Page 88 of The Mating Game
“Yeah,” he breathes. “Just…hold still.”
No trouble there, I think. Even though when I’m standing this close, I’m assaulted again by the warmth and scent of him. So much so that it makes something pulse low in my belly. Makes me even more aware of the fact that I’m naked with him.Again.
His hands move over me carefully when I release my grip on him, and I feel the terry cloth gingerly meeting my skin as he slowly works the towel around my body. I replace his hands with mine as soon as my fingers can find the towel’s edges, quickly covering myself with it for some semblance of modesty as I attempt to straighten.
“I can help you to your room,” he tells me. “Just grab my hand.”
Once again I find myself holding Hunter’s hand, but this time he pulls my arm up and over his shoulder to tuck me into his side, no doubt trying to support my weight so I can hobble to my room. If I weren’t so painfully aware of how close my naked body is to him, I might actually die from embarrassment.
But I am aware. I amveryaware.
It’s hardnotto be aware when the thin light of dusk is still spilling in from my bedroom window, less so now than it was when I got into the shower, but still enough that I can make us both out as Hunter guides me to my bed. I peek up at his face to find it dutifully trained upward at the ceiling, his lips pressed into a tight line as he helps me along.
“I’m not looking,” he assures me.
A childish part of me pouts somewhere in the back of my mind.I mean, doesn’t hewantto look? Even a little? It’s not as if he hasn’t already seen it. I quickly squash that ridiculousness though. Mostly because I’m still hobbling and growing increasingly colder by the second—it’s hard to feel indignant when your nipples could cut glass.
“My clothes are on my bed,” I tell him. “If you could help me sit down, I think I can—”
“Right,” he cuts me off, guiding me toward it.
He gently helps me into a sitting position on top of the quilt, quickly turning his broad back to give me privacy. “Do you want me to step outside?”
“Um.” I’ve got one foot in my underwear at this point and am struggling to get them on with my throbbing ankle, and I know the pants are going to be twice as difficult. “I might…need your help. But stay turned around. Just in case.”
“Okay.”
I manage to get my underwear on after a minute of huffing, and I grab for my sweater next, figuring it will be an easier task to tackle. I shrug into it sans bra, thinking that the material is thick enough to hide that fact. Not to mention it’s growing darker by the second. The pants do indeed prove to be a problem—it’s hard to pull them up while I’m in a sitting position. I have one pant leg mostly to my knee, but the other—the one that goes over my injured ankle—is being a little bitch about it all.
“Hunter,” I whine. “I can’t get my pants on.”
I think he makes a sort of groaning sound in the back of his throat, but I might be imagining it.
20
Hunter
“Okay,” I tellher, turning my head ever so slightly. “I won’t look, all right?”
“I’m mostly dressed,” she points out. “It’s fine.”
I turn and immediately crouch, my fingers brushing along her calves as I try to locate the waistband of her sweats in the half-dark room. My knuckles brush against her skin when I find it, and my fingers curl into the edge as I slowly start to pull her pants up her legs.
Now, I know this is probably one of the most awkward, ridiculous moments of my life, and Ishouldn’tfeel a rush of adrenaline and a quickening pulse as my knuckles inadvertently glide against her knees and then higher over her thighs as I work the material up to where it’s supposed to be, but my body doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.
“Lift up,” I murmur, my voice rough.
She raises her hips as instructed so that I can work her pants to her waist, then she lets out a quiet gasp that makes me still for half a second when the backs of my fingers graze her ass on the way.
“There,” I rasp, quickly pulling away from her. “All done.”
“I can’t find my socks,” she mourns. “I think they got knocked off the bed.”
“Oh. I have…Just a second.”
I move to the other side of the room, knocking my hands against the things on the dresser, the sound deafening in the quiet space, right before a bright beam of light illuminates the entire room.
“You had a flashlight that entire time?”
