strode back to start sweeping up the mess at her feet. She didn’t prevent him from cleaning, but merely stepped clear of the debris as she giddily recalled the hardness of his chest and the heavy warmth of his hand and how comforting and…and…um, pleasing it had been to feel Griffin against her.
She didn’t stop him from opening the cabinet under the sink, either. He had to toss the contents of the dustpan, after all, into the oversized white garbage pail.
The garbage pail that, she belatedly remembered, was almost overflowing with ice-cream-covered undergarments.
“Oh!” Annie said, dashing forward. She’d even gingerly pawed through the mess with tongs at one point, desperate for something wearable, so that several bras hung drunkenly over the edge to reveal a pile of ice-milk-sodden, but clearly recognizable panties. “I don’t…I’m not…”
Griffin looked at her, his brows raised. “You don’t?” He looked back at the contents of the can. “You’re not?” He looked at her again. “I can…see that. I just don’t understand why.”
Why? How could she possibly tell him about what had gone through her mind yesterday when she was lying on the bank’s floor? Annie chewed on her lower lip, feeling completely foolish about those silly vows. Then someone, a sainted someone in her book, rapped impatiently on her front door. Without a second’s hesitation, Annie grabbed at the opportunity to escape what now seemed horribly embarrassing and completely unexplainable.
“Company!” she said brightly, pasting on a cheery smile. Then she turned and ran to see who it was, as if the man she’d once adored from afar hadn’t just discovered her naughty, though totally innocent, secret.
On the other side of Annie’s front door stood two dear, familiar figures—her mother, Natalie Smith, and Annie’s best friend, Elena O’Brien. “Mom, Elena. Come in, come in.”
With a surge of relief, Annie ushered them inside. They were just the people to remind her of the real Annie Smith. The ordinarily patient and ordinarily shy Annie Smith. She wasn’t the unfamiliar creature who had tossed her clothes away yesterday any more than she was the half-naked woman who’d found herself in the arms of Griffin Chase this morning.
Her mother and Elena would help her remember that.
Annie’s mom looked at Annie closely, an unfamiliar frown on her pretty face. “Honey? Are you all right? You look…different.”
“No, I don’t,” Annie denied quickly. I’m the same. Nothing has changed. “I told you yesterday, Mom, I’m fine. A-okay. Peachy-keen. Hunky-dory.”
“You left out tutti-frutti.” Elena grinned, her sassy smile bright against the golden color of her skin. Her Mexican mother and Irish father accounted for her straight black hair and blue eyes.
“Still,” Elena continued, “your mom wasn’t going to stop worrying until I drove her over here. I told her nothing could shake you—” Her eyes widened as she caught sight of something over Annie’s shoulder. “Whoa. Maybe I was wrong.”
Annie swung around slowly to find Griffin coming into the room. It’s not that she’d forgotten him, exactly, but she hadn’t quite yet figured out how to explain his presence or how to respond to him. Particularly now that she knew he knew that what she wore beneath her skirt and T-shirt was exactly zippo.
But he took the uncomfortable situation out of her hands by walking directly to Annie’s mom and lifting her off her feet in a grizzly-worthy bear hug.
“Griffin!” her mom cried. When he set her down she lifted up on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek. “You’re home.”
“And completely devastated to discover that in the two years I was gone you had retired.” He smiled down at her. “Any chance I could entice you back? At least just to fill the cookie jar?”
Her mother laughed, and under the cover of their continuing conversation, Elena sidled over to Annie. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
Annie rolled her eyes. “I told you yesterday. He gave me a ride from the police station.”
Elena’s brows rose. “What about last night? Any additional, uh…rides?”
Annie lightly slapped her friend’s arm. As if a man like him would look at her twice in that way! “Of course not. Griffin merely came over to check on me this morning. It was a neighborly thing to do.”
Elena’s eyebrows rose even higher. “Neighborly?” she asked, her voice skeptical.
Before she could scold her friend again, Griffin turned away from Annie’s mom to look at the two younger women. “And this is?” He was asking for an introduction to Elena, but his gaze was only for Annie.
Suddenly, beneath her clothes, her skin prickled. She was naked. He knew it, she knew it, it was a secret only the two of them shared, and it only made her feel that much more exposed.
Annie swallowed as more tickles of awareness rose on her bare flesh. “Griffin, this is—this is my friend Elena O’Brien.” She hoped her voice didn’t sound as squeaky to them as it did to herself. “Elena, may I introduce you to Griffin Chase.”
There was a funny little smile on Elena’s face as she stuck out her hand to shake Griffin’s. “Brother of Logan, I presume?”
That caught Griffin’s attention. His eyes narrowed. “You know my little brother?”
Elena gave a casual wave of her fingers. “We go way back. Be sure to give him my best.”
Annie slid a look at Elena. There was bad blood between Elena and Griffin’s “little” brother—now twenty-nine years old and as big as Griffin himself—over a senior prom date gone awry, though Elena wouldn’t speak of it beyond making nasty cracks about Logan whenever they happened to catch a glimpse of him.
Griffin glanced at Annie, then back at Elena. “Your best? I’ll be sure to do that.”
Annie’s friend smiled once more but it wasn’t her usual cheerful one. “Thank you. Be sure to tell him Elena says hello. That’s Elena with an ‘e’ as in every day I thank my lucky stars he left me standing there.”
Nodding, Griffin gave her one more half-puzzled, half-amused look, then switched his attention to Annie. “I’ll be on my way now,” he said. “I brought piles of work home. Will you be okay?”
Those crystal-faceted blue eyes of his made it impossible for her to look away, and even more impossible to forget the sensation of being enclosed by his arms. “I wish people would stop asking me that,” she whispered. It didn’t seem necessary to talk any louder, not when she could have sworn there were only the two of them in the room, maybe in the whole world.
He shrugged, then his hand lifted and he brushed his fingertips across her temple to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. His fingers were cool and his touch gentle. Goose bumps skittered across Annie’s neck and then southward, and she found herself once again crossing her arms over her chest.
His gaze flicked down toward her breasts, back up to her eyes. “We’re just concerned,” he said softly. “You’ve been through a stressful experience.”
“My mom and Elena are here.” Somewhere. She remembered how
