He cleared this throat. “It’s fine.”
“Maybe we should go to the ER.”
“For a cat scratch?”
“Cat scratches can be bad.”
“This one isn’t.”
“It’s pretty deep.”
“Lexa, I’m fine.”
She returned to her cleaning, every swipe of the fabric a creeping torture he’d never experienced before. But then she set the washcloth down and dabbed antibiotic cream on her fingers, and the torture began anew.
Because this time, she was touching him directly. Hot fingertips against his hot skin.
She looked up. “Does it hurt?”
He shook his head, amazed he could talk at all. “It’s fine.”
Except he wasn’t fine. He was nearly hyperventilating. Not from pain, at least not from the pain of the scratch. Her touch was like a branding iron against his naked skin.
God strike him down for the most inappropriate reaction of all time given everything she was going through, but the first thing he thought was how amazing it would be to feel her hands on other parts of him, and suddenly his groin got the misguided idea that now would be the perfect time to stand at attention. Fuck.
He jerked away from her. “That’s good.”
Alexis blinked up at him, cheeks growing pinker. “I’m sorry. I—I’ll get you a new shirt.”
* * *
Alexis escaped to her bedroom upstairs and sank to the edge of the bed. She pressed her hands to her eyes. Nope. Didn’t work. She could still see him.
Shirtless.
As in naked from the waist up.
As in trim hips encased in faded denim rising to a wide V of shoulders, bulging triceps, and toned pecs that played peekaboo beneath a layer of dark hair that gathered in the valley between before descending in a straight line down taut abs toward . . .
No. She wouldn’t think about the toward part.
Holy shit, how did she not know he looked like that under his comic book T-shirts? And double holy shit, she had just ogled her best friend, and he knew it.
“Lexa.”
She shot to her feet and turned toward his voice. He hovered in the doorway as if afraid to cross the threshold. In the play of light and shadow from the single lamp, his face was angular and sharp.
“You have a tattoo on your back,” she blurted.
“Yeah. Didn’t . . . Didn’t you know?”
“No.”
He took a tentative step into the room. “It’s the date of my dad’s death.”
Her eyes fell to the wide spread of his shoulders. And then farther down to the hard ridge of his collarbone, and farther still to the dark hair covering defined pecs and tight . . .
“Lexa . . .” His voice was strained. Maybe even embarrassed.
Crap. She’d just been busted again.
Alexis quickstepped to her closet, threw it open, and yanked a sweatshirt from a hanger. It was his. He’d given it to her last winter to wear when she spilled spaghetti sauce on herself. She’d never returned it, and he never asked for it back.
He took it from her. “Thanks.”
She shrugged. “It’s yours.”
Alexis sidestepped him to return to the other side of the bed, a safer distance. She looked at the floor as he pulled the sweatshirt over his head.
“I’m decent,” he said, trying and failing to make a joke out of the sexual tension that made the air sizzle and crack like a fire.
She glanced up through hooded lashes. “Are you . . . Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry about Beefcake. He’s just—”
“I’m fine, Lexa.” The corner of his mouth quirked up in a half smile that sent her heart into a rapid flutter. “But I don’t think he likes the harness.”
She laughed all nervous-like and then cringed at how unnatural it sounded. “Right. No, I think maybe I won’t be using it.”
She met his eyes and then quickly looked away, but her gaze instead fell to the bed, but that suddenly seemed way too intimate, so she looked back at him, and then, oh shit, her cheeks blazed as hot as if she’d just pulled fresh muffins from the oven.
This was ridiculous. She was acting like a teenager with her first crush. “Are you staying?” she blurted.
His expression went blank. “I— Do you want me to?”
“I—I was just asking. I mean, it’s late, so I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to go home, but you can stay if you want. I just—”
Her words became a jumbled run-on sentence as he walked toward her. He stopped inches away, and her breath lodged in her chest.
“Alexis.” His voice was strained again.
She gulped. “What?”
“Do you want me to stay again tonight?”
She noticed everything at once—the low register of his voice, the clean, manly scent of him, his muscled forearms, the overpowering size of him. And heat. It radiated off him in waves as if he generated his own solar power.
Yes. I want you to stay. The words were there, but she couldn’t get them out. Something was wrong with her. She was itchy in her own skin, jumbled in her own thoughts, unsure of her own emotions.
She put a foot of distance between them. “I’m okay,” she whispered. “You can go.”
* * *
The drive from her house to his had never been so long, and Noah was pretty sure he’d left more than a chunk of his skin behind. He’d obviously left his common sense. Because it was a test of willpower in the entire twenty-minute drive to not turn around, return to her bedroom, drag her into his arms, and beg her to touch him again.
That was pathetic enough. But even worse was that the only thing stopping him was a sliver of uncertainty that he’d imagined the whole thing.
Noah pulled into his driveway and squinted as motion lights flooded the lawn and garage with a yellow glow. Noah turned off his car, dragged his hands down his face, and groaned out loud as he dropped his head against the seat.
No, he hadn’t imagined it. He’d been naked in front of enough women—not a lot, but enough—that he recognized the look on Alexis’s face. Desire. And he had no idea what to
