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“Do you think you’re capable of getting out of your clothing without my assistance?”
Her lips thinned as she considered the question. And humiliatingly, the answer was a resounding no. The hoodie wouldn’t be a problem, but the button fly of her boyfriend jeans would be a challenge. Well, not so much a challenge as an insurmountable obstacle. There was no way she’d be able to undo those buttons with her numb, aching fingers.
She shrugged out of her moisture-heavy hoodie—dropping it to the tiled floor with a wet thwack—leaving only the soaked-through black tank top she wore beneath it.
Thereafter she was at a loss, staring helplessly down at her double-knotted boots while trembling violently, her chattering teeth and shuddering breath the only noise in the room.
Trystan Abbott shocked the hell out of her, when—with a quiet grunt—he sank to his knees in front of her and made quick work of unlacing her boots, then he encircled her ankle in his large hand.
“Lift.”
Incapable of doing anything other than obey, Iris dropped a hand to his broad shoulder for balance and lifted her foot while he tugged the boot off quickly and tossed it aside. He repeated the process with the other foot.
Then he remained kneeling there, at face level with her stomach. He said nothing and for a long moment he just sat there, staring at the soaked cotton tank top she wore. Thank God it was black or she’d be giving him quite the peep show—since she hadn’t bothered with a bra.
“Let’s do this,” he finally spoke, raising his face to meet her eyes. She could see the grim determination in his expression and the steely resolve in those beautiful eyes.
Before she could register his words and the meaning behind them, he slipped his left hand between the waistband of her jeans and her cold goosefleshed abdomen.
Iris sucked in a shocked breath when she felt the cold backs of his long fingers brush against her sensitive flesh.
Oh, God! This was so humiliating.
He grasped the placket of her jeans between thumb and forefinger, his knuckles flexing against her tummy at the move. Iris gritted her teeth, refusing to react in any way. This was purely impersonal. He was doing it because it needed to be done. And as such, Iris needed to treat this intimate touch as nothing more than a clinical necessity. Like visiting her doctor’s office. Yes, that was it! This was exactly the same as Dr. Herbert’s touch.
Only… Dr. Herbert was seventy, wore ill-fitting dentures, sported the world’s most unconvincing comb-over, and had known Iris since she was a baby. While the man kneeling at her feet was in his prime, gorgeous, and the world’s biggest movie star. And he currently had a big, assertive hand tucked into the waistband of her jeans—the blunt tips of his fingers intimately close to the top of her bikini panties—while his other fingers undid the stubborn buttons of her jeans.
Iris couldn’t help it—she moaned and covered her face with both hands.
“This is so embarrassing,” she said, her voice muffled by her hands.
He didn’t respond, merely peeled her wet jeans down her generous hips.
Iris squealed in horror when she realized her panties were starting to slide down with the denim.
“Oh, for the love of Jesus, please stop,” she pleaded, and his hands stilled on her hips. Where before they’d gripped the top of her jeans, he now flattened them against her rounded hips and held them there, staring up at her quizzically.
“Think you can manage from here?” he asked after a beat of silence and she blinked, surprised by the question. No. Not surprised by the question, but by the odd tremble in his voice when he asked said question.
“I think so,” she said on a whisper. He looked unconvinced and she nodded assertively. “Yes, I can.”
He pushed lithely to his feet and towered above her once more, too damned close for comfort.
“Uhm, what about…” He made a vague gesture and Iris cocked her head as she tried to decipher what it could mean.
“What about what?”
He took a step back, waved his fingers at her chest before his eyes dropped to where he was pointing. They seemed to snag there and—baffled—Iris followed his gaze down before hastily folding her arms over her very, very hard nipples. She wished she could say the reaction was entirely due to the cold and wet, but… she disguised a little shudder as she remembered the feeling of his fingers sliding down her abdomen. Her frikking stupidly sensitive abdomen, which had always been one of her wind me up and watch me pop erogenous zones.
“Your bra,” he stated after another weird little silence. “Can you?—”
“Not wearing one,” she said curtly, then immediately wished the words back. His lips curled into what looked like a full-on smirk and he opened his mouth to say something, but she hijacked his words before he could utter them.
“Don’t say it,” she bit out irritably, and this time he was the one to fold his arms over his chest as he waited for her to continue. Which she did, with a bitter note of self-deprecation in her voice. “I clearly don’t need one, right? That is what you were going to say? Or some nasty variation of the same. Yes?”
He held up his hands in surrender and took another step back.
“Get into that tub before you turn into a papsicle—get it?—papsicle because you’re a blood-sucking leech of a pap?”
