…’ Adam felt his interest pique despite the heavy cloak of fatigue. ‘Anything interesting?’
Jess couldn’t believe she was having this conversation.
In her room. In a towel.
With Adam. In a sheet.
‘Liver transplant.’
‘Ah …’
Jess waited for something more forthcoming but Adam collapsed back against the mattress, his abs unfurling like flower petals, his eyes closed.
Oh, brother! He really did look centrefold material now, reclining in her bed as if he owned it.
‘Adam!’ she said, still not game enough to touch him.
Adam, already falling back into the blissful folds of sleep, prised his eye open. He raised himself slightly on bent elbows. ‘What?’ he demanded crankily.
It hadn’t been her plan to wake him up but now he was he could damn well vacate her bed. ‘Why are you in my bed?’
He watched her mouth move but it took a moment for the words to compute.
He hadn’t noticed how pink Jess’s mouth was before. Like fairy floss. Was it lipstick or natural? It was a little too dark to tell. ‘Hmm?’
Jess noticed his heavy-lidded gaze on her mouth and almost lost her train of thought. She scrambled hard to get it back again. ‘You’re. In. My. Bed.’
He hadn’t noticed how her hair flicked up at the ends like that when it was freed from its ponytail or even that it was so long. It brushed her shoulders and fell forward over well-defined collar bones.
Had it always been so blonde?
‘Ah, but, Goldilocks,’ he teased lightly, a smile spread across his full lips, ‘your bed was just right.’
Jess felt her knees go weak as the smile warmed his face, taking it from sexy-but-tired to steal-your-breath sublime. She reached for the nearby wardrobe door and held on tight.
‘Adam …’
He sighed. ‘Sorry.’
His exhausted body protested as he curled into a sitting position again.
‘The air-con in my room is on the blink. A fix-it guy is coming at ten.’ He shrugged. ‘Your room was empty. And air-conditioned. I checked the calendar. Sorry … I’m just exhausted, I guess.’
He rubbed his right eye with his hand. It felt gritty and unfocused. ‘I think I’ve been in four different time zones in the last week.’
Jess felt everything solid inside her melt to liquid. He looked completely done in. She wanted to go to him, pull him down beside her, cradle his head against her breast, stroke his hair till he slept, hush him, tell him she was there for him.
Oh, God. She still had it bad.
‘I thought you were in the wilds of Asia for three months? You’ve still got another few weeks left, haven’t you?’
She couldn’t help it. She always knew where he was. Would count down the days. His comings and goings were also marked on the calendar in black and she absorbed it like the big fat Adam sponge that she was.
Maybe groupie was closer to the mark.
‘There was some unrest in the last province when we first arrived,’ he said. ‘The department of foreign affairs ordered us out. So I’ve spent the last week talking with international funding bodies, trying to organise for the patients to come to us.’
Jess felt ill at his casual reference to unrest. She certainly forgot all about the fact that they were both essentially naked and this was probably the longest conversation they’d ever had.
She knew he went to some remote places in his crusade to bring equality of healthcare to all but there’d never been any trouble before.
The mere thought of it had her heart palpitating wildly.
It was no secret she had the utmost respect for what he did. In fact, her housemates often teased her about her hero-worship. But, hey, the man could be making squillions of dollars as a plastic surgeon doing boob jobs and lipo like his esteemed father. Instead he’d chosen to help horrendously disfigured people that no one in the world cared about, have a shot at a normal life.
He could easily have been a playboy.
But he wasn’t.
Frankly, it got her hot just thinking about it.
‘Unrest?’ she squeaked.
Adam waved his arm dismissing the threat. ‘Local warlord stuff. We were fine. Just the government being cautious.’
Local warlord?
Dear God, was his work dangerous? What if … what if he went away one time and didn’t come back? What if she never got the chance to …?
Adam studied Jess intently for an age. She was chewing on that pink, pink mouth and he found himself suddenly wondering what it might be like to run his tongue along those lips and soothe them from her savaging.
The insidious thought that she was naked beneath her towel hit him from out of the blue. He’d never thought about Jess like that before. Not about her mouth. Or what was under that towel. She was a friend of his little sister.
She was twenty-three, for crying out loud.
He was thirty-five.
And she read romance novels.
Time to leave. Way past time to leave.
Jess watched as he shifted, the muscles of his naked arms and chest rippling as he began to pull the sheet aside. ‘Stop,’ she squeaked. ‘What are you doing?’
Adam frowned. ‘It’s okay,’ he assured her, consulting his watch, ‘I’ve had a couple of hours. I’ll be fine now till the air-con guy gets here.’ Even though he felt like his eyeballs had been rolled in shell grit.
‘Adam …’ She shook her head. ‘You haven’t got a stitch on under that sheet.’
It was on the tip of Adam’s tongue to tell her she didn’t have a stitch on under her towel either but then another thought struck him.
‘Well, now,’ he drawled as he leaned back on his splayed palms. ‘And you would know that how, Jessica Donaldson?’
Realising her gaffe, Jess blushed furiously. A more sophisticated woman may have been able to come up with some witty reply but Jess was mortified.
‘You were peeking at me,’ Adam stated and seeing her cheeks grow an even more fetching shade of pink—as pink as her mouth—he laughed.
The rich, deep sound filled the room and Jess felt her skin break out in goose-bumps.
