better, whipped off her sunglasses and glanced down. Not good. She was pink, very pink, and if she was that pink already, then later she’d be lobster-esque.
“Oh, no.”
“That’s the reason I told you to get your things, because you needed to get inside,” he explained, and his voice was back to semi-normal, still a little raw at the edges, but better than before.
“You could have explained that out there,” she snapped, then lifted one leg to see that the burn factor wasn’t merely on her arms and belly. Oh no, every part of her was pink. That shower was going to sting, big time. “How did this happen?”
“You didn’t wear sunscreen,” he said, scanning the lobby. “We need to find somewhere to sit and talk.”
“Why don’t we just go to my room?” she asked, then realized what a mistake that’d be. A gruff and rough and gorgeous Jeff in her room, with her needing sex the way she knew she did, wouldn’t be so great. “Or not.”
“Not,” he agreed, without further explanation.
She shivered. The air conditioning system in the lobby was certainly in full working order, but then again, her sunburn probably made it seem even more frigid.
“You have a T-shirt in there?” he asked, indicating her bag.
She shook her head.
“A cover-up?”
Another shake.
“Towel?”
“I used one that the pool guy provided, and then I left it out there.”
He frowned. “Come on.” Then he took her hand and led her toward the elevator.
“Where are we going?”
“Your room. You’re freezing, and you need to put something on. I may be pissed at you, but I’m not about to make you stay down here and freeze to death.”
She followed him into the elevator and then stood on the opposite side, shifting from one foot to the other as she tried to find a comfortable stance in her bikini. Talk about awkward. Jeff, in his dress clothes and looking impeccable, and her, in a teeny-tiny bikini and looking burnt. At least red and green went well together; she was definitely red.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “Chris put sunscreen on me.” He had, and he’d certainly enjoyed doing it, being extremely thorough in making certain all parts were covered.
“Where is the sunscreen?” he asked, his voice all gravelly again.
“What?”
“The sunscreen that Chris put on you.” He said Chris’s name as though it scorched his tongue.
She opened her beach bag, withdrew the bottle and handed it to him.
The elevator doors opened, and she led the way to her room while he examined the bottle.
“It’s SPF thirty,” she said. “There’s no reason for it not to have worked.”
“Except that the date on this bottle is a year ago,” he said, stopping beside her at her door while she opened it.
She had no idea sunscreen even had an expiration date. “Expired?”
“Yeah. Where did you get this, Babette? Because it shouldn’t have been on the shelf. It’s long since lost its ability to protect anyone from sunburn, especially a redhead with a tendency to burn anyway.”
She stepped into her condo and shivered again. It was even colder than the lobby. She always turned the thermostat down at night, because she liked it cold when she slept so she could snuggle into the sheets. But now it felt absolutely icy. “You mean where did I buy it?” she asked, trying to remember, as she hustled toward the thermostat and started punching the arrow to make it go up, up, up. “I’ve got to get a T-shirt,” she said, hurrying into her bedroom. “And I don’t remember where I bought it.” She grabbed her sleepshirt off the bed and threw it on over her swimsuit.
Returning to the living room, she found he’d made himself at home on the white sofa, propping his feet on the coffee table while he continued frowning at the sunscreen bottle. “Well, whoever still had this on the shelf should be shot. It won’t protect anyone, certainly not you.” He looked up at her, and the turquoise pillows on the couch seemed to cause his eyes to look even more striking, and Babette momentarily forgot what they were talking about.
“Huh?”
“You need to try to remember the name of the store, Babette. I’ll call them and let them know that this stuff has expired, or other people are going to get burned as well. Literally.”
Then her memory kicked in, and she said, “But I bought it the last time I went to the beach.”
“Last year?” he asked, raising his brows enough that they disappeared beneath his sandy waves.
“Oh,”