The Player and the Pixie (Rugby #2)

She bathed me.

It was a glorious experience, though made frustrating by her insistence I not touch her while she tended my wounds. They weren’t terrible, nothing that would leave a scar. I felt entirely mobile, though my left eye was swollen shut and my ribs were sore.

Nothing a week of ice packs couldn’t fix.

“Oh! Your face,” she lamented, pulling a towel full of ice cubes away from my eye. She was frowning, gazing upon me with pity and concern. I rather liked it.

“Don’t worry, none of it’s permanent. Now my face matches your hair.”

We were sitting on the bed in my suite. Rather, she was sitting next to me and I was laying down, allowing her tender ministrations mostly because I was discovering how much I enjoyed being fussed over. But only if Lucy were doing the fussing. She was still in her bridesmaid dress and I was loosely wrapped in a bathrobe.

“That’s not funny, Sean,” she said, though there was clear amusement in her words and expression. “I don’t want your face to match my hair. I want your face back to normal.”

I caught her hand before she pulled it away and admitted abruptly, “I’ve missed you.”

She gave me a small smile like she found the statement silly, tilting her head to the side and allowing me to hold her fingers hostage. “When did you miss me?”

“Until now. Until right this moment.” I pressed her palm between mine, studying how we fit together, how my large hand swallowed her much smaller one. “I think I’ve always missed you.”

We were quiet for a moment and I felt her eyes on me as I examined her fingers. Her nails were both perfect and atrocious. The polish was chipped, the edges uneven. She needed a manicure, but only if she wanted one.

“I think I’ve missed you all my life,” I murmured unthinkingly to her knuckles before bringing them to my lips.

She said nothing, allowed me to kiss each of her joints, and then she blurted, “Sean, I’m in love with you.”

I stilled my movements, hid my unbidden smile with her hand, and closed my eyes. The room was quiet save for the sound of her breathing. The silence was soft, unobtrusive, and Lucy surrounded every part of me. I smelled her. I touched her. She was in my mind and in my heart, her warmth obliterating what was once cold.

This was a moment I wanted to savor. To remember. To recall.

Frequently.

“Sean?” Her voice was small, unsure.

“Mmm?”

She shifted on the bed, tried to withdraw her hand. I held it fast, singled out her middle finger and licked it, sucked it into my mouth, ignoring the cut on my cheek.

A tremor shivered up her arm.

“What are you doing?” she asked on a breathless whisper.

“I’m tasting you.”

Lucy sighed a nervous sounding laugh. “Why are you doing that?”

“I don’t know,” I responded honestly. “Because I want to and I can.”

“Are you trying to distract me?”

“From what?”

“From that fact that I just spilled my guts to you and you’ve said nothing about it. Not even a measly, ‘Thanks, Lucy. Thanks for being in love with my snobby arse.’”

I started to laugh but then had to stop, wincing. It hurt my ribs. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“It would serve you right if I tickled you.”

My one eye flew open. “Don’t you dare.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Well, I won’t. Because I love you. And I don’t want to see you hurt.”

I slid my hand up her arm, over her shoulder, threading my fingers in her hair. “I wish I had a picture of us together.”

She grinned at me, almost shyly. “I have one, if you want it.”

“You have one?” I tried to remember when we’d taken a picture together, or at least one she hadn’t deleted.

Lucy reached for the nightstand and handed me my phone. “Type in your passcode.”

I did as instructed then returned it to her. She concentrated on my screen as she said, “I’m just going to log into my email. I sent it to myself. You’re not allowed to tease me about it, but I made it the desktop image for my laptop.”

Finished with her task, she showed me the phone again and my mouth parted in surprise. It was the picture I’d taken that first night, when I’d forced her into having dinner with me, unable to help myself.

She’d ordered the tuna.

“I thought you deleted it.”

She shrugged, her smile wry. “I told you that because I didn’t want you to know that I fancied you.”

“So you kept it.”

“Yes.” She nodded once.

“And you looked at it every night.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Not every night.”

I wanted to smile at that, in fact I wanted to shout my discovery from the rooftops, but my cheek and ribs protested. I loved that she fancied me, the way I looked, enough to keep the image and risk discovery.