Page 114 of Her Reluctant Hero
“What on earth happened?”
“A little accident,” Adrian said.
“If the mud was on your back instead of your front, I’d think we’d made a mistake leaving you alone up there.” She flashed Mallory a grin that confused her. She thought Mallory and Adrian had been fooling around and she was winking at Mallory? No jealousy at all? “Especially after that walk down memory lane last night. I’m telling you, this site is cursed.”
Mallory decided the best defense was to ignore her. She stepped forward. “How can I help?”
“Why don’t you guys clean up first?”
Adrian glanced around. “I think the shower tent is on the bottom of that pile over there.”
“Use the ocean.” Linda inclined her head toward the beach. “It’ll get most of that gunk off.”
Mallory grimaced at the thought of bathing in salt water; it would itch like hell later. But she had mud in her bra, down the front of her pants, in her hair, her ears. She had to get cleaned up.
And she’d left her clean clothes in the truck up on the hill.
The hell with it. She was heading for the surf.
Adrian came on her heels, also without a change of clothes. “Your stuff in the truck?” he asked.
“Yep. Yours?”
“Yep.”
“So no points for planning ahead, huh?”
She stopped dead when she reached the apex of the sand dune and looked out at theMiss M, tilted at a thirty-degree angle in shallow water. Adrian swore and ran past her, shouting for Toney and Jacob.
The five of them working together got the boat righted. They found no significant damage, other than water in the gas tank. Adrian stepped away, grease from the gas and water filter now layered on top of the dried mud.
“So much for taking the boat to the city to catch your plane,” he said over his shoulder. “The filter should dry in a day or so. Looks like we’re stuck here.”
She struggled to hold on to her frustration. It wasn’t his fault they were stuck here, right? He hadn’t called the storm on them. He couldn’t have known the boat would be swamped.
Tears burning her eyes, she turned away, not wanting him to see her cry.
Adrian moved in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders. She tensed at his touch and he dropped his hands away, his face grim through her blurred vision.
“It will be all right. Two days at the most. Two days won’t make that much difference.”
She wished the wedding was the entire problem. No, her real problem was staying here with all the memories of what they’d once been.
“You’ll feel better after you wash off. Come on.” He headed into the gently rolling water, peeling off his shirt. She turned away. The rippling muscles, the bronzed skin was too familiar.
He noticed that she balked. “Come on, Mallory, it’s not like you’ve never seen it before, and we’re not exactly going to get this mud off with our clothes on.”
She folded her arms and glanced behind her. The others had gone to camp, leaving them alone. Her nerves simmered.
“I’m not going in with you if you’re going in naked.”
He straightened, unzipping his shorts. “That’s a first.”
Damn, damn, why did he have to go and say something like that? Now he had her remembering more than one time they’d gone into the surf shamelessly and made love in the waves. She could feel his arms around her, feel his body push inside her. “It’s not a good idea.”
“We’re adults.” He shoved the shorts down and her face heated as she averted her gaze. His tone held the slightest hint of a taunt. “You said yourself you’d learned how to control your urges.”
Not where he was concerned. Even mud-splattered, he was—
