She caught her lower lip between her teeth. “Are you certain you wouldn’t like a hand up?”
James, who had been quietly trying to extricate himself from his thorny prison, finally faced the truth that in one-on-one combat, the rosebush would emerge the victor. “I’m going to give you my hand,” he directed, keeping his words nice and slow, “and then you are going to pull me up and out. Is that clear?”
She nodded.
“Not to the side, not forward, not—”
“I said it’s clear!” she snapped. Before he even had a chance to react, she grabbed his hand and hauled him out of the rosebush.
James just stared at her for a moment, more than a little shocked by the strength hidden in her tiny frame.
“I’m clumsy,” she said. “Not an idiot.”
Again, he was rendered speechless. Twice in one minute had to be a new record.
“Are you injured?” she asked brusquely, picking a thorn off his jacket and then another from his sleeve. “You
r hand looks scratched. You should have worn gloves.”
“Too hot for gloves,” James murmured, watching her as she picked more thorns off him. She had to be a complete innocent—no lady of any experience, even with mere flirtation, would stand so close, her hands running up and down his body…
Very well, he admitted to himself, he was letting his imagination and his libido get the better of him. She wasn’t exactly running her hands up and down his body, but she might as well have been with the way he was reacting. She was so close. He could just reach out and touch her hair—see how soft it really was, and—
Oh, God, he could smell her.
His body hardened in a second.
She pulled her hand back and looked up, her eyes innocent and blue. “Is something wrong?”
“Why would anything be wrong?” he asked, his voice strangled.
“You stiffened.”
He smiled humorlessly. If she only knew.…
She picked off another thorn, this one caught on the collar of his jacket. “And to be frank, you sound quite odd.”
James coughed, trying to ignore the way her knuckles accidentally brushed against the side of his jaw. “Frog in my throat,” he rasped.
“Oh.” She stood back and examined her handiwork. “Oh, dear, I missed one.”
He followed her eyes…down to his thigh. “I’ll get that one,” he said quickly.
She blushed. “Yes, that would be best, but—”
“But what?”
“Another one,” she said with an embarrassed cough and a pointed finger.
“Where?” he asked, just to make her blush some more.
“There. A little higher.” She pointed and looked away, turning red as a beet.
James grinned. He’d forgotten how much fun it was to turn ladies’ cheeks to pink. “There, now. Am I clean?”
She turned back, looked him over, and nodded. “I really am terribly sorry about the, ah, rosebush,” she said with a contrite tilt of her head. “Truly very sorry.”
The minute James heard the word “sorry” again, he had to fight the urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake. “Yes, I believe we have already established that.”