“I can’t help you out there,” Dan said. “You’re the one who has to live with your choices, not me.”
“Fair enough. Should we have a talk about our sexual histories before we proceed?” she suggested.
He fought to keep the smile off his face. He should have known she’d do her safety checks first. “We’re getting pretty clinical, but yes, maybe we should get that out of the way, since the condoms are in my jeans pocket right now.”
She glanced at his jeans, then at him. “You didn’t think this through, did you, Sheriff?”
He waggled his brows. “You could always bring one with you.”
“Or, we could start with that talk and determine if there’s a need.” She launched right in. “I haven’t had sex in almost a year. I’m on the pill, mostly because I work with men and you just never know, and at my last checkup I was given a clean bill of health.”
He wasn’t sure what she meant by, ‘I work with men and you just never know,’ since it could go a few different ways, but he didn’t like the sounds of it at all.
“I haven’t had sex in over a year”—he pushed aside the main reason why not—“and that’s definitely because I work mostly with men. I’m healthy, I use condoms because they haven’t made a pill for men yet, at least not that I’m aware of, and also for protection from STDs, so I guess as long as we’re willing to trust each other, this means we’re both good to go.”
“And thus ends the romantic prelude,” she said lightly.
“Is that what you’re looking for?” he asked. “Romance?” If so, she could have fooled him. He’d tried that with the invitations to dinner and she kept shooting him down. The blatant approach was garnering him much better results.
“God, no.”
She caught the sides of her dress and peeled it off, over her head, and he’d have to think about how fast she’d answered him later, because she wasn’t wearing a bra and her breasts were fantastic. And as for the panties?
She might as well have left them home, too.
The dress fluttered to the ground by her feet. Sadly, the panties stayed put. Well, he could work around that limitation.
She edged her way down the slight embankment to the water’s edge, one arm supporting her breasts while she used the other for balance, and dipped her toes in the water.
She jerked her foot back. “That’s what you call fantastic?”
Drenched in moonlight, her toned, naked body surpassed that descriptor by far. He pried his tongue free from the roof of his mouth. “If the river’s too low or too warm, it carries bacteria. So yes. Once you’re wet, it’s just like a bathtub.”
He floated on his back, letting the river’s slow-swirling eddy twist him about. The river burbled over the rocks in the shallows. A fish jumped upstream. He heard the splash as its tail slapped the water. The cold wasn’t affecting his interest in her in the least, so if she was playing for time, he could be patient.
She waded in until she was a few feet from where he was, then sucked in a deep breath and submerged her whole body. She came up gasping and flipped the wet, jagged bangs from her forehead.
“Still not feeling the bathwater,” she spluttered.
“Give it a minute.”
He had his feet under him now. The water was chest deep where he stood. He dove down, intending to grab one of her legs and drag her under again, but she moved, and the water was murky because it was night, so he couldn’t see.
When he came up for air, she was ten feet away.
“Like I couldn’t see that coming,” she said, the eyeroll implied, and he laughed. He took a few short strokes and glided toward her, stopping a few inches away so that they almost touched. He reached out and did just that, tracking the tip of his finger down the line of her cheek, then her throat, to her bare shoulder. Her wet skin was cool but not cold, so her shiver likely had little to do with the temperature of the water. At least, that was what he hoped.
Anticipation shuddered the length of his spine. “Ready to call this a date yet?” he asked softly.
Her upturned eyes, large and unreadable in the muted light, searched his face. “That depends. Who’s Andy?”
The question brought him up short. Surprisingly, the pain and anger usually brought on by hearing Andy’s name spoken out loud didn’t come. At some point over the past months, it had been replaced by sadness—for who she had been, for what she could have become, and what she’d never be.
Only his mother or one of his sisters could be responsible for Jazz knowing that name, however. No doubt they thought they were doing him a favor—helping get him back in the saddle, so to speak—but she’d picked a fine time to ask.
“A girl I grew up with.”
He hoped a short answer would put an end to the questions. He wasn’t naturally inclined to talk about his feelings for one woman while he was naked with another.