Carter didn’t even look up from the papers he was sorting. “Actually, you’re going to wash your hands first.”
I froze with one hand already deep in the food bag. “You’re not the boss of me,” came out of my mouth before I could stop myself.
Carter simply raised one imperious eyebrow. Aren’t I, though? And do you really want to be spending more time in the bathroom?
I growled and turned around, walking casually to the bathroom in the back of the building as if I didn’t give a damn one way or the other.
Which was bullshit. I cared. I cared a lot. I didn’t want to be here in this stupid place. I wanted to be anywhere else but here with the generic Pine-Sol scent permeating the sparse cinder-block building, the entitled Dr. Rogers finding every opportunity to make me feel unwelcome and disrespected, and the knowledge the auricle implant training program was slipping through my fingers with every day I spent here.
I washed my hands with the hospital-grade pump soap we’d brought in the supply boxes, dried them on my dirty pants just to spite the germaphobe, and then returned to dish out the food.
Instead of the awkward silence I’d expected to fall between us during our meal, conversation came easy. We talked about how quirky the town of Licking Thicket was, how oddly endearing it was, and how we’d never in a million years expected to wind up in a place most known for its milk pail race.
The evening hours passed quickly with more cleaning and organization, but shortly after nine, I noticed Carter flagging.
“You’ve been at it for sixteen hours,” I said, reaching for the mop in his hands. “It’s time to sleep now.”
I could tell he wanted to argue with me, but he was too tired. By unspoken agreement, he used the small bathroom first. I heard the shower spray, followed by the sounds of him brushing his teeth. I tried not to imagine his slender muscles wet and dripping under the water. When he emerged, his blond hair was damp but tidy, he was dressed in thin cotton pajama shorts and a color-coordinated tank top, and he smelled clean and fruity.
My nose wanted to follow him straight to the bedroom and then sniff him for a solid three hours.
Instead, I followed the same scent to the bathroom, where I noticed he’d left a full-size bottle of bodywash in the tiny shower stall. It looked expensive, and the only word I recognized on the French label was “pamplemousse,” which meant the sweet smell was grapefruit.
I brazenly scrubbed my own body with the stuff since I hadn’t thought to bring my own bar of utilitarian soap. When I finished up, I brushed my teeth, slipped into a clean pair of boxer briefs, and padded back to the single bedroom that was mostly full of our supply boxes at this point.
Dr. Duchess was already laid out in the bed with some heretofore unseen bed pillow, an ivory satin eye mask, earplugs, and the finest fucking ass on this planet.
He lay on his stomach on top of the sheets with his arms under the pillow and his head turned toward the side. I stared at the curve of his back, the way it dipped down and then rose again. My eyes devoured the man’s muscular butt the way my mouth wanted to.
His skin was clean, and he smelled amazing. Something about his body chemistry made the bodywash smell a thousand times better on him than me. A peek of armpit hair made me itch to run my nose and tongue up the inside of his arm and see if there was any remaining scent there from the day of hard work and travel.
He’d barely done any work.
The reminder wasn’t really true. He’d worked plenty. For a man probably used to lifting nothing much more than a stethoscope and iPad, he’d done an impressive amount of heavy lifting. We wouldn’t have made it from the airport in Caracas onto several different buses if he hadn’t done his share of the work.
As I smoothed out the thin sleeping bag I’d brought, my eyes kept straying to his long, sexy form. There was no denying he was a gorgeous specimen. He obviously kept fit and healthy like many doctors I’d met over the years, even though it was a different kind of fit than my military friends. He was sleek rather than bulky, and I imagined exploring his long lines with my hands and mouth. I imagined him grinning up at me with those blue eyes of his, my rough fingers combing through the silky blond of his hair as I let him tease me. I imagined how it would feel to know his smile was because of me, and I wondered how his laughter would taste—