turned and ran right into Brian’s massive chest, still minus the shirt.

Holy swizzle sticks. So it’s true, adrenaline really is a potent aphrodisiac.

“So do you want me to chew you out now or after we shower?”

The way he said ‘we’ was inspiring all sorts of inappropriate ideas in her head.

And by the naked lust she saw darkening his gaze, it was clear the inspiration was mutual.

“After,” she squeaked before taking off for her bathroom like a chicken. Thank goodness she now had a spare shower in the extension her landlords had built. She locked the door to the master bath quickly. Not because she was worried Brian was going to try and join her.

But to stop herself from asking him to.




A VERY THOROUGH, VERY COLD shower later, Brian went out to the kitchen and swiftly executed phase one of Operation Romance Abby, finishing with time to spare. Luckily, she was taking a pretty long time in the shower. Thinking about what she could possibly be doing in there, however, was rapidly undoing the effects of his cold shower.

Down boy. He shifted his towel a bit.

“Hey.”

Brian looked up from the cup of coffee he’d made himself and saw Abby shuffling into the room looking as sweet as ever in a pair of his old, baggy sweats. “Hey yourself, cutie.” He walked over to give her a quick kiss before she could object, and was pleased to note her look of disappointment when he pulled back.

Progress.

Smiling, he leaned against the back of the sofa and sipped his coffee silently. The harder Abby avoided looking at him below the neck, the bigger his smile got.

“So…where’s Skylar?” Abby glanced at the wall clock behind him. “It’s almost five.”

“I wasn’t sure how long my parent-teacher conference was going to go today so I asked my mom to pick up Skylar after school and drive her over to Connor’s to wait out the storm. Even though it was still early, I didn’t want her walking in this weather.”

He saw Abby’s surprised, almost hurt expression and clarified gently, “I didn’t know what you had planned this afternoon, and I didn’t think you’d want to drop Skylar off at Connor’s.”

“Oh.” She nodded.

When she winced as she shifted the weight on her feet, alarmed, he shot over to her. “You’re injured.”

“Just a tweaked ankle and a minor scrape, no biggie.”

“Babe, there are a lot of fungi and other nasty things floating around during these dust storms. Valley Fever isn’t the only thing you can catch from the spores in the flying debris. Get over to the couch. Let me check out your cuts.”

Raiding her medicine cabinet for supplies, and then her freezer for some frozen veggies for her ankle, he returned and rolled her sweat pants up her leg, hissing with every new bit of bloody skin he revealed. The angry red gouges in her kneecap had his protective alpha instincts going crazy. “You should’ve called me, Abby. I would have dropped everything and been right over.” For chrissakes, he’d almost had a stroke when he’d happened by to check on her, only to see her splayed across the roof with nothing more than a cotton hoodie protecting her from the elements. “I still can’t believe you were up on the roof at all, let alone in the middle of a storm.”

When she pouted stubbornly, he locked his jaw. Loving someone as fiercely independent as Abby was likely going to take years off his life. “And your injuries aren’t that minor,” he continued scolding, because he just couldn’t stop. Gingerly, he applied peroxide over the large strawberry that covered her entire left knee. “You can’t be so cavalier about wounds like this after a dust storm.”

“I wasn’t; I scrubbed it out really well in the shower,” she defended.

So that’s what she’d been doing in there.

He put bacitracin on the scrape and put a pillow under her knee. “Let it breathe tonight. Tomorrow, you can put more medicine and a bandage over it.” Now on to her ankle. He lifted her leg up and turned her foot back and forth, checking the range of motion. “It’s not too swollen, seems like a small sprain.” He put a paper towel on her ankle and the frozen veggies over it before wrapping her ankle, ice and all, with an ace bandage. “Keep this one elevated,” he instructed, perching her leg on the back cushions of the couch.

“I’d almost forgotten how good you are at all this.”

“What do you mean this?” he asked as he slowly massaged her calf and foot on her sprained leg.

“This.” She waved her hands over herself. “You took such good care of Beth.”

He shrugged. “It’s no big deal—all basic stuff.”

Abby sighed and swatted him playfully in the stomach. “Take a compliment will you, Sullivan?”

He caught her hand against his skin and slid it slowly up to his lips.

Her soft brown eyes dilated sharply, darkening with awareness.

“Thank you for the compliment, Abby,” he said as he kissed his way over her palm and across the racing pulse along her inner wrist.




ABBY WENT MUTE as she felt Brian’s tongue lash across her skin, sensitizing the nerves to levels beyond pleasure.