Animal Attraction

  though he had no idea if her grin was because he hadn’t stayed at Melinda’s or the idea of wiping the mat with him. He suspected the latter.

  The list of things he liked about Jade was very long and growing, he thought as they went downstairs and she pulled off her sweatshirt. He liked how she threw herself into any task with everything she had, including this one—which she wasn’t altogether comfortable with yet. He liked the way her skin glowed. He liked the way she shoved her hair back from her face to stall before getting on the mat, and he really liked the way her nipples hardened and pressed against her T-shirt.

  Yeah, that was his favorite. “Ready?” he asked.

  “I was born ready.”

  Not for me, though he suddenly wished otherwise. They worked for a half hour before she asked for a water break. As she tipped her head back and drank from a bottle he handed her, his gaze drifted up the length of her body where she was draped over a weight machine trying to catch her breath. Her T-shirt was sticking to her, and it made her look tough, like maybe she could kick some serious butt. It also emphasized her curves, making his mouth water.

  Her hair had dared to disobey and was coming out of her fancy twist but he could still see the nape of her neck. The creamy pale skin there was driving him insane. It was the vulnerability of that one little spot, the way a few strands of red silk curled damply to it.

  He wanted his mouth there. Of course he was shit out of luck on that particular fantasy, which could get in line behind all the other fantasies he had filed in his brain under Goddess Jade.

  “Dell?”

  She’d finished her water and was facing him, expression determined.

  He was so going down.

  And not ten minutes later she went for the slam dunk and he was on his knees on the mat, hands holding his junk, gasping for breath and trying not to throw up.

  Yeah, she was not nearly as soft and vulnerable as he’d thought.

  “Oh God. Oh God, Dell, I’m sorry! You said jam my knee up and—”

  “It’s okay,” he croaked, and slowly fell over. “I’m okay.” Or as okay as he could be with his nuts in his throat. Hell, he wasn’t ready to have children, anyway. He felt her crawl close and put her hand on his lower abs. “Back up, I don’t want to throw up on your pretty Nikes.”

  She didn’t back up, she leaned over him, her fingers drifting lower to cover the hand he was using to cup himself. He knew why he was doing it, he was holding on to the goods to make sure they were still there. But she . . . “Jade—”

  “Did I hurt it?”

  “It” twitched. “No,” Dell said, both to her and to his dick’s unspoken and hopeful question of getting lucky.

  “Are you sure? Maybe I should . . . look.”

  He opened his eyes and met her worried ones.

  “I worked at a medical center for eight years, remember?”

  Because he wasn’t ready to move—or let her look, Jesus—he said, “Tell me about the job.”

  “I was in charge of . . . everything.”

  He choked out a laugh. “So what’s so different from now?”

  That earned him a small smile and she wrapped her fingers around his wrist and tried to lift his hand off his groin. Her fingers brushed against him and in spite of the fact that he was still hurting, he got hard. Perfect. “Jade—”

  “If you’re bruising up, we need to ice—”

  “I’m not bruising.”

  She pulled his hand away and stared down at the crotch of his basketball shorts.

  He lifted his head and looked, too, the both of them taking in the very obvious bulge between his legs. “I think I’m going to live,” he said wryly.

  She swallowed hard and wet her lips.

  Groaning, he thunked his head back on the floor. “Not helping.”

  Her gaze met his, and that’s when they heard it. The front door slamming shut. And then Adam’s boots on the cellar steps.

  Jade leapt to her feet and practically ran for her sweatshirt, which she was just pulling over her head when Adam appeared. Jade sent his brother a weak smile. “He might not be in fighting condition at the moment.”

  And then she was gone.

  Adam looked at Dell prone on the mat. “She flatten you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Adam just shook his head. “Food?” Then he went back upstairs, apparently in search of said food.

