Erin McCarthy: Lady of the Lake

“Yes?”

Darn it, there was no hope for it. Her mind wasn’t devious enough to formulate a reasonable lie on quick notice. She shivered in her wet bikini as a light breeze moved over her skin. She sighed. “He didn’t notice I fell over.”

“He didn’t notice?” His head tilted. His voice was incredulous. “He didn’t notice. His girlfriend fell off of his boat, he drove away and never even noticed? That’s what you’re telling me?”

It sounded even more pathetic by the minute. “He was talking to his friends several feet away from me.” Still angry herself, Violet wasn’t defending Frank so much as herself. Could she look any stupider? “And you have to understand, Frank has a genius level IQ. He gets distracted, and isn’t always aware of his surroundings.”

“That’s asinine.” He leaned across the boat and grabbed his T-shirt.

Thank God he was going to cover that chest up. She was extremely distracted by it. In all her twenty-eight years, she’d never seen that much muscle that close up. All her boyfriends had been pencil thin. All three of them, that is.

“You don’t just not notice your girlfriend falling overboard!”

Violet winced. “Frank does, apparently.”

He muttered something in Spanish, which would have been sexy except she suspected he was calling her a dumb broad.

Which she was. Her pregnancy plan had been ill-fated from the beginning, obviously.

There was no way she was going to let Frank anywhere near her ovulating self ever again. She could forgive him for not noticing that she’d fallen overboard. But it was a good, solid twenty minutes later and there had been no sign of him. If he hadn’t noticed she was gone by now, he would probably bring the boat in, dock, head off with Jay and Shack for dinner, and never even once think of her.

He’d probably already forgotten she’d even been with them in the first place.

It was damn depressing.

“Take your bikini top off,” he said.

“What?” Oh Lord, it just figured. Why did things like this happen to her? She was a good girl. She was nice to her neighbors. She taught small children. She paid her bills on time. She led perhaps the most boring life in all of humanity outside of a penitentiary prisoner, and yet she had managed to fall off a boat and get rescued by a pervert. “No!”

“You’re shivering, you have goose bumps.” He pointed to her bump-covered arms. “And you’ve been in the water for who knows how long. Take your wet top off and put on my dry T-shirt.” He held it out to her.

“Oh.” He didn’t want to see her breasts. He didn’t care about her breasts, any more than Frank did. Violet wondered why she’d spent so much time camouflaging her overgrown chest if it faded into the wallpaper just like the rest of her. Not that she should care. She should be glad that he wasn’t looking at her breasts. Somehow that message wasn’t quite making its way to her brain, though, because she felt mildly offended.

“Thank you.” She took the T-shirt and dried her glasses off on it. The clarity of her vision when she popped them back on her nose made her wish she’d lost them altogether. Oh, my he was hot.

“Your boyfriend is an asshole,” he said.

“Well, he doesn’t mean to be,” Violet assured him.

He scoffed. “You shouldn’t let him treat you like that.”

“It was an accident.” And why was she defending Frank? She’d already decided she wasn’t going to see him again. Sperm wasn’t worth this level of humiliation.

“I would notice if you fell overboard. He should have, too.”

Yeah, sure he would have noticed. Please. Violet knew the kind of woman she was. She was the kind of woman whom men only saw when they sat down across from her for their child’s kindergarten conference. Then she was Miss Caruthers, their child’s starchy, sweet teacher. Other than that, she was invisible to men of all ages.

Completely and utterly invisible. She was a spider web. You never saw it until you walked into it.

But still, she knew that Frank should have noticed. She deserved that much.

“You’re right.”

He nodded firmly. “I know I am. I’m Dylan Diaz, by the way. What’s your name?”

“Violet.” Why did his name sound familiar? Violet was sure she’d heard it somewhere before, but at the same time she was positive she’d never met a gorgeous, buff Latino. She was so distracted trying to place his name, she forgot to be shy. “It’s odd, but I feel like I’ve heard your name before.”

Dylan tugged at the T-shirt she was holding in her hand. “Don’t forget to put this on. You’ll feel better when you’re warmer.”

“Thank you.” Not that she had any intention of taking her bikini top off. Not until she got home and she could stuff it in her garbage disposal and flick the ON switch.

Violet pulled the sun-warmed shirt over her head and almost choked as the masculine smell of sport deodorant filled her nostrils. She was blushing it, damn it, she was blushing. But at least her breasts were covered, and in another ten minutes or so she might actually be able to look him in the eye again. Maybe.

“I’m sorry to be so much trouble. You can just…pull over and I’ll swim to shore.”

When she chanced a look at him, he was staring at her, dark eyebrows lifted. “Are you crazy? I’m not going to do that.” Then he swirled his finger in a circle. “Turn around.”

“Why?” But she did it anyway, because turning was better than looking at him. Because he was gorgeous and she was a nun trapped inside a stripper’s body, with a chess club president’s head.

It was the prim part of her that squawked in horror when his fingers jerked the ties of her bikini top loose at her neck, then deftly slid under the T-shirt and made fast work of the bottom strings, warm fingers brushing over her clammy skin. He harvested the whole dang thing with one last yank, and Violet swallowed hard.

“I’ll just lay it on the deck in the sun to dry.” He did just that, and then grinned at her when she turned back around. “You gave me a heart attack, you know. I thought you were a dead body. Scared five years off my life when you lifted your head up.”

“I’m sorry,” she said sincerely, hunkering her shoulders over so that her tight nipples wouldn’t jut out like twin thimbles. Despite the fact that it was July the water was still cold, causing her to shiver, and well, pucker.

“I’m sorry for interrupting your night. Like I said, if you just take me to the nearest dock or whatever, I’ll get out of your hair. Thank you for…rescuing me.”

He was laughing. Why was he laughing? Embarrassed, Violet stopped talking. Glancing down to avoid his eyes, she saw the T-shirt had plastered to her breasts in two round wet spots, nipples centered like pornographic bull’s eyes.

She almost wished she had drowned.

Dylan wasn’t sure why he was laughing, but it was better than drooling, which was what he really wanted to do.

Violet wasn’t anything like any woman he’d ever met. She wasn’t screaming or ranting or squawking or crying over what had happened to her. She wasn’t pissed off.

She was apologizing for inconveniencing him.

And she was self-conscious about the T-shirt plastered to her chest. His shirt. Clinging to that beautiful chest. Dylan had had so many ta-tas flashed at him over the years, he was damn near immune to the sight. But Violet had him hard, simply because her breasts were naturally beautiful, and because she was shy about a stranger seeing them.

He’d had so many women and their body parts just shoved right smack into his face, that he liked the allure of knowing there was something gorgeous under there that he wasn’t allowed to see. When she’d been on top of him, he’d felt her flesh, but again it had been just a hint, just a tease, enough to make him want to explore her slowly and thoroughly.