She blinked and looked down, but there was a curious smile on the uplift of her mouth.
He reached past her, registering but ignoring the brush of his arm across her breasts. She didn’t move away. In fact, it felt like she moved deliberately against him, her warm moist breath expelled practically into his ear. His dick jerked, angling like the needle on a Geiger counter toward the source of the near-radioactive lust surging through him. Hell. Gritting his teeth, pretending he didn’t register the lush mounts pressed against his arm or the sweet breath tickling his ear, he opened her door. “Inside. Now. You’re shivering.”
*
Oleg greeted Yardley with excited yips and jumps of greeting. She bent down to accept his doggy affections, glad that Kye had left him free to protect her home. Even if Stokes was safely behind bars in the county jail, she knew she wasn’t going to feel safe again in her house for a very long time.
She suspected all that chewed paper strewn across the floor had been once been a roll of kitchen towels. But Oleg hadn’t damaged anything else within her view. Or continued to tear up her house. She’d seen the damage he could do. He’d tried to take down a wall to get to her, to protect her. The crisis had bonded them. She and Oleg were a K-9 team. She’d never doubt him again.
It took her a few more seconds to realize that, beside the chewed towels, the living room was clean. Without asking, she knew Kye had picked up the shattered blinds and removed them. The chunks of plaster had been swept up and the drapes had been rehung, even if they did droop unevenly from a bent rod. He must have done it before following to the hospital. His efforts touched her more than she would have expected.
She turned back and noticed he hadn’t come in behind her. She went out to the porch and saw a dark form moving away. He was carrying Lily on his shoulders toward the bunkhouse.
“Wait!”
He turned around. If surprise had a posture, his was it.
“You said you brought food. Did you eat?” Not waiting to see if her indirect invitation would be accepted, she turned and went back in.
A few minutes later Kye entered and lowered the crate he carried with Lily onto the floor. He was smiling at her with more gratitude than she expected, or deserved. She didn’t want to be alone just yet. Anyone, she told herself, would have been welcome.
She ignored the little voice whispering Liar. Kye had been there tonight. It meant everything.
He came in quickly and lifted a pair of leashes off their pegs by the door. “I’ll walk the dogs while you hop in the shower. Then I’ll heat up dinner.”
He didn’t wait for her to respond but began leashing Oleg and then Lily. When he was done he opened the door. “Let’s go, Lily. Oleg. Jdi ven.”
“Hold on.” Yardley swung his coat from her shoulders and held it out.
He smiled at her with more tenderness than her offer required. “Thank you.”
Yardley stripped and stepped into the shower without even peeking at herself in the mirror. Afraid to register how bad she must look. The hot water stung her skin in a dozen places—her left cheek, one shoulder, her left breast, her knees—but she didn’t care. She would have stood uncomplaining under water twice as hot if it would erase Stokes’s touch.
She wasn’t badly hurt, she reminded herself. She wasn’t raped. She wasn’t any of the many awful things that might have been. She was only roughed up.
But the longer she stood scrubbing at her body, the angrier she became. By the time she stepped out to towel herself off, she was more torqued up than she could ever remember being. Flame-red furious. No longer at Stokes. At herself.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kye looked up from stirring a pot when he heard a door slam. A moment later Yard appeared in the kitchen doorway. Her damp hair was twisted up in a topknot with one take-out chopstick pushed through to anchor it. She was dressed as he’d never seen her, in leggings of some soft pastel sweater material and a matching oversized top that slipped off one shoulder and still managed to cling to her braless breasts, outlining their fullness. His eyes hung there for a second too long. He knew it. Because when they rose to her face she looked ready for a fight.
He glanced back at the pan he stood over. “I hope you like beef tips with onions and bell pepper. Or smothered chicken. I’m heating both up.”
“I tried to kill a man.”
Ah. He didn’t look up as her voice echoed through the kitchen. “You wouldn’t have killed him. Maimed him, maybe. You want mashed potatoes with this?”
She came up beside him, forcing him to glance over at her. A few tendrils of hair had escaped. The long ribbons of her damp hair were leaving wet streaks on her top. One drip formed a wet line down her breast so that her nipple showed like a dark smudge beneath the fabric.