“What is it?” Simon demanded.
“Where are your clothes?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I spilled coffee on my damn shirt. I was rushing up here to talk to you and got hot coffee all over myself.” He cursed loudly.
“There’s an extra shirt in the drawer of one of your cabinets,” she reminded him.
His eyes locked on hers and the hard expression on his face softened. “You’re right. I forgot.”
She didn’t need him to ask for help. After she had gone to ask him for help earlier today, returning the favor was the right thing to do. Springing into action she walked over to one of the cabinets, grabbed a shirt from the bottom drawer, and handed it to him.
“Wait a minute, you’ve still got coffee on you.” She grabbed the stained shirt from his desk and started to dab at his chest, doing her best to get the hot liquid off his hard body.
She inspected his exposed skin for burns, but there weren’t any. Satisfied, she set the stained shirt down and motioned for him to get dressed. It took all the strength she had left to appear as detached and nonchalant as possible. Revealing how much his naked torso excited her was just asking for trouble. Not to mention, drooling over her ex-boss at work was liable to get her dismissed. She was on thin enough ice as it was.
Simon slipped into the shirt and started buttoning up. He cleared his throat. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” she said, trying to keep her voice even despite her stomach doing somersaults. “I think we need to talk.”
When he reached the final button, he let out an exasperated breath. “All right, Heather, let me have it.”
She frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you came in here guns blazing,” he shot back.
Annoyed, she lifted her hands to press down his collar and smooth out the wrinkles in the shirt. She tried to ignore how intimate it was to be helping him into his clothes like this, but that didn’t stop her hands from shaking slightly when her fingers brushed against him.
“I’m not trying to fight with you, Simon,” she said.
He crossed his arms. “Is that why you stormed in here?”
“Why did you hide me from the police?” she demanded. “Do you have any idea how guilty that probably makes me look?”
“You’re welcome.”
“What am I thanking you for?” she demanded.
His blue eyes darkened dangerously. “I hid you from the police and this is your way of thanking me?”
“I didn’t ask you to hide me from the police,” she said. “I came to you to ask you a simple question and the next thing I knew I was being shoved into the Dover building like some fugitive.”
He scoffed. “If you think you’re such a fugitive, why don’t you call those cops back and see what happens?”
She swallowed an irritated groan. Damn, he was so infuriating! This was why she had hesitated to ask for his help. She asked for one favor and suddenly he’d be helping her in every aspect of her life. If he wasn’t getting in her ex-husband’s face to defend her honor, he was taking risks he couldn’t afford with the police. It wasn’t that she wasn’t grateful—she was—it was that Simon didn’t understand failure. He’d never had to back down from anything. Never had to pick up the pieces and start over.
“You think it’s easy for me to turn down help?” she asked. “Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is for me to still need help? To need someone to look out for me and bail me out of things?”
He reached his hand out to her but she sidestepped it, backing away from him.
“Of course I don’t think it’s easy,” he said. “But it wouldn’t kill you to accept help. And I don’t mean the kind of help you seem ashamed to ask for. I mean real help. The kind that can actually make your life easier. I know that we’ve had our differences, Heather, but why do you keep refusing my help? Is it because you think you don’t deserve it? Is that what your ex-husband has made you think?”
“We’re not doing this,” she snapped. “We’re not having this heartfelt talk where you wrangle your way back into my good graces. I’m still angry with you.”