NICE GIRL TO LOVE (THE COMPLETE THREE-BOOK COLLECTION)(63)

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.

If he didn’t stop, there was a good chance she’d pull the towel he was wearing right off.

“Do you want me to take it off?” he asked, his words tickling her skin.

Yes. “No,” she stammered, unable to take her eyes off the portion of the towel that was tucked at his hipbone. Just one good tug—

“I was talking about the ice, sweetheart. But if you have other things in mind…”

Ice? What ice? “Oh! Ow.” The burning of the ice at her ankle finally filtered through to her brain. “Yes, actually, can you take it off? I’m a wuss when it comes to icing my injuries.”

Brian quickly pulled off the ice and rewrapped her ankle before resuming his massage. “So back to the other things you wanted me to take off,” he teased.

Okay, seriously? It was a really good thing the man had never flirted with her before because she was certain she’d never have survived it, especially not when his hands were kneading her muscles into butter.

“You’re impossible,” she complained thickly, though it came out more like a purr. His massages should be illegal for how good they felt.

She blinked slowly at him and started wondering idly what was so wrong with him losing the towel. A fuzzy smile drifted across her face.