A loud sob punctuated the end of her sentence. She didn’t have any clean underwear. Lucas tried to focus on the fact that she was upset and needed him to say something to ease her discomfort, but all he could think about was her underwear.
Of course, he’d already seen her in what amounted to underwear. Who hadn’t? The media was forever splashing pictures of her frolicking on some beach or other in miniscule bikinis.
Lucas’s mouth went dry as the pictures he’d seen danced across his memory. He closed his eyes in a vain attempt to block them out. It didn’t work—long legs under a surprisingly rounded bottom and a flat stomach, leading up to high, pert breasts with not a bit of silicone to be seen—he was an absolute slave to real boobs.
He fisted his hands to stop himself from reaching out to her. “I’m sure we’ll be able to work something out.”
“How? You going to lend me some of yours?” She fired back, her sniffles subsiding on a hiccup.
Lucas wasn’t sure what was worse. Imagining her in no underwear, in a bikini, or in his underwear.
“I don’t think mine would … um … fit.” He hated that he stumbled over his words when she was near. Lucas forced himself to remember who she was—a spoilt daddy’s girl who’d lived her life in front of the media’s cameras and lived a party lifestyle that would shame most pop stars. Not someone that he had any business falling in lust with.
Only, somehow, his body didn’t seem to be getting the message.
Chapter Two
Frankie stretched as she left the communal tent the following morning. Her problem wasn’t sharing accommodation, she wasn’t that spoiled, it was simply something she’d never done before. Not for a moment had she expected falling asleep to the sounds of others doing the same would be strangely comforting.
Following the exposure of Joey’s infidelities, she was ready to rely only on herself as she moved forward with her life but she hadn’t expected that to feel so lonely. Being part of a famous couple meant rarely being alone to examine your feelings too closely.
She grabbed the elastic waistband of her way-too-big-borrowed jogging trousers and made a mental note not to stretch again as any movement threatened to send them over her hips and down to her ankles.
“Good catch. Hope your reflexes are as quick in today’s surgeries.”
The compliment, followed quickly by Lucas’s lack of belief in her, chafed on her nerves. She’d had a lifetime of backhanded compliments.
She was beautiful, poised, a fashion icon—but with these positives came the character assassinations. She was a WAG, someone who existed only as the girlfriend of a football player, whose job it was to look gorgeous on Joey’s arm and nothing else. She doubted any reporter had looked far enough into her background to find out about her nursing degree, and if they had, well, it was hardly the sort of detail that would help sell their stories. Not when attacking her perceived lack of personality was so much easier.
As Lucas moved from the side of the hospital to stand outside the temporary camp, she saw the scars on the left side of his face properly for the first time. She’d noticed them the previous day but today, in the bright sunlight, she couldn’t miss them.
Her experience in emergency medicine had her guessing the scars were from being dragged along the ground, possibly as a result of a car accident. Pedestrian versus vehicle. They were definitely not recent, more likely to be from a childhood accident. It certainly helped to explain his prickly personality.
“I’m wide awake and ready for whatever Astoria has in store for me today,” she replied. Though, truthfully, she wasn’t sure if she was quite ready. Her days usually began with a leisurely cup of coffee and breakfast mid-morning. Her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn’t eaten yet and had only snacked the previous evening. Back home in England, it was nearly lunchtime.
“Here.” Lucas pushed a protein bar towards her and handed her a bottle of water. “Eat this while we walk. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
Frankie snapped off the top of the bottle and drank greedily. Something about living on the beach made her so much thirstier than usual. Maybe the sun or the sand, but definitely not anything to do with Lucas. Her dry mouth wasn’t because he was about and strangely made her feel like a teen in the middle of a completely inappropriate crush.
“What surprise?” she asked. Her voice held every bit of trepidation she felt. A no-brainer given her last surprise had been finding lewd texts on Joey’s phone, closely followed by discovering him entwined with a naked woman in their bed.
He gave her a long look before answering. “This one will make you smile.”
It was almost as though he could sense just how fearful she was about sudden bolts from the blue. She added ‘empathetic’ to the list of words she was mentally recording that described Lucas. It was much nicer than the first one she’d noted—‘arrogant’.