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“The best,” he remembered softly. “Every year for three weeks they rented a cottage on the seashore. We had these long days of swimming and playing in the sand, we had bonfires out front on the beach every night. There wasn’t even a TV set. If it rained, we played Monopoly or Sorry or cards.”
He realized he had never felt that way again. Ever. Not until he had come here.
And to feel that way was to leave yourself open to a terrible hurt.
Was he ready?
A sudden sound made him jerk up from her. Without his noticing, so engrossed in protecting her and comforting her, and sharing his own secret memories with her, the wind had come up on the lake.
Some warrior. Some protector! He had not tied the canoe properly. It had yanked free of its mooring, the sound he had heard was it crashing into a rock as it bounced away from the small island.
He ran for the water, plunged in, could not believe the cold and stopped.
“Leave it,” Dannie cried.
Good advice. He should let the canoe go, but everything about Moose Lake Lodge said the Bakers were operating on a shoestring. He’d been entrusted with their canoe.
“I can’t,” he shouted at her, moving deeper into the water. “Can you imagine how the Bakers will react if the canoe drifts back there, empty? What about Susie?”
He took a deep breath and moved deeper into the water, felt her movement on the beach behind him.
“Stay there,” he called. “I’ve got it under control.”
He was used to speaking, and people listened. Naturally, Dannie did not. He heard her splash into the water, her shocked gasp as the icy water filled her shoes.
It made him desperate to get that canoe before they were both in deep trouble. He was up to his waist, he lunged forward, and just managed to get the rope that trailed off the bow of the boat.
He pulled it back toward shore, grabbed her elbow as he moved by, steering her in the right direction.
“I told you not to come in,” he said.
“I was trying to help!” she said, unrepentant.
“Now we’re both wet.” But what he was thinking was it had been a long time since he had been with the kind of woman who would plunge into that water with him. He knew a lot of women who would have stood on shore, unhelpfully hysterical or more worried about her haute couture than him!
Still, they both could have got in trouble and it would have been his fault. He was aware of freezing water squeezing out of his shoes and that, wet up to his chest, his teeth were chattering wildly and in a most unmanly way.
Except for the fact it might save the Bakers some distress, his rescue was wasted. When he inspected the canoe it had a hole the size of his fist in the bottom of it from where it had smashed into a rock.
He inspected her, too. She was wet past her waist, had her arms wrapped around herself. She was reacting to the cold in a very womanly way, and he did his best not to whistle with low appreciation.
Think, Joshua snapped at himself.
He was stranded on an island. With a beautiful woman. Who was shivering, and who had hair that smelled of Hawaii.
They were both going to have to get these wet clothes off quickly. And not in the way any red-blooded man wanted to have the first disrobing happen.
But because the May wind was like ice as the spring day lengthened and chilled, if they didn’t get out of these wet clothes, there was a real chance of hypothermia.
There was only one option.
They were going to have to seek shelter in the honeymoon cabin.
Just his luck that he was going to end up half-naked in the honeymoon cabin with Dannie Springer. Maybe it was because he was shaking with cold that he couldn’t quite figure out if he had landed in the middle of a dream or a nightmare.
CHAPTER SIX
DANIELLE SPRINGER had been in a few awkward situations, but this one definitely rated as Most Embarrassing, especially given the fact she was in the company of Most Sexy. If she hadn’t known that about him before, she certainly couldn’t miss it now that she had seen his soaked clothes mold every inch of his fine male body.
What had started off as a day full of potential, was now quickly declining toward disastrous, as quickly as darkness was sweeping over the small island.
She had broken down in front of him, shared confidences she never should have shared. When the canoe had ripped away, she’d been devastated. He had been in the middle of telling her important things, real things about himself. Thankfully, his own confidences had snapped her out of her self-pitying recital of woe.
Watching him push out into the water to save the canoe, she had thought sadly, only Dannie Springer would be alone on an island with a man like that, lamenting her last, lost boyfriend. It was no excuse that Joshua had encouraged her. That’s what men who were successful with women did. That was their secret weapon. They listened.
