She swallowed thickly when she saw the flicker of his eyelids. Had he guessed what she’d been thinking?
His long fingers worked the button through the last hole. He whipped the shirt over his shoulders and draped it across
the back of the chair.
“I thought you’d want me to take off my shirt. So you can tend to my wounds. Doctor.”
Sophie ripped her gaze off the glorious expanse of lean, prime male flesh. The sight of his sexy lips shaped into a small smile was nearly as unsettling as his naked torso.
“Thanks. It’ll help,” she said, infusing a brisk sense of purpose into her voice. He must be used to having females temporarily short circuit at the sight of his body, after all. No reason to swell his male ego even further.
She scowled at her automatic thought as she set down the items on the counter and tore two paper towels off the roll. She was honest enough with herself to recognize her own defensiveness. Thomas never acted like a strutting rooster, despite his rugged male beauty, so it was unfair to cast him in that light. Just because she had a father whose conceit exceeded his considerable good looks didn’t mean that every man who was handsome was equally invested in his appearance.
He sat compliantly in the chair when she approached, saying nothing while she inspected the cuts on his neck.
She extracted most of the slivers easily, but one large piece was more deeply lodged than the others. He didn’t flinch when she finally removed the shard using the tweezers, but she saw how his shoulder muscles tensed, absorbing the pain.
“Sorry,” she murmured as she placed the glass and tweezers on the paper towel. “It looks like that’s all of it.”
“How’d you ever find this house?” Thomas asked a moment later, interrupting the silence between thunder bursts.
She paused in the action of cleaning his neck with cotton balls soaked in hydrogen peroxide. She’d been doing her damndest to attend to her task and ignore the compelling odor of combined male musk and spicy cologne that lingered so richly at his nape.
“My parents left it to me.” She noticed he was staring at some photos on the wall—black and white, highly stylized images of a beautiful couple walking and posing on the beach. “That’s them—there in the photos.”
He twisted his chin around to see her. “Have they passed away?”
“No. They’re just sort of absent. Psychologically speaking, anyway,” she said matter-of-factly. She looked up from unscrewing the antiseptic and noticed that his dark brows were furrowed in puzzlement.
“My parents are completely, utterly involved with two things: each other and their careers. They moved me to Hollywood when I was eleven years old. My father was chasing after a dream to become a famous actor, and my mother wanted to be in the thick of things, as well. She modeled when she was young, and started writing screenplays after she had me.” She glanced around the comfortable lake house with the mismatched furnishings, embroidered pillows, the old stereo with her parents’ extensive—and probably valuable, at this point—record collection stored in painted wooden crates. She loved the homey appeal of the house—perhaps because it represented what she’d never really had.
“We used to come here when I was little,” she explained in a low voice. “I usually got to bring a friend. It was a childhood dream come true: swimming until nightfall, running around the woods like savages, roasting marshmallows over a bonfire at night. My parents became a little less obsessive while they were here . . . a little happier.”
Thomas didn’t speak as she rubbed the antiseptic cream into his skin, but she sensed he waited expectantly. “Once my parents moved to California, they never came back to Haven Lake. The house stood empty until I returned when I came to Chicago for college.”
Thomas peered at her over his shoulder.
“You said you came here for a month every summer?”
“That’s right.”
“And they’ve never come back? Never met you here?” he asked as she rubbed cream into the final cut. Fat raindrops began to spatter on the window panes. She tried to ignore how intimate the scenario was—their quiet conversation about family, the cheerily lit kitchen, the storm outside.
Her fingertips on Thomas’s skin.
“No. I have to go to California to see my parents.” She nodded distractedly toward one of the photos on the wall as she peeled the paper off a Band-Aid. “That’s their house there, in the background of that picture. It sits right on the beach; it’s modern, fashionable . . . very clean.”
She paused in the act of affixing the bandage to his neck when he twisted his chin around farther and forced her to meet his stare. Even though she’d kept her tone level, he’d sensed her irony anyway. She read something in the depths of his eyes. A memory from yesterday evening came back to her in graphic detail.
I used to tell Rick you were like the little girl in the neighborhood who was always so clean; the kind that Mama wouldn’t let play rough with the other kids . . . the kind that was never allowed to get dirty.
She held her breath when he suddenly grabbed the wrist of her outstretched hand and turned himself on the swivel stool. He widened his long legs, bracketing her hips between his knees.
“So what you’re telling me,” he began, his low, gruff murmur causing goose bumps to rise on her neck. “Is that it wasn’t your parents who made you all prim and proper? You did that on your own, didn’t you, Sophie? They were too busy with each other . . . fulfilling their own dreams to make you into a good little girl.”
“They weren’t negligent, if that’s what you mean. I had everything I needed.”
His dark eyebrows went up on his forehead in a wry expression. “So you didn’t starve and you had clothes on your back.”