Desire by Design - By Paula Altenburg Page 0,32

the next few hours.

“Don’t bet on it,” she said, regaining her balance. “You’re like any one of my brothers.” Eve finished wrestling his pants off, then snapped her swinging jaw shut. He wore navy boxer briefs. She’d thought male models in underwear ads were the only men who looked good in them, but she was wrong. If not for the thick, white bandage around the top of one long, muscular thigh, he’d look like a model himself. To think he’d wasted all that on architecture.

She dragged the covers over him, then flopped on the bed beside him and thumped his chest with her fist. “You’re useless, too.”

“I’ve never had any complaints before.” Matt trapped her fist on his chest with one warm hand, and her heart shivered. He twisted onto his side so his face rested scant inches from hers. He touched a free finger to the tip of her nose on his third try. “And I am not like your brothers. Although they probably share a lot of my fr…” The word gave him a little difficulty. “Fr…frustration. Did they get mad at you much when you were little?”

“Never.” Eve reclaimed her hand and sat up, shoving the image of those boxer briefs out of her mind. “They adored me. Still do. Then again,” she amended, “their adoration needs to be put in perspective. These are the same guys who once tried to use me as shark bait.”

A dimple worked at the corner of his mouth. “They did not.”

“It’s true,” Eve insisted, wondering if she could get that dimple to flicker into a full-blown smile. In all fairness, she probably owed him at least a smile or two right now. “When I was seven years old my older brother Cyril took me down to the harbor at high tide, tied a rope around me, and he and his friends hung me off the end of the wharf because they wanted to see if they could catch a shark. They told me we were playing Peter Pan and I got to be Tinker Bell because I was the cutest. My two younger brothers stood back and watched.”

Matt’s face creased into the smile she’d been aiming for. “Did they catch anything?”

“Of course not. Sharks don’t come that close to land. Even if they did, they’d be more interested in fish than skinny little girls.”

Matt shifted one broad shoulder into a more comfortable position and closed his eyes. Just when she thought he was about to drift off, the corners of his mouth arced upward again.

“What was their reasoning for hanging Tinker Bell by a rope over the water?” he asked, his words threaded and slurred.

“So she’d have a soft landing if the fairy dust wore off.”

He laughed out loud. “I missed out on a lot, being an only child. It must have been nice growing up with people who were so concerned for your safety.”

“It’s easy to tell you don’t have any brothers,” Eve said. “They were disgusted with me for being so gullible.”

Matt peeled open one eye. “You were seven.”

“I was a savvy seven. Or so I liked to think.” She folded his torn, bloodstained pants and laid them at the foot of the bed.

“What other things are you gullible about, Eve?” he asked softly, trying to focus his eyes on her. “Working alone late at night in bad neighborhoods?” He cocked an eyebrow and glanced down at himself, then at her. “Helping men take their pants off?”

“I only do that for the men I shoot.”

“Sooner or later we’re going to talk about that, you know,” he said softly. “The men you shoot, I mean. Or the ones you’d like to. When I can think straighter.”

Matt was right. He deserved an explanation. Then he’d know how right her brothers were to be disgusted with her. But how did she explain a twisted, two-week train wreck of a marriage to Matt, a man who rolled his eyes at his own mother’s inability to commit?

She hopped off the bed. “I have to run over to the head office and get some papers, but I’ll be back soon. You should be all right by yourself for a bit—as long as you stay in that bed.”

“I’m coming with you.” Matt tried to sit up. “You aren’t going anywhere alone.”

She wasn’t having him get in the habit of following her around—not that she believed he could do it at the moment, anyway—but it was nice of him to worry. In fact, he was far nicer