“Are you serious?” Stacie asked.
“Yes. I love the rain,” Maria said, ignoring the dubious expression on Stacie’s face. “But now I really need to get warm and out of these wet clothes.”
Stacie opened the door and let Maria enter first. “The bathroom is right over there,” Stacie said, gesturing down the hall. “Feel free to use the shower. Just toss your clothes out into the hall and I’ll stick them in the washer.”
“Thank you.”
Now that the fun was over, her clothes were just something wet, heavy and cloying against her body that she desperately needed to remove. She peeled them off as quickly as possible and opened the door a crack to drop them in the hall. To her surprise, Stacie was standing there with a robe and a few thick towels tucked under her arm. She was poised to knock. She stared at Maria for one awkward moment, then looked away, blindly pushing the whole pile into her arms. “For when you are done,” she managed to mumble before escaping down the hall.
Maria closed the door, dropped the towels down on the counter and turned on the shower. Just before she stepped in, she realized that she had opened the door completely naked. No wonder Stacie had turned all different shades of red. From the look on Stacie’s face before she ran away, and that was all she could call that hasty retreat down the hall, perhaps it was a good thing she hadn’t gone swimming today. She didn’t own a single bathing suit and she sure hadn’t planned on getting her outfit soaked.
She closed her eyes and let the water sluice down her back, chasing away the last of the chill. Her skin still tingled from the electricity that charged the air and every drop stung in a pleasant but sharp way until she warmed back up. She hadn’t expected a summer storm to bring such a cold rain with it. And mud, don’t forget the mud, she thought as she watched sandy brown streaks disappear down the drain. After their mid-creek escapade, it almost surprised her that she hadn’t shed a few tadpoles along with all of that dirt. A good bit of it had ended up in their hair, slung up and into the open cabin from the Jeep tires until they were both covered from head to toe. They looked like two ancient wild women escaping from their own myths to join the modern world. Maria threw back her head and laughed out loud, unable to contain her delight at having such wonderful memories to keep forever.
Stacie is going to think I’ve lost my mind, and maybe I have.
She thought about that last look Stacie had given her, the one that escaped just before she did. Raw emotion as naked and exposed as Maria was, but exquisitely more intimate because it had nothing to do with the amount of clothing she was wearing. Desire and longing, bottled up and pushed down for so long it threatened to roll over the both of them. Those emotions called to her, making her body rebel in its own demand for release.
And you told her to what? To wait. To let things grow between you and see where they go. And, now? Now all you can think about is that you are about to walkout of this room with nothing on but a robe and wondering what would happen if you stole a kiss. It wouldn’t take much to loosen the tie, to let the fabric drop to the floor in a discarded puddle of self-restraint and encourage her to forget what you said this afternoon. You’re in her house, just the two of you all alone and with no one to see what you do between now and dawn.
Suddenly, the steam and heat were too much for her. She shut the water off and stepped out onto the cool tiles, wishing it was that easy to cool her thoughts.
Chapter Nine
The sound of the shower running set off a flurry of activity that managed to keep Stacie’s hands busy, if not her mind. She hadn’t planned on company and her small house reflected that. Josie would laugh at her and tell her to calm down, that the place just looked lived in, but that didn’t stop Stacie from racing around the small living room and trying to stack her mail.
A pile of JAVMA, the Veterinarian’s version of the American Medical Journal that kept her abreast of any new breakthroughs in care and treatment of her four legged patients, along with another stack of reference material that should have found a way into a bookcase a long time ago, went into a not so small pile underneath the coffee table. A stack of clothes too dirty to track into the house sat where she had left them, near the door leading out to the garage. A dirty cup in the sink, another on the counter, and an old pot of coffee she had forgotten to rinse out, the list of things grew with every circuit through the kitchen and living room. She opened the refrigerator door, then closed it quickly. There was no explanation for the sad state of her refrigerator. All she could do was hope nothing would jump out on its own power after fermenting itself into some kind of cold-cut Frankenstein monster. The coffee maker seemed a safer bet, so she cleaned that out and started a fresh pot, then rinsed out the coffee cups. The sink was clean, at least, but that was also closely related to the state of her refrigerator. She rarely cooked so there weren’t any dirty dishes to worry about.
She finally stopped her frantic attempts to
