I turned the tap, things started to go wrong.
Instead of coming out of the shower head, water poured out of the back of the tap, gushing onto the floor.
Great. This was the third time that washer had failed in a year.
Which probably meant it was the tap itself, not the washer to blame. One dud was fine, but three in a year? Unlikely.
Mentally planning a trip to the hardware store—I could make it there and back before Hayden arrived and have the tap fixed before anyone knew it was broken—I headed inside and slipped upstairs to the main bathroom to finish my shower.
The shower spray was soothing and the fresh water washing pool salt out of my eyes felt incredible. I peeled off my swim trunks and nudged them over the shower drain with my toes so they’d get a rinse, too, and I wouldn’t have to worry about the salt fading the colors or making them stiff and scratchy later.
Disaster averted.
I thought, until I stepped out of the shower and realized there were no clean towels in the bathroom, because I’d been so busy thinking about the pool that I hadn’t set them out yet.
Dammit.
Well. No one was home, right? I could make a run for the stack of clean fluffy towels I’d folded in the laundry this morning, and it wasn’t as though Mr. Lewis ever had to know.
Not that he’d especially care about me running around the house naked. Maybe if he had people over, but not when we were alone. He was cool like that. We’d laugh about it.
I shook some of the water out of my hair so I wouldn’t drip too badly on the floor, abandoning my soaking-wet swimming trunks on the towel rail and stepping out of the bathroom, naked as the day I was born.
The stairs creaked under my feet, reminding me that replacing the second one from the top was on my to-do list. The laundry was at the back of the house, but a glance out the window told me Mr. Lewis’s car wasn’t in its usual spot out front, so the coast was still clear.
So far so good. Just another few steps and I’d be wrapped in a warm fluffy towel and no one ever had to know what’d happened.
I was home free.
... or so I thought for ten, glorious, seconds.
The hinges on the front door squealed as I got to the bottom of the stairs—reminding me of another to-do list task.
And bringing me face-to-face with Hayden Lewis.
Butt naked.
4
Hayden
“How did you get in here?” the very naked man at the foot of my father’s stairs asked, eyes wide, hair a wet mop, droplets of water dripping down…
Don’t look.
It took a lot of willpower not to. I hadn’t been kidding with Marissa when I said I hadn’t seen a naked man in person in a long time. And this one was toned and tanned and traffic-stoppingly gorgeous, deep set amber eyes nearly glowing in the sunlight streaming through the door behind me.
He was perfect.
“I… live here,” I said, thoughts racing about this beautiful specimen of manhood in front of me and why he was naked in my dad’s house.
There were only so many reasons for that, and the list was short.
The naked man blinked at me.
“But you’re early,” he said, and I was starting to think this was as uncomfortable for him as it was for me.
“My flight got moved up,” I explained, the feeling that this was a weird conversation to be having while he was standing there naked tickling the back of my mind.
We were probably both in shock.
“Towel,” he announced, throat working as he swallowed.
Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look.
I barely resisted the urge to screw my eyes shut so my gaze didn’t flick further south than it already had.
“Towel?” I asked.
“Towel,” he confirmed, turning without another word.
My willpower crumbled, and I watched the most perfect ass I’d ever seen disappear into the back of the house, heading for the laundry and the mudroom.
Great.
My dad had a cute boyfriend, and I didn’t.
I left my hastily-packed suitcase in the entryway and headed for the kitchen, finding it completely transformed from the last time I’d seen it. New worktops, new cabinets, new windows, a whole new set of French doors where the wall used to be.
This was the thing about Dad being an architect. He couldn’t leave the house alone.
I pulled a mid-century bar stool—the real thing, not a reproduction—out from under the breakfast counter and sat heavily, taking