Sandcastle Beach (Matchmaker Bay #3) - Jenny Holiday Page 0,90

staring at her. He’d stopped under the archway that divided the dining area from the living room, light from the lamp behind him backlighting him. She couldn’t make out his expression, so it was hard to know what he was thinking. What if she was overreaching? When he’d said, That’s a thing we do now, he’d been talking about kissing. Maybe that was all he wanted to do.

But how would she know unless she asked? She was getting that stage-fright feeling again. Way worse than before the curtain had opened earlier. But the show must go on, right? “Can you help me get this corset off?”

He didn’t answer, merely stared at her. Just when she started to feel that she’d made a terrible mistake, he walked to a side table next to the sofa and turned on another lamp. “Sure. But I want to be able to see.”

She didn’t know if he meant he needed the light to illuminate the laces, like task lighting, or if he wanted it to see her.

He stood by the lamp for what seemed a maddeningly long interval. Just when she was about to tell him to get a move on, he strolled over. She was going to need to turn around for him to unlace her, but they were back to having one of their staring contests. She was glad he’d turned on the light, because now she could see that while he was staring at her like he always did, he was also biting down on his lower lip. She did the same, almost against her will. And on they stared.

Until she realized she’d been holding her breath. When she let it out, she almost felt dizzy. She was going to have to lose the contest. So she shot him a little eye roll that seemed to amuse him, and turned around. Finally, finally, she felt the pressure of his fingers. But not the heat of them, separated as they were from her by a layer of linen and a layer of leather. It felt like a lost opportunity. She wanted his skin on her skin. “Hurry,” she panted, but it was no use. He was going to do things in his own time.

Which meant slowly, apparently, agonizingly slowly. The apartment was so silent that the sound of the laces dragging against each other as he undid the bow hissed through the air between them. The feeling of being almost but not quite free was excruciating, suddenly. Of having his hands on her but not on her.

She still couldn’t get a full breath in. “Hurry, hurry,” she said again, more urgently. “I can’t breathe.”

He went into overdrive, loosening the bottom laces with lightning speed. When he got her fully unlaced, he pulled off the corset and flung it aside, turning her around as he did so. His hands came to rest lightly on the sides of her lower ribs, as if to soothe. “Better?”

She nodded. Better, yes, but she still didn’t have his hands on her skin. They were resting on the blouse that had been under the corset. So she grabbed a handful of fabric on each side. He began to let go of her, but she said, “Don’t move.”

He raised his eyebrows and shot her one of his stupid smirks. “And here I thought that was a help-me-so-I-don’t-suffocate corset removal.”

“It was, but…” She pulled her blouse partway up, past his hands, which were as warm as she’d imagined. He was still looking at her with amusement. “I am good at multitasking.”

The stupid thing about her costume was that she had to wear a bra under it. The corset stopped under her boobs, and the white linen blouse was too sheer for her to go braless under it, especially under the stage lights.

So while this would have been an excellent opportunity for her to peel off her shirt and flash him in all her topless glory, what was actually going to happen was she was going to peel off her shirt and flash him a giant, unsexy, padded “nude” bra. And it was white-lady nude, so she couldn’t even go for a monochromatic version of the giant, unsexy padded bra look.

But the show must go on.

So she finished taking off the blouse and, as quickly as she could, undid the bra.

There, that had wiped the smirk off his face. He was a little slack-jawed, even. “Are you—”

“Remember how we weren’t going to talk? Let’s go back to that.” Because they were certainly