him walk towards the changing rooms, water sluicing down impressive broad shoulders and the gleaming slabs of tight muscles in his back. Water slipped over the skin-tight briefs which left almost nothing to the imagination. The cheeks of his butt were firm and round. The water ran down those muscular, thick thighs as he took long and sure strides. As I watched in a daze of shock, he lifted his powerful hands and raked his fingers through his raven hair.
He looked like a big, wet Greek God, but he had to be one of my father’s guards. They frequently used this indoor pool for their training sessions. The outdoor one was designated for leisure and entertainment and used solely by the family, but I hadn’t felt like battling mosquitoes, and had headed here. As a result, I’d clearly interrupted his training session, almost given myself a heart attack, and doubtless destroyed my phone.
He’d been so quiet as he swam through the water that I hadn’t seen him. When I entered and when he had come into my peripheral vision, I’d mistaken him for a corpse floating on the surface. The shock made me slip off the edge and fall in the water.
It was a sheer miracle I hadn’t broken several teeth.
In fact, I had bloodied my elbows and they stung as I clung on to the edge of the pool and made my way back to the shallow end. I could swim, but I’d always avoided the deeper parts. For some inexplicable reason, I had an irrational fear of deep water. When at the shallow end, I could swim like a fish, but I felt an unexplainable terror overwhelm me when my feet couldn’t touch the bottom.
Maybe I’d been dropped into deep water and suffered trauma when I was too young to remember, or maybe it was a memory from a past life, but the fear was real. Hanging on the edge of the pool, I treaded water and pulled myself along until I got to the shallow end. As soon as I knew my feet were only about two feet from the bottom, I let go and swam to the steps, then pulled myself out of the water.
I sat on cool tiles as I realized even my air-pods were lost. And it had all been his fault. If he hadn’t startled me. If he hadn’t treated me like he was pure and I was some infectious disease. Who did he think he was anyway? Asshole. Hell, I could have had a panic attack and died in the water.
Brushing my hair out of my face, I jumped to my feet and marched towards the men’s changing room. Without knocking, I barged in. “Hey!” I called out. “Hey!”
No response came.
I stopped to listen and heard water running, so I immediately headed towards it and found him in a stall.
I pounded noisily on the door. “Hey!”
I was fuming, my chest nearly about to explode with anger. “How could you just leave me there? I could have died.”
The arrogant brute didn’t respond.
“There’s something called basic human decency, you know. Like helping someone when they’re in need, especially when you’re the cause of their almost death in the first freaking place.” I kicked at the door to the stall.
The cascade of water ceased and I froze. No doubt, he expected me to run off, but I stood my ground and waited, ready to give him a piece of my mind the moment he came out.
True enough, the door to the stall was pushed open and he appeared.
“You owe me an apology—” I began but the next words, whatever I had planned to say, were snatched out of my head.
He stood there naked.
I was a civilized person and I had assumed wrongly that he would be as well ‒ believing he would emerge with a towel wrapped around his waist, but instead ‒ he had deliberately appeared naked.
I pulled my jaw off the floor and shot my shocked gaze up to his face. Wow, without the goggles, he carried the blue-green Caribbean ocean in his eyes.
He stared at me with an irritated expression as if I was a nuisance he could do without. He then took a step towards me.
I instinctively took a few steps backwards.
It gave him the space he needed to turn left and walk away from me.
It took a few seconds before I recovered enough to get my brain working again. A feat, given what I’d just seen.