My thoughts finally clear and I steady myself in front of her. “Wow.” It’s the only lame word that comes to mind, but there are so many more phrases catching in my throat—words like best blow job I’ve ever had, you’re f**king amazing, I want to feel that over and over, but they all seem to belittle what just took place.

My hands glide down her naked body and I hold her as tight as I can for a long time. When she shivers I know she’s cold and I pull away to gather the towels we discarded earlier.

“Lift your arms.”

As soon as she does I wrap the towel around her and draw her to me again so I can kiss her on the lips, soft and gentle. The kiss quickly deepens as I suck on her tongue, her lip until neither of us can breathe and I pull away with a quick kiss above her bandage before I do.

“We need to change that.”

“I can do it.”

“I want to.”

She points to the supplies the hospital gave her behind me on the counter.

When I turn to retrieve them, I spot her green bikini. I turn back to get her attention. “Come to Laguna with me today. We have to get your car anyway and I really need to shave.”

She rubs her fingers over my face. “I like the way your face feels against my skin.”

My pulse races. This girl is going to kill me. “Oh yeah, where particularly do you like the way it feels?”

She points to her lips. “Here.” And then she points between her legs. “And here.”

“Fuck, you’re hot as hell.”

She shrugs. “Just being honest.”

“What happened to the shy girl under the sheets yesterday morning who wasn’t sure she could tell me what she wanted during the day?”

Her eyes meet mine. “You helped with that phobia pretty quickly.”

I laugh and pat her bandage. “There, all done.”

She laughs. “Thanks for the help.”

I bow and say, “My pleasure.”

A look I can’t quite decipher crosses her face, but she doesn’t say anything. And I don’t ask but instead hand her the green bikini. “I’m going to see you in this one way or another, and since I’m taking you to Laguna today, I want you to wear this under your clothes,” I growl in her ear.

She playfully pushes me backward. “I didn’t say I’d go home with you.”

I feel a corner of my mouth turn up. “I have food, lots of food, at my place.”

“I can be ready in ten minutes.”

• • •

What you can learn about a person in a short period of time when you pay attention astounds me. I’ve learned so much about S’belle Wilde over the past couple of months and even more in this block of time we’ve spent together. I’ve learned she loves to eat but never keeps food in her apartment—I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like to eat alone. I’ve learned she’s really smart and thinks long and hard about things—but likes to come across as being more aloof or maybe even scatterbrained. Which she’s neither. I’ve learned she likes sex dirty and she likes it clean. And I’ve learned she knows how to turn me on and she does it on purpose.

I glance over at her fingers as they tap the screen of her phone. “Did you check in with your mother?”

“She’s texted me every four hours around the clock. I told her I’m spending the day at the beach and Xander and River too. I don’t want them to hunt me down.”

I laugh. “Or me.”

She laughs back. “That too.”

I reach out to caress her bare leg. She’s wearing a pair of denim shorts with an eighties type of sweatshirt that hangs off her shoulder, exposing the golden threads of her bikini top. My heart beats a little faster at the thought of finally seeing her stand in front of me in it—just the bikini top, that is, nothing else. I quickly chase the thought away.

“I need to give Josie a heads-up too,” she says, tapping her fingers on her phone again. “She’ll be worried when I don’t show up for work tomorrow.”

“She’s Wyatt’s assistant, right?”

She looks up at me from over her sunglasses. “Yes. So you do pay attention.”

“You think I don’t?”

She looks back down. “No. I just wonder how much people hear when I talk because sometimes I feel like I never shut up.”

I smirk at her—she’s definitely quirky and it’s a breath of fresh air from all of the other women I’ve known. “Speaking of work, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Okay,” she says, dropping her phone in the cup holder and twisting in my direction.

“The night Wyatt saw me at Beck’s he was with that arrogant SOB.”

“Romeo?”

I nod and go for broke. “He told me he’d seen your phone, that he saw a message from me. Why would you show him that?”

She frowns and reaches up to brush some fallen hair out of my eyes. “It wasn’t like that.”

I glance over and lift her sunglasses so I can see into her eyes; the green is even deeper than usual with the sunlight streaming through the window. “What was it like, then?”

“Why do you hate him?” Her voice is soft and full of curiosity.

My fingers tighten back around the wheel. “For a shit ton of reasons. Because he was captain of the football team and I was a surfer, because he lived on the bluff and I lived on the beach, because he was a jock and I was . . . well, I was more of a rebel, I guess, but most of all because from what I saw that night he’s still a prick.”