Juliet resisted the urge to hide from him. What good would it do?
She kept her focus steady on his face, not glancing down, not letting him realize that she realized that his big male body was dripping on her floor. His big, dripping, naked male body.
He didn’t acknowledge his nakedness either. Instead, he stared, his gaze running over her. She felt it like a hand, his hands, big like he was, strong and sinewy. She hadn’t felt anything in so, so long. Goose bumps rose in the wake of that imaginary touch and her breasts tingled inside her bra as again her face burned.
“You’re hurt.” His voice was rough but he reached toward her slowly, one of those hands lifting in her direction, heavy veins standing out on the back of it. The dark hairs of his forearm were plastered against his tanned skin and drops of water still moved along his muscles like a man sweating after hard work…or after making hard, satisfying love.
Forgetting her cut, she put her hands over her eyes, appalled by the direction of her thoughts. Shocked by the heat of a flush on the back of her neck, by her swelling breasts, by the sensitive pinpricks that rose on the flesh of her inner thighs.
The air in the room shifted, so she supposed he was moving, but for a man so big, he was graceful and silent. She’d never noticed that about him before.
“Juliet.” Closer now, his voice. “Juliet, honey.”
Honey. When was the last time a man had murmured an endearment to her? This man had never. This man must be rocked to the soles of his size twelve feet—God, somehow she’d even noticed his feet and made a determination of their size!—if he was talking to her like that.
And touching her like this. Because he was peeling away one of her hands. The hurt one. Like a coward, she only squeezed her revealed eye tighter shut.
His palm cradled her fingers. The calluses on his skin made an erotic scratch along her knuckles. “You’ve cut yourself. What happened? Did something startle you? Did someone startle you?”
You. Me. She had no idea which was more accurate. But she did know she couldn’t keep pretending she wasn’t standing in her kitchen with a naked man.
Her heart still whomping inside her chest, she opened her eyes. Oh. Not naked. Not naked any longer.
He was staring down at her, a line between his black brows and concern in his blue eyes. Around his neck was the strap of a butcher-style apron. It was printed with green vines and red roses. It barely covered the flesh between his dark nipples and its ruffled hem hit him at mid-thigh.
She remembered buying it at one of the boutiques in the Malibu Country Mart, thinking it would look cheerful hanging in her kitchen. Wrapped around him, it should have looked ridiculous. The sight should have made her smile, if not out-and-out laugh. Instead, she could only think that on the other side of the apron he was—no, don’t go there.
Too late. His first-class buttocks were back in her memory, that vision of him as he churned, naked, through the water. His muscles flexing, creating a tantalizing scoop on the right, scoop on the left.
“Oh, God.” She put her free hand to her forehead.
One corner of his mouth ticked up. “I know, I know. I’d be ready to thank the Lord, too, if someone presented me with such primo blackmail material. If I let you take a picture, will you tell me what’s going on?”
“I have absolutely no idea what’s going on,” she answered, with all honesty. Her voice came out a little rusty, and his fingers tightened on hers, like a brief embrace. “Not beyond the fact that there’s a man dressed like Rachel Ray in my kitchen.”
One of his eyebrows winged up. “So she’s the one they call ‘The Naked Chef?’ ”
“No.” She rubbed her forehead again. “No. It’s…oh, it’s all so complicated.” So completely unexpected.
“Not so bad. Nothing we can’t fix with a Band-Aid.” He was looking at her cut hand again. While all she could think of was that what really needed fixing wasn’t going to be helped by any item stored in her medicine cabinet.
Because something momentous had just happened to her tonight. Her defenses had dropped away, and the resulting clatter had awakened something inside her—or perhaps it was she who had awakened. In any case, Juliet Weston didn’t feel like herself, which made sense, after all, since she’d just learned she wasn’t who she’d always thought she was.
But the why of this current situation didn’t matter, not when the what was so clear to her. The what—oh, God—was this: With her protective shell gone, she was overcome by a sudden and raging sexual attraction for the naked non-chef standing on her tiled floor, holding her shaking hand. He affected her just that much. Her whole body was trembling in reaction to him.