  Dell rolled to his knees, disgusted with himself. Great way to make her feel comfortable and safe. He scrubbed a hand over his face feeling . . . discombobulated. It took him a minute to realize that was because she’d walked. Usually he did the walking. That’s how it always worked. “I guess not this time,” he said to Gertie, who’d lumbered down the stairs to investigate. Gertie snuffled and plopped down at his feet. She might not have a graceful bone in her body, but she wouldn’t walk away. At least not unless someone bribed her with food . . .

  Ten

  Dell spent Sunday deep in the Bitterroot Mountains with Brady and Adam, working volunteer S&R. Late that night they’d located the lost hiker and flown back to Sunshine.

  Brady went home to Lilah. Adam had a class to give.

  So Dell was on his own, and he crashed early in his own bed. Not that being exhausted helped him sleep. He woke up several times, the latest at dawn when Gertie leapt on his bed and slobbered on his face.

  Her version of the good-morning kiss.

  He shoved her off him and got into the shower. At Belle Haven he rode Kiwi, then let himself into the office just as Jade arrived. He’d called her several times since Saturday night, all of which she’d ignored.

  Which made sense. He’d invited her over for self-defense training, promising to teach her moves to make her feel safe. And then he’d turned into a fifteen-year-old boy and gotten hard in class. “Jade.”

  She had the phone headset on. She raised a finger to indicate she needed a minute. He could see now that she was accessing the center’s messages from their service, typing them into the spreadsheet that she had up on her screen. She was crazy about her spreadsheets. She’d uncovered Peanut, and the parrot was preening and humming to herself. Beans was watching Peanut with avid, narrow-eyed interest.

  Gertie had found the sole sunny spot in the room and was already snoring.

  Jade’s fingers were a whirl on her keyboard. She worked hard here, and she was his responsibility, as much as any of the animals were. He took that very seriously.

  He wanted her to be able to count on him.

  Always.

  Which meant he needed to work on the self-control. The only thing that kept him coming back to the straight-andnarrow was that clearly she’d been hurt. Some fucker had put his hands on her and terrorized her, and seeing her suffer the aftereffects killed him.

  That was not to say that having her sweet, curvy body so intimate with his wasn’t having a toll.

  It was.

  And that toll had kept him up at night. Hell, last night he’d had to get up at two in the morning to abuse himself in the shower.

  He probably should have abused himself again this morning just to cover his bases.

  Jade’s fingers were a blur on her keyboard, but then suddenly she stopped and pulled off her headset. “Twenty-five messages today. Must be Monday.”

  “Jade, about Saturday night—”

  “I never thanked you.”

  This derailed him. “What?”

  She lifted her head and met his gaze. “For spending so much time with me.”

  “Sure, but I wanted to apologize for—”

  “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “You have nothing to apologize for. It was my fault. I, um, put my hand . . . there, and then it—”

  She broke off suddenly, eyes locked on something over his shoulder.

  Dell turned around to find Adam standing there, brows up.

  “Don’t stop on my account,” Adam said. “It’s just getting good.”

  Dell blew out a breath and considered killi
ng him but he had patients arriving. “Go away.” He turned back to Jade, but she was gone, heels churning up the big reception area as she went to the wall of files and began pulling down the day’s scheduled patients.

  “So,” Adam said, “she put her hand where?”

  Two days later, Jade was sitting in Lilah’s kennels. They were in Lilah’s office, surrounded by Abigail the duck, Lulu the lamb, and several dogs, all snoozing.

  It was naptime in Lilah’s world.

  Lilah and Jade were munching on deli sandwiches, which Jade had brought over to spend her lunch hour with some female company.

  “He’s going to be back any minute,” Lilah was saying as she decimated a pickle, talking about her favorite subject.

  Brady, of course.

  Dell had been gone all morning with Brady, out on a ranch about a hundred miles east where Brady had flown him, taking care of a difficult high-end breeding mare’s birth.

  “It didn’t go well,” Lilah said, patting one of the dogs who lifted its head and sniffed. Twinkles belonged to Brady, but Lilah considered him hers. She handed him a piece of turkey from her sandwich. “In fact, it went awful.”

