as much as my pride. I feel horribly stupid. Horribly.”
No, stupid did not cut it. She would have felt stupid if her neighbor, the lovely elderly Miss Twining had found her.
But to be found in this situation by Daniel Riverton?
While he was definitely the rescuer straight out of a dream, it was still absolutely mortifying. His picture had been gracing the cover of major business magazines for at least a year, including Calgary Entrepreneur which she subscribed to, and read avidly from cover to cover, since starting her own small business after being let go—fired, her mind supplied helpfully—from Bernard Brothers a year ago.
“What on earth happened in here?”
When he had introduced himself on the phone a few days ago, she had denied it could be that Daniel Riverton.
But, now with him standing in front of her, in the flesh—literally, she glanced greedily at his naked chest again—there was no denying it. And nothing—certainly not looking at his picture on the cover of a magazine, or listening to his admittedly quite sexy, if irritated, voice on the phone—could have prepared her for the man.
Maybe it was good she was tied to a chair. In her weakened state, four days with her nieces and now running on pure panic and adrenalin for the past hour—plus debilitating pain was shooting through her shoulder and arm—it was probably all that was preventing her from swooning.
Because he was literally in the flesh—his arms sleek and lightly muscled, his naked chest broad, and smooth, without a hair marring the silk of his skin, his pajama pants dipping very low on his hips, showing her that place where hard abs narrowed below his belly button, to an enticing V that made her mouth go dry.
No! she insisted on lying to herself, her mouth was already stuffed-with-cotton dry.
He had black hair, which looked impossibly well groomed even though he had obviously been in bed. And he had features so perfect it could have been the cover of GQ he had posed for rather than business magazines.
Or, with that perfect naked chest, one of those calendars that featured gorgeous men leaning on fire trucks or carrying saddles.
Trixie made herself look away from that, not that the perfect features of his face provided respite from the awareness of him that was thrumming through her veins.
Why did she feel faintly, ridiculously guilty that Miles had never made her feel this way? Miles had never rescued her from certain death, that was why!
Still, Miles with his pasty complexion and shock of thinning red hair, with his cute little tummy and pudgy limbs had been the antithesis of this man.
Daniel had high cheekbones, a perfectly shaped nose, a firm mouth saved from arrogance by the plumpness of his lower lip, a chin that was square and faintly dimpled.
His cheeks and chin were ever so faintly shadowed with dark whiskers, which added to, rather than detracted from, how gorgeous he was.
But it was his eyes that were absolutely mesmerizing. The magazine cover had not captured the true blue of them.
Trixie wondered, and hated herself for wondering, was this tingling awareness of Daniel the “something more” that Miles had left her in search of?
He began to unravel the rest of her binding, his way no-nonsense and firm. “There’s got to be a dozen rolls of paper on you.”
Trying to ignore the heated sensation being caused by his hands unraveling tissue from very personal places—that sizzling awareness of something more— Trixie tried to focus. He wanted to know what happened. Stick with the facts, ma’am!
“I was just so tired,” she said. “They never sleep. They’re from Australia. I mean Molly and Pauline are in a completely different time zone, as I told you.”
“And as I could not help but notice!” This said a touch grimly.
“It was your phone call that made me so anxious to not be noisy. I had just gone to sleep. They woke me up jumping on the bed. Then they wanted to eat. Then they wanted to play this game.
“They said their mother let them play it all the time. I was to sit in a chair, and they would wrap me in toilet tissue. I just didn’t see the harm. I was desperate to keep them quiet.”
For you.
Even though she hadn’t said it out loud a sardonic smile touched the glorious curve of his mouth. “Ah, yes, the complaining neighbor.”
“Not that I was blaming you,” she said hastily.
“That’s good.”
“Though you were very intimidating on the phone.” He was still very intimidating. So she tossed her head and added, like a woman not easily intimidated, “And a little rude.”
“I get that way when I’m sleep deprived. So, if you could just continue with your little story.”
Her little story? She was beginning to find her rescuer a bit aggravating. He was just one of those men. So supremely self-confident, so sure in his own skin, that it grated slightly. Daniel Riverton was a man who compared a woman’s hair to whiskey, and guessed at her earrings, as a matter of course.
Still, she did, possibly, owe him her life, so an explanation was in order.
“So they were going around and around me, each of them with their own roll of tissue. They were concentrating very hard, and they were being very quiet, for once, and I was very grateful for that. But it was terribly hypnotic. I must have nodded off. I can’t believe I did that! But I’ve been working all day, and up all night with them, since they arrived, and I just drifted off. And when I woke up, I was trapped. I couldn’t believe how strong it was. You’d think you could just rip through tissue, but, as you can see they got into my quilting stuff, too—”
She was blathering and she noticed he was more focused on the task of releasing her than her “little story.” She shut her mouth with a snap. The twins, finally, arrived with a pair of scissors and he made quick work of the rest of the bindings, seemingly not even noticing that she had stopped talking.
She watched the dark silkiness of his hair as he bent over her, cutting away the twins’ handiwork. As she had suspected, it wasn’t just tissue. He cut through quilting batting as well. Sometime after she’d gone to sleep, the twins had helped themselves to things from her workroom. She noticed an inch of white fluff floated above the floor of the entire living room and knew they had finally succeeded in getting into her bags of cotton stuffing.
Since they had arrived they had been begging her to play with the bags of snow.
And the envelopes—orders—that she had stacked so neatly on her desk, afraid to open them, were strewn from one end of the apartment to the other. She groaned, and he followed her gaze.
“You get a great deal of mail,” he said. He stooped and picked up an envelope. “It’s addressed to Cat in the Hat. What’s that about? Your hair?”
“My hair?”
“Sorry.” He grinned with apologetic charm. “It does kind of have that wet cat look about it. A wet cat pulled from a hat.”
“I