Except it was becoming increasingly difficult to see Joshua in the light of his playboy reputation.
Especially after the way he had looked talking about his family, the tenderness in his voice, he seemed like the most real man she had ever met. Poor Brent seemed like a comic book character in comparison. Joshua Cole seemed genuine. That’s why the trust element was there, despite the fact she had known him only a matter of days. That’s why she had let her guard down, when she of all people, jilted, should have her guard up higher.
When had she decided it would be okay to trust him with her heart? It was the way he looked at her, compassionate intensity darkening the shade of green of his eyes. Something she interpreted as interest, hot, male and intoxicating was brewing just beneath the calm surface.
Yet for all that male energy—sure and strong—the way he had conducted himself over the past few days was nothing short of admirable. He was a man navigating a foreign land with the children, and yet he was doing it with grace and openness.
Even the way he plunged into the water after that canoe spoke to character. It was him, supposedly the self-centered bachelor, not her, the supposedly compassionate nanny, who had considered how others would react to the empty canoe showing up somewhere.
Dumb to plunge into the water after him, because what was she going to do? But somehow, ever since they’d gotten in that canoe together, she had felt the delicious sense of teamwork. She had plunged into the water almost on instinct. They were in this together.
But she was paying for her altruism now.
They were in the honeymoon cottage where hundreds of couples had shyly taken off their clothes for each other for the very first time.
And not a single one of them like this, she thought dourly. Not a single one of them because they were in imminent danger of shivering to death.
“Embarrassing,” she muttered out loud.
“Forget embarrassment,” he said, glancing back at her from where he was crouched in front of the fireplace, feeding little sticks into it, coaxing a bright blaze to life.
He had peeled off his sodden trousers as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Of course, for him, World’s Sexiest Bachelor, it probably was.
Except for the part where he’d warned her he was doing it, giving her time to turn around.
Except for the part where he’d unearthed a container full of bedding, snapped off the lid, and tucked a blanket around himself.
He should have looked like an idiot with his flowing red tartan blanket tied in a knot at his taut stomach. Instead he looked like a chieftain, his shoulders and chest bare, his arms rippling with sinewy strength. There was a warrior cast to his face, remote and focused, as he had turned his attention to getting a fire going in the old stone fireplace.
“I can’t get my jeans off,” she wailed.
“What?”
“I can’t get them off,” she said, annoyed he was making her say it again. He had heard her the first time!
The soaked denim, which had probably been a touch snug to begin with, was stuck to her now. Her hands were so cold she couldn’t make them do one thing she wanted them to do.
He turned and looked at her. “Are you asking me to help you get your pants off, Miss Pringy?”
“No!” Then with sudden rueful understanding, she said, “You like making me blush, don’t you?”
“If I was considering a new hobby that would be it. I could while away hours at a time thinking up things like—”
“Now is not the time for games, Joshua! I’m just telling you I’m stuck. Just hand me a blanket.”
He came across the room toward her, without the covering she had ordered, and his own blanket slipped. She held her breath, shamelessly hopeful, but he stopped and reknotted it, moved toward her.
“Just relax,” he said soothingly, looking at the situation with what struck her as an annoying bent toward the analytical. She had the button undone on her jeans, and the zipper down. She had wrested the uncooperative, sodden, freezing fabric about three inches down her hips and there it was stuck, hard.
“It’s because you’re tense,” he decided.
Taking off my pants in a room with the World’s Sexiest Bachelor, and I’m tense. Go figure.
“It’s because my hands are too cold.” It was true her hands felt as if they had turned into icy basketballs at the ends of her wrists. But there was another problem. She was just going to have to admit it and get it over with.
“The jeans might have been a little too tight to begin with. Marginally.”
“They looked fine to me,” he said, apparently thinking about it. “More than fine. Great.” She might have been thrilled that he’d noticed in different circumstances.
