“Don’t you know she was thinking, ‘Oh shit, Mom’s in the water and if she sinks I’m screwed.’”
Startled, Bo laughed out loud. “She doesn’t know swear words.”
“Betcha.”
The idea of puppy Tricks swearing to herself was priceless. Bo was still chuckling as together they watched Tricks retrieve her ball and turn, swimming for the bank. She wasn’t going as fast as she normally did, but neither did she seem to be in any distress. Now that she had Morgan safely on land, she wore her normal jaunty, happy expression. It was amazing how a dog could smile with a ball in its mouth.
“The guys would rag my ass forever if this got out,” Morgan observed.
“Oh, good, I have something I can blackmail you with.” Tricks was touching the bottom now and bounding out, sending water flying everywhere, so Bo backed up out of the spray area. Morgan stayed where he was because he couldn’t get any wetter. Tricks gave him a quick look of disdain—evidently for being so foolish as to go swimming—and took the ball to Bo.
Morgan scratched his jaw. “I think I’ve been dissed.”
“Most definitely.” Bo didn’t take the offered ball, instead saying, “You need to rest a few minutes, princess, that was a long swim. Just a few minutes, okay? Nose around and see what you can smell.” After a few seconds Tricks dropped the ball and trotted off to sniff out something interesting.
Morgan had turned back and was looking out over the lake. Bo could feel him wanting to get back in the water, but he waited, not knowing how Tricks would react. For Bo’s part, she was content for him to stand there, because just looking at him made her hormones whisper, “Oh man, he’s fine.” As good as he looked now, with water dripping off his lean, muscled body, she could only imagine what he was like at full strength. For him, “weak” was most people’s normal.
The scar on his chest wasn’t the only scar he bore; there was a white slash across his right triceps, a dark discoloring along his left thigh that looked like road rash, a jagged scar under his left shoulder blade, even a raised white slash of scar tissue on top of his left foot. She wondered if all the injuries on his left side had occurred at the same time. And all she could see right now were those on his back; she hadn’t noticed any on his front last night, but then she’d been preoccupied with other things—plus the light had been off.
Her gaze lingered on the way his wet boxers were hanging low on his hips and clinging to his ass. The muscle definition in his legs was mouthwatering. Come to think of it, there wasn’t anything about him that wasn’t mouthwatering, but those legs looked as strong as trees. Thick pads of muscle lined the indentation of his spine, laced along his ribs. She remembered that when he’d arrived his arms had looked thin; they certainly didn’t now. She didn’t know what he’d been doing while she was at the police station, but she suspected he hadn’t rested much, not to fight his way back this far.
He had the body of a warrior. She didn’t try to forget what he was, but in the day-to-day normality of the routine they’d established, one reality would sink out of sight below the other reality. Yet every time she’d almost forgotten, something would happen to remind her. Yesterday it had been that moment when he’d taken Kyle down, the savagery in his gaze, the almost absent way he’d slammed Kyle’s head into the pavement to knock him out. Today it was seeing the scars he bore. Since the moment when he’d choked her, he’d been careful to keep himself under control and on low intensity, but by then it was too late. The people in town might have bought it, but she knew the truth.
“You’ve been really careful since you’ve been here, haven’t you?” she asked as she bent down to retrieve her jeans. “Simmer instead of boil. You walk a tightrope when you’re stateside, don’t you?”
He didn’t have to ask what she meant and he didn’t deny it. He shrugged and said, “For the most part I don’t have to because I’m with other men who are the same. That’s my job. But when I’m in the real world, I can ratchet it down with no problem—except for the minor slip when you shook me awake.”
“Minor.” She made a scoffing noise as she shimmied into her jeans. He’d scared the crap out of her, and he could so easily have crushed her throat. “You could have killed me.”
“Could have. But I didn’t, and I didn’t hurt you, so that makes it minor. Scared you, though. I’m sorry about that.”
His tone was absent. She looked up from zipping her jeans to see that his attention was riveted on what she was doing. His expression was so hungry that her heart skipped a beat and she froze, trying to get a handle on her immediate response to nothing more than that, just an expression. She felt breathless and turned on; a minute ago her wet feet had been cold from the lake water, but one look from him was all it took for heat to wash over her from her toes to her head.
Her cheeks were hot as she got her shoes. She wasn’t shy but she’d never been a flirt, never wanted to flirt. Why not just be up front and save everyone time and trouble? But now she wanted to tease him and get him as revved up as she felt, though if she went by his actions last night he didn’t need much revving.
She took a deep breath and composed herself, remembering that he’d wanted a long swim. “If you want to go back in the water, I can hold Tricks to keep her from saving you again. For all I know, if you go back in the water, she might write you off as wasted effort.”