He wasn’t compelled by the dare. Whether or not she would think he was. He wasn’t compelled by the challenge in her voice. It was just her. Which was how he found himself shrugging his coat off and then stripping his shirt off. “I don’t have swim trunks on.”
This was a mistake.
Her eyes went round. Well, she’d made her bed so she could lie in it. He undid his belt buckle and kicked his boots off, pushing his jeans down his thighs and leaving himself wearing only his black boxer briefs.
Everything slowed down.
She looked at him.Reallylooked. From his face,down to his chest, his stomach. He watched her eyes skim quickly over his package, and to his thighs, then with an almost panicked speed, go back to his face.
He felt it.
Dammit to hell, he felt it.
When she looked at him like that it was difficult. And she probably didn’t even know how she had looked at him. But he had seen a curiosity in her eyes that wasn’t going to lead anywhere good.
Would you rather she looked at some other man that way?
That was a shitty thought. And an intrusive one.
What he wanted to do was wrap her up in cotton wool and put her on a shelf until she was able to process what had happened with the dissolved wedding. He didn’t want her going off half-cocked with some ridiculous notion that she was unappealing and needed to test herself with some random man to prove she was hot. But he also didn’t need her looking at him like she was both curious and hungry. It was just bad. It was all bad.
“Aggghh.”
The moment was broken by Rue’s plaintive noise.
Rue was hopping from one foot to the other because the ground was so fucking cold.
“The water’s only going to make this worse,” he said.
“We can do it!” she shouted.
“This is insane. And not only that, it’s unnecessary.”
“Quit being a baby!” she said.
“I am not being a baby. I am being a reasonable human being who is pointing out to you that this is not going to—”
And then she shrieked and began running toward the water. At full tilt. And he had no choice but to follow.
The minute the icy water enveloped her, Rue knew she had made a mistake. Hell, she had pretty much known it from the moment they had pulled up, but he was giving her such a hard time and she wouldn’t allow him to win. Which meant they both had to lose.
And then...
Then he had stripped his shirt off, his pants off, and she had found herself staring at a whole lot more of his body then she usually did.
Everything was so tangled up in her head. She was single. So that was a thing. Single for the first time in a very long time, and he was a man and she didn’t normally think of him that way.
Well, it wasn’t like she had never thought of him that way. But that wasn’t what defined him the most. It was all this sex talk. Around him. At him. With him.
And suddenly then she couldn’t really think of him as anything else. The most gorgeous man she had ever seen in her life, standing there with her half-naked out in the middle of nowhere, and that was the thing that had got her feet moving. Like she was running away from him.
Only he had followed.
And now she was submerged in ice.
It was like the thought jarred her awake. She propelled herself back up toward the surface and gasped, which actually came out a lot more like a scream as she started windmilling her way desperately to shore.
“That was so dumb!” she screamed as she pulled herself up on the shore.