As it was, the jeans had been a bit of a challenge to get on, and that’s when they’d been dry. What little devil of vanity had made her think her rear end looked good enough in them to put up with a tiny bit of discomfort?
“Look, no matter how reasonable a choice they were when they were dry, they won’t come off now. They won’t fit over my hips. There, am I blushing enough for you?”
His lips twitched.
“Don’t laugh,” she warned him.
“I won’t,” he said, but she could tell he was biting the inside of his cheek. Hard. He didn’t speak for a minute, containing himself. “Let me help,” he finally managed, and then choked. “I sound like a butler.”
“Only one of us here would know what that sounded like,” she warned him, but it was too late.
He was laughing, moving toward her with singleness of purpose written all over him.
“Don’t touch me!” There. Self-preservation finally rising to the occasion. Where had that fine attribute of character been when she had been sobbing her heart out in his seemingly sympathetic ear?
“I can’t help you without touching you.”
“I don’t need your help.” That was a lie obvious to both of them. “You’re laughing at me.”
“I’m trying not to.”
“Try harder.”
“Okay.” He crouched down, and was looking at the area where the soaked jeans were bound up around the wideness of her hips. Oddly enough, the way his eyes rested there, briefly and with heat, before returning to her face did not make her feel like a whale. At all. In fact, his laughter seemed to have died, too.
“Yes, you do,” he said firmly, “need my help.”
“Okay, then.” She was shaking too hard to deny it any longer. She closed her eyes hard against her humiliation. “Just be quick.”
“That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that in this particular situation,” he muttered.
“We are not in a situation,” she warned him, “or not one you’ve ever been in before.”
“You’re absolutely right about that,” he said.
His hands settled around the jeans. Her skin was so cold she actually felt scorched from the heat of his hands. She had to resist an impulse to wiggle into that warmth. Instead she made herself stand rigidly still. She opened her eyes just enough to squint at him undetected through the veil of her lashes.
He yanked with considerable strength, enough that she saw that lovely triceps muscle in his arm jump into gorgeous relief. Unfortunately the jeans did not budge, not a single, solitary fraction of an inch.
“Your skin feels like ice-cold marble,” he noted clinically.
Somehow in her imagination, she had imagined him saying softly, Your skin is like silk that’s been heating in the sun, soft and sensual.
When had she imagined such a thing? Practically every damn minute since she had met him, a dialogue of lust and wanting running just below her prim surface.
“Can’t you relax?”
“I doubt it,” she moaned, and then made the confession that made her humiliation complete. “You’re going to have hurry. I think I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Dannie, it would be really inadvisable for you to get us laughing right now. Really.”
“Believe me, I am nowhere close to laughing.” But his lips were twitching again. How had she ever thought he was handsome? He wasn’t. He was like an evil leprechaun.
“Someday you’ll see the humor in this,” he assured her. “You’ll tell your kids about it.”
No, she wouldn’t. Because a story like that would begin with, “Did I ever tell you how I met your dad?”
And he was not going to be the father of her children. Though suddenly she was aware she had a secret self that not only conducted entire conversations just out of range of her conscious mind, but wished things. Impossible things.
Green-eyed babies.
She told herself she had just gotten over another man. This was rebound lust, nothing more. But she was very aware of quite a different truth. There never had been another man, really, just a convenient fantasy, a risk-free way to play at love, a safe way to withdraw from the game while pretending to be engaged in it.
Joshua tugged again. The wet, cold, thick fabric shifted a mean half inch or so.
“Ouch. Who invented denim? What a ridiculous material,” she complained.
“There’s a reason they don’t make swimsuits out of it,” he agreed, and then broke it to her gently. “You’re going to have to lie down on the bed. Hang on. I’ll cut the mattress open.”
He found a knife and cut the strings that were wrapped tightly around the mattress, a defense against mice.
Mice, which had probably been her greatest fear until about thirty seconds ago. Now her greatest fear was herself!
