she countered.
He burst out laughing, and once again she felt things she didn’t really want to feel. Kate was going to kill her sister. Kill her. But of course Molly must’ve been thrilled about this turn of events. She kept insisting that Kate should stay in town until some miracle happened and Kate and Garrett finally became an item. Ha. She was clearly still such an innocent.
And right now, especially, not even a miracle would make someone want Kate. Only a thing called strep throat wanted her.
And just then, she remembered the exquisite feel of Garrett, big and warm, in bed with her Saturday night.
As the thought rushed through her, Kate ducked her head to hide her blush, never wanting Garrett to know the effect he had on her. On the night of his birthday, she’d been so angry and frustrated. She’d felt all kinds of unwanted arousal while he’d slept soundly next to her. So she’d promised herself she would get over him. And she would. No matter what. She merely wished that he, of all the men in the world, hadn’t seen her in this state.
“You want help getting to the tub?” He gestured toward the bathroom. She was still in bed, holding the sheets to the top of her neck like a shield.
“I can walk,” she answered the moment she realized how silly she must look. Frowning in annoyance at her own prudish attitude, she kicked the sheets aside, then realized that her T-shirt had ridden up to her hips. As she struggled out of bed, Garrett got a perfect view of her pink panties.
He whipped his eyes away, but not before she saw that he saw. Her pink panties. And her toned thighs.
Garrett’s face hardened instantly, and he rubbed the nape of his neck as Kate felt a red-hot flush creep up her body.
“So, you have strep?” he asked, looking away quickly.
“It’s very contagious. You should leave.” In fact, she’d probably even had it incubating when he’d slept in her bed the other night. The thought of giving him strep made her insides twist in foreboding. “You should really leave, Garrett.”
“I’ll leave when your fever’s gone, Katie.”
Groaning in disgust at his stubbornness, she went into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. Oddly, she felt acutely aware of her nakedness when she stripped. Aware, also, of only one measly door separating her from him.
After double-checking the lock, she settled in the tub. The water felt so warm. She closed her eyes and sighed as she dunked her head and slowly surfaced, starting to relax.
As the minutes passed, she couldn’t stop wondering what Garrett was doing out in her room. She definitely heard noises, and she figured he must be setting up a miniature office. The thought both annoyed her and...didn’t. He looked extremely good today. But she couldn’t help but wonder what the purpose of this sudden attention was. Of course something sneaky was going on. She had no doubt this all had to do with her leaving for Florida—and Garrett intending to convince her not to.
No way are you going to stop me, Garrett Gage.
She scowled at the thought. She hadn’t even had boyfriends because of him. Directly or indirectly, he’d been responsible for Kate waiting to lose her virginity until she was over twenty-one and then she’d lost it to someone she didn’t even like all that much. Even then, though, she’d kept expecting him to one day realize they were meant for each other. Now she was determined to stop waiting for anything Garrett-related.
Fiercely resolved, she came out minutes later, wrapped in a towel, bathed, refreshed and wet.
She found, not to her surprise, that Garrett was already settled in her room. He lounged back in a chair with his laptop open on her small desk before him. He’d also turned the chair so that it was facing the bed, rather than the window. He looked as out of place in her feminine bedroom as a bear would.
He glanced up when she padded barefoot toward her dresser, and an irresistibly devastating grin appeared on his face. “You already look better.”
“Actually, I feel tons better.” Clutching the towel to her chest, she rummaged through her drawers and was about to try to get dressed under the towel when she remembered to say, “Look away for a second, please.”
As she selected her new panties, purple this time, she asked, “Are you looking away?”
“What do you think, Kate?” he asked, annoyed.
She took that as a yes and quickly let the towel drop and slipped into her panties. Even though he was looking away, her cheeks flushed red at the thought of him being so close when she was naked. She quickly slipped on her bra, still feeling hot inside, but then she realized he would probably be as moved by her nakedness as a sofa. The man was completely immune to her.
Then again, her butt was quite nice thanks to her Pilates classes. As she was thinking these thoughts and smoothing her panties over the curves in question, a strange silence settled in the room.
Garrett’s voice was deceptively calm when she reached into her drawer again.
“Did you really think I’d look away, Kate?”
Kate’s stomach clenched, but she went about the task of selecting a T-shirt.
And now she could feel his eyes were definitely on her.
Boring holes into her bottom, actually.
And suddenly she really prayed that it was, indeed, a very nice bottom.
“Please don’t tell me you were looking,” she threatened, starting to panic. She broke out into a fresh sweat as the fever continued dropping after her bath.
As she grabbed a T-shirt with a Minnie Mouse image on the front and pulled it on, she heard a deep male groan.
“Freckles, I’m not made of stone you know.”
Garrett sounded grumpy, as if he was in danger of getting strep, too.
“Really? I thought you were.” Instead of being embarrassed, she was suddenly amused as she pulled the T-shirt as low as possible and turned around. But her smile froze on her face.
Garrett sat like a marble statue on the chair, his muscled arms crossed, his forearms corded with veins, his lips hard and completely unsmiling. His face was harsh with intensity, and his eyes were the blackest she’d ever seen them. There was such an unearthly sheen in them, Kate stopped breathing.
They stared at each other for a heart-stopping moment, and the atmosphere seemed to morph, becoming heavy and thick with something inexplicable. There was a deeper significance to their stare that she couldn’t quite pinpoint, but it felt like a delicate thread between them was pulling tight.
It hurt. This strange link. It felt threatening.
It hurt, and ached in all kinds of places inside her.
Garrett put his forehead in his hand for a moment, then sighed and ran a big, tanned hand down his face in pure frustration. “Look, Katie.”
“Look, Garrett, you need to stop this now.”
“Stop what?”
They stared once more, and the atmosphere in the room continued feeling heavy and odd. Kate’s nerves could barely handle it.
“I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not going to work,” she finally said.
His eyes remained almost predatory in their intensity. Finally he raised one sleek black eyebrow. “My plot to save the world, to keep Kate in Texas, won’t work, even if I put in some good hours of doctoring time?”
“It won’t work.”
“So you didn’t mean it the night of my birthday when you said that we would talk about it later?”
“We’d both been drinking. Whatever we said that night was the alcohol talking.”
“All right, so today the strep is talking. When