He made one last attempt to beg off, but it was becoming very obvious to him that the woman didn’t know how to take no for an answer. He opened his mouth to protest again, but before he could say a word, Hailey was already talking.
“Look, Mr. Fortune, I need your shirt,” Hailey stated in a friendly but firm tone.
With every step that this persistent petite woman had taken toward him, Dillon had taken an equal step back. But now his back was against the wall—literally—and he had nowhere to go.
The only way he could get her to stop was to raise his voice and tell her to back off, although that really wasn’t his style. However, as a last resort, he was willing to change his tactics.
And he was just about to, when the slender, vivacious spa manager cut him off at the knees. She raised up those big beautiful eyes of hers, aimed them directly at his and then fired the winning salvo.
Hailey said, “Please?”
And just like that, Dillon felt as if he’d been completely disarmed.
With a loud sigh, he conceded that he had lost the battle.
But how was he going to remove the shirt without feeling like a male stripper?
Hailey had always been blessed with the ability to somehow intuit what was going on in a person’s mind. She applied that ability to the situation she found herself in at the moment. When she did it, she was able to see exactly why Dillon was still hesitating to give her the shirt.
For some reason, he was embarrassed. Dillon was obviously well built, but apparently he was not one of those men who was comfortable about flaunting it.
“Tell you what,” she proposed. “There’s no one around here so you can take your shirt off now. I’ll even turn around to give you your privacy,” Hailey offered, then smiled brightly at him. “You can’t really do better than that, Mr. Fortune.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he countered, contemplating whether or not to tell her exactly how he could have done better. He could have passed up on this royal pain of a tour altogether, he thought. But saying that out loud sounded cruel to him, so he decided to let it go.
Rather than argue with him, Hailey deliberately turned her back on the man she was determined to impress.
“Any time you’re ready,” she cheerfully announced, holding the robe out to the side.
Keeping her back to him, Hailey took a single step backward toward the contractor so that the robe would be more accessible for him.
As she did so, because of the angle where he was standing, Hailey realized that she could see his naked upper torso. It was reflected in the side mirror near him and that image was ricocheted back to her via the larger mirror that ran the length of the left wall.
The end result was that she was able to see exactly what he undoubtedly hadn’t wanted her to see—Dillon in all of his exceptionally sculpted glory.
Hailey’s mouth suddenly went very dry. It became clear to her that she wasn’t really able to swallow even if her life depended on it.
Dear Lord, the man was magnificent!
It was all Hailey could do not to utter the word out loud.
Belatedly, she realized that she had given herself away because in that first unguarded, unprepared moment, she had sucked in her breath the way someone sitting in the first car of a roller-coaster ride might do just as that car started to take its first plunge down the steep incline.
No matter how prepared she might have thought she was for the sight of this good-looking male, she was not that prepared. Seeing all those muscles, all those incredibly hard ridges, even secondhand because she was seeing them all reflected in the mirror, she was totally unprepared for the effect that gorgeous body had on her.
Maybe he hadn’t heard her, Hailey thought, crossing her fingers.
The next moment, her hopes were dashed. She could see from the raised eyebrows in his reflection that he’d heard her. Moreover, he probably knew that she knew.
Dillon, however, made the decision to carry on the charade and pretend that he hadn’t heard her sharp intake of breath. It was far safer that way. This way there would be no need to talk about anything.
Ignorance created a welcomed cloak that draped helpfully over everything, he thought as he thrust the shirt in the direction of Hailey’s waiting outstretched hand. “Here’s my shirt.”
“I can tell,” she answered, smiling to herself as her fingers closed over the surrendered article. Without turning around—she could tell by the sound that he was just shrugging into the robe she’d given him—Hailey started to hurry off. “I’ll get this started. Your shirt will be the only thing in the washing machine so it should be done in no time flat.”
It wouldn’t be done fast enough for him, Dillon thought.
When Hailey returned to the area several minutes later, Dillon saw that her hands were empty. Still, he couldn’t help asking her, “Is the shirt ready yet?”
“The spa’s washing machine is the very latest model on the market,” Hailey proudly told him. “But it’s not that fast,” she politely pointed out. “Again, I am so sorry about all this.”
Had he been one of those spiteful people willing to blame everyone else for anything he had to put up with, Dillon would have let her continue beating herself up for dousing his shirt and causing him to practically sneeze his brains out. But to do so wouldn’t have been right, or fair and he had too much of a conscience to indulge in that sort of behavior.
“It’s not your fault,” he told her. “The fault is mine. I wasn’t