  “What do you mean?” Jade asked.

  “They lost the mare. She’d stroked out and Dell had to put her down.”

  “Oh no,” Jade breathed.

  “The owners were so distraught they couldn’t sit with the horse during the euthanization.”

  “They let her die alone?”

  “No.” Lilah shook her head and Jade knew. Dell. Dell had stayed with the horse. Jade’s throat ached for him because she knew him. He’d have sat on the straw-covered barn floor with the horse’s head in his lap, stroking her face and talking to her until she closed her eyes for the last time.

  It was who he was. “Damn.”

  Lilah nodded. “Been a long week. How are you doing?”

  Jade sipped her iced tea. “Good.”

  “Good as in ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ or good as in ‘good.’”

  Jade looked at her.

  Lilah looked right back, innocent-faced.

  Jade had no idea how Lilah could have heard about her kissing Dell. But she planned to play it cool just in case. “Maybe we should save some time and you should just skip to the part where you tell me exactly what you want to know.”

  “Okay, well something scared you last week in the parking lot and you’ve been jumpy ever since.”

  Not where Jade expected this conversation to go. “Who told you that?”

  “Hell, honey, this is Sunshine.”

  Right.

  “And Dell’s been teaching you self-defense, and now you’re talking about going back to Chicago—which you left to come here because, as you told us, you wanted better skiing in the winter. Now I’m thinking that’s not true.” She paused, brows up. “How am I doing so far?”

  Jade stared down at her turkey on multigrain. “It’s . . . complicated.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  Again, Jade’s throat tightened. She’d lied, omitted, kept a good part of herself closed off, and Lilah didn’t care about any of that, all she wanted to know was if Jade was okay. “You’re already doing it.”

  Lilah smiled and offered her some chips. “He’s a good man, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  Yeah. She did.

  “A really good man.”

  Jade nodded. “I know.”

  “Do you?”

  Jade looked at Lilah.

  Lilah smiled sweetly. Expectantly.

  And Jade had to laugh. “You’re fishing.”

  “Yes,” Lilah admitted without shame. “I’m totally fishing.”

  “Why?

  “Why?” Lilah just shook her head. “You know how insatiably nosy we all are. Something’s going on. We just don’t know what, and it’s killing us.”

  “There’s nothing—”

  “Oh, please. If there’s nothing going on with you two, I’ll eat Abigail.”

  Abigail the duck lifted her head and looked reproachfully at Lilah.

  “Seriously,” Lilah said to Jade while patting Abigail on the head. “There’s no way it’s nothing.”

  “Based on what?” Jade asked.

  “Based on the fact that whenever you and Dell are in the same room, all these little flames flicker between you.”

  “Flames.”

  “It’s a metaphor,” Lilah said.

  “For?”

  “Sexual tension.”

  Jade stared at her, then laughed.

  “And Adam told Brady he interrupted the two of you in Dell’s gym.”

  “What, is this high school?”

  Lilah grinned. “Well, we’ve all been together that long, so yeah, in emotional years, we’re still in high school. You two doing it or what?”

  “Okay, wow.” Jade shook her head. “We are so not going there.”

  “Please! Oh, please, let’s go there!”

  “I didn’t ask you about your . . . flames when you first started circling Brady,” Jade said.

  “Aha!” Lilah jabbed a finger into Jade’s direction, triumphant. “You are! You’re circling Dell.”

  Jade sighed. “Okay, maybe I’ll cop to the circling. But that’s no secret. We’ve always circled each other.”

  “But something’s different,” Lilah insisted. “I can feel it.”

  Was it? All her life Jade had been the master at compartmentalizing the people in her life. She’d put Dell in the slot for boss and left him there for eighteen months. She’d been okay with adding him to the friend slot as well, but that had taken him a good long time to earn.

  And he had earned it.