my sister? Forget it. She would have to get three kids in the car. So I am asking you to return the favor of pet-sitting your very bad dog and get me out of this . . . thing.”
Max blinked. And then he was laughing. Oh, but he laughed. He put one hand on his belly he was laughing so hard.
“That’s just mean,” Carly said.
“This is hilarious. How the hell did you get stuck?”
“A long story, but the short of it is, I had an idea about a problem I’m having with my job, which includes this piece of fashion, among others. But my idea to save the day is not going to work and now I just want it off,” she said with a bit of a shimmy.
“Okay,” Max said. “Happy to help. Where is the zipper?”
Carly reluctantly turned around and presented her back to him. The zipper ran down the center of the skirt. All the way down. It was so tight she’d not been able to zip it all the way up to her waist, and the zipper had stuck just above her center line. Max stared at that zipper. He had a couple of thoughts about whether or not he ought to be doing this. “That thing is on here good and tight, isn’t it?” he asked, looking at the roll of her flesh spilling over the skirt’s waist. “Looks like if you took a big breath you could pop right on out of there.”
“I tried that. And I am aware of how tight it is,” she said impatiently. “Victor does not design for a silhouette as . . . robust as mine. Will you just do it already?” She tried to look over her shoulder at him.
The term robust was clanging in his head. He had a sudden urge to put his hands on her robust hips and her robust waist and her robust breasts. “I’m studying it.”
“You don’t need to study it, just unstick it!”
“All right,” Max said. “I’m going to touch you now—”
“For the love of Pete, I know you’re going to touch me, I asked you to touch me. Can you just get on with it?”
Max bent down to have a closer look. He could see a patch of pale pink fabric had been caught in the zipper’s teeth. “It looks stuck on fabric or something.” He leaned closer. “Oh.”
“Oh? Oh what?”
“I think it might be your panties.”
“Yes, Max, those are my panties, thank you for pointing that out. But you don’t have to announce what you’re finding like an archaeologist. Just please do it.”
“Right.” When he thought of pink silk panties, something waved through him. He tried to carefully manipulate the zipper loose, but the skirt was pulled too tightly. “Can you maybe pull the skirt around a little and give me some slack?”
She sighed. “Max? If I could give you some slack I would have given myself some slack and turned the damn thing around and fixed it!”
“Okay, okay,” he said. He had to slide his fingers into the skirt to get a grip, and they brushed against the warm, firm flesh of her butt.
“Well?”
Well . . . he was having a moment. “Carly, calm down—”
“What? Did you really just tell me to calm down? Do you not see that I’m stuck in a skirt and I’m having to ask a complete stranger to get me out and he’s taking his own sweet time and telling me to calm down?”
“Stranger! I don’t think you can say I’m a complete stranger anymore. I mean, especially now.”
“Oh my God! How do you expect me to be calm? Would you be calm?”
“I’m not saying to calm down, not like that,” he said as he worked the bit of silky panty. “I was going to suggest it’s not good for your heart to get so agitated. You’re releasing catecholamines into your bloodstream left and right and you don’t want your blood pressure to get too high.”
“What the . . .” She tried to look over her shoulder at him.
“You’re moving around too much,” he said, and with one hand, pushed her shoulder forward.
“What is wrong with you, Max? Seriously, what is wrong with you?”
“Nothing that I’m aware of. But you, on the other hand, are letting an inconsequential observation get under your skin.” He almost had the bit free. His fingers were pressed into her hip, and he was terribly distracted by it. He could imagine the feel of her in his hand, could