She glanced at his face in time to see his eyes darken with reluctant hunger. A muscle tensed in his jaw.
No. Uh-uh. Absolutely not, Roxy. Tangling with any man, much less a surly lawman who looked at her with alternating degrees of distrust and disapproval, ranked low on her to-do list. Her system craved the chemistry, that’s all. And chemistry had a way of blowing up on her.
Officer Donovan cleared his throat. “Nice tat.” With the pad of his finger, he traced the small flock of black birds winging their way up her ankle. Even his fingers looked official. Long, squared, with clean nails trimmed in neat, no-nonsense lines.
“Thanks,” she managed, while nerve endings all over her body reacted as if he’d stroked far more personal areas. An uncomfortably vivid scenario popped into her mind. Her, lying in the back of this very cruiser, floating just below consciousness while those official fingers carefully but thoroughly roamed over her body. Not another fantasy, her fired-up nerve endings assured her. A memory. He’d frisked her. The realization brought instant heat to her cheeks. She’d like to call the reaction mortification, but the sad truth was the idea of Officer Donovan touching her so intimately had her hot and bothered for all the wrong reasons.
Maybe he realized he’d set off an erotic chain reaction with his casual touch because he released her as if he’d been burned. “Lift your foot so I can bandage your heel.”
“10-4, Officer.” If she was any kind of a grown-up, she’d tell him to hand over the first aid kit and tend to herself, but she’d already had the woozies once today, so she raised her foot closer to his eye level. “Good?”
He dipped his head to get a better angle then froze, let out a strangled groan, and looked away. “Ah…no. Not good.”
That’s when she realized her position offered him an unobstructed view up her skirt. Immediately, she lowered her leg while an offended part of her insisted, Hey, some guys think it’s pretty good.
“I’ll do it.” She held out her hand for the first aid kit.
“Let’s try this instead.” His voice returned to the calm, sure tone she already thought of as normal. “Turn around and kneel on the seat.” Before she could fully process the instructions, he took hold of her and positioned her how he wanted her.
She grabbed the headrest rather than end up on all fours across the seat. The notion introduced a whole new montage of unbidden images into her overheated imagination. Him shoving her skirt up, raking her underwear down, and dishing out his own personal brand of punishment for hitchhiking. Her hormones went wild at the prospect.
What he actually did was wrap his hand around her ankle and ease her foot to the edge of the seat. Her stomach clenched as she knelt with her back to him, granting him unsupervised access to her injured heel. She couldn’t have felt more vulnerable if he’d told her to close her eyes and take a trust fall into his arms. Then again, she’d essentially done that when she’d passed out, and apparently, he’d caught her, so maybe she could trust him with this, too?
She balanced on her knees and counted the broken white lines bisecting the empty stretch of highway visible through the back window. Behind her, he got to work. He had a surprisingly gentle touch for someone with such a brusque attitude. Gentle and efficient. It took less than a minute for him to dab antibacterial cream on her heel and apply a jumbo Band-Aid. Yet somehow during that time, he managed to dissolve every ounce of resistance she possessed.
Whenever he leaned in, his hair grazed the back of her thigh. The light tickle left her fighting shivers despite the August heat and struggling to keep her breathing even. Did he know what he was doing to her? Did he feel it, too?
A tug on her booted foot pulled her thoughts away from her tingling erogenous zones. She twisted around in time to see his hot stare travel up her body to stop at her face.
“I want to check your other foot,” he said in a voice thick enough to tell her she wasn’t the only one getting a little something extra from playing doctor.
The air between them sizzled like lightning-charged ozone. Though he hadn’t phrased his words as a question so much as a statement of intent, he paused, hand wrapped around her instep, waiting for her to respond.
“That one doesn’t hurt.” Nonetheless, she relaxed her foot to let him to remove the boot.
“It’s intact,” he said briskly once he’d dispensed with her sock, but his hands were just as quick and careful as he placed a protective Band-Aid over her heel. A moment later, he uttered a soft, “Done.” His hair brushed the back of her thigh once more as he raised his head.
She twisted herself around to put some space between them but moved too quickly for her light head and ended up swaying as she dropped onto the seat. He grabbed her shoulders and steadied her. Gray dots swarmed her vision, but she blinked them away and focused on his face.
His brow furrowed. A corner of his mouth tightened. “Easy.” He released her shoulders slowly and kept his hands hovering there for a moment in case she toppled. “You’re not going to pass out on me again, are you, Roxy?”
Was she? Her hands shook, so she clasped them together and shoved them between her knees. The position brought her head lower, which helped. “No,” she insisted, as much to herself as him. “I’m okay.”
He hesitated for several heartbeats, and she felt the weight of his stare. “Stay,” he finally said and stood.
Sit. Stay. The single-word commands were getting old fast. Before she could share her disdain over being ordered around like
