mind. She wasn’t going to accept Claire’s silly dare. But that didn’t change the fact that she still had to get rid of Buck. She took a step into the bedroom, then hesitated. She couldn’t wake a gorgeous guy like that wearing her wallflower work outfit. No, she would slip into something a little less boring while he was still asleep, and he’d never know the difference. When she woke the sleeping stud, at least she would do it with her womanly ego intact.
She tiptoed several feet without making a sound, but the closet across the room seemed a mile away; her chest of drawers wasn’t any closer. She couldn’t let a little thing like that stop her, though, she reminded herself as she took one more tentative step and sighed with relief when Buck continued to snore softly.
She did a mental inventory of her wardrobe, wondering which outfit best suited the occasion. What she realized immediately was that she owned a dizzying array of beige garments, and almost nothing that was appropriate for waking up a stud-muffin. She stopped in her tracks in front of the closet. There sat a black suitcase with a hot pink bow on top and a small note card tucked under the bow. Lucy bent and plucked the card out, recognizing her name written in Claire’s handwriting. She opened the envelope to find a card within that read, “This is everything you’ll need for the week, except an outfit to travel in. That, you’ll find hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Just wear it!” The words “wear it” were underlined twice. Claire had signed the note, “Love, C.”
Lucy eyeballed the suitcase warily. Where her tastes ran toward conservative styles and neutral colors, Claire had a penchant for outrageous platform heels and leopard-print undergarments. It was best not to look at the contents of the suitcase right away, not when she had Buck, who could wake at any moment, nearby.
She hurried across the room as silently as possible and slipped into the bathroom, gently closing and locking the door behind her. Her heartbeat thudded in her ears. When she finally turned on the light, the outfit in front of her was worse than she could have imagined.
And she couldn’t wait to try it on.
Two minutes later Lucy’s work clothes were lying in a heap on the bathroom floor and she was peering over her shoulder at the reflection of her butt in a pair of skintight black pants. As many other shocks as she’d received this evening, perhaps the greatest one of all was the realization that she didn’t look half bad in the outfit Claire had picked out. In fact, she might even say she looked…darned good. All those years of eating wheat bran and steamed veggies had paid off.
But whether or not she could walk out of the bathroom and allow another human being to see her like this was a different matter. She finished fastening the tiny eye-hooks on the front of the stretchy red top—red, a color she never wore—and slid on the black platform sandals that turned out to be a lot more comfortable than they looked, then took another look at herself in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door.
Okay, she wasn’t exactly blessed by Mother Nature in the chest department, but still…She inspected herself further. Not bad for an outfit that made her look like a groupie hoping to sneak backstage at a rock concert. Her hair, however, was all wrong.
She reached up and removed the pins that held her French twist in place, then ran her fingers through her light brown hair until it fell around her face in waves that hung to her shoulders. She’d never liked her hair much, especially not the mousy color that made her about as noticeable as white wallpaper, or the flyaway curls that, on bad days, gave her the appearance of having wispy little horns, but with the groupie getup, she had to admit that the tousled look went quite nicely.
She wasn’t wearing a spot of makeup, but there was no time to fix herself up any more than she already had, especially when her makeup collection consisted mostly of ointments and facial cleansers—not tubes of lipstick with names like Scarlet Passion.
She had a cowboy to awaken. But as she took a deep breath and stepped out of the bathroom, her throat seized up and she felt her knees begin to buckle. What could she possibly have been thinking? She couldn’t wake up this strange man and let him see her like this.
She heard Claire’s voice again. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life with no one but your cats to keep you warm at night. Lucy loved her cats, but they didn’t make great bed partners. Aside from their more obvious shortcomings, Romeo hogged the bed and Juliet liked to deposit dead, mangled insects on Lucy’s pillow—her feline version of fancy hotel chocolates.
With that depressing thought, she decided the least she could do for herself was be proud of the way she looked in her new outfit, even if it was only for the couple of minutes it took to get Buck out of the apartment.
Her confidence somewhat renewed, she couldn’t help pausing for a moment to marvel again at the male form in all its glory. Why did such gorgeous men have to exist, to remind plain women such as herself of all they couldn’t have? She decided it would be wise not to spend much more time contemplating the unfairness of it all, but she still couldn’t stop staring. What she really wanted was a closer look.
It only took one more gander at that perfect expanse of chest to convince her that a closer look wouldn’t hurt anyone. Besides, she’d never actually seen a half-naked hunk at close range before.
As she knelt beside the bed, a little alarm sounded in the back of her brain that she quickly shut off. This was her one chance to gawk at Buck up close, and she wasn’t going to waste it. She eased her elbows onto the edge of the bed and leaned in, inhaling the scent of him—an advantage of getting close that she hadn’t even considered. He smelled of something warm and woodsy and unmistakably male, and the scent was intoxicating. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeper, nearly melting as the smell overtook her.
Eyes open again, she admired the smoothness of his tanned, olive skin and the little brown nipples that were nearly flat against his chest. The only body hair he had was under his arms, and a thin, dark trail that started below his belly button and disappeared into the waist of his jeans, calling Lucy’s eyes lower to the impressive bulge that filled his worn-out Levi’s. She felt her jaw sag as she contemplated the size of the bulge. Were there really men out there who were that well endowed? If so, she’d been missing the boat. Heck, she hadn’t even known the boat existed.
“Hey there, darlin’. Like what you see?”
The shock of Buck’s voice sent Lucy sprawling backward, landing on her rear end with a thud as she stared up at the man she’d thought to be asleep.
“H-how l-long have you been awake?” She felt her face burn as he watched her with amused eyes.
“Since you leaned against the bed.”
“Oh.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
Lucy found herself mesmerized by his mouth as it formed words, words she didn’t want to hear at the moment because he had the sexiest mouth she’d ever seen and all she wanted to do was to find out how it would feel to kiss it. Oh, it wasn’t just his mouth, but his whole face! The hat had slid back to reveal features just as stunning as those below his neck. Straight nose, strong jawline, hint of a five o’clock shadow, dark brown lashes to match his tousled dark hair.
“What question?”
“Do you like what you see?” He had a lazy smile and a deeper voice than she’d imagined.
Lucy pushed herself up from the carpet and stood, futilely trying to brush cat hair from her black pants. Anything to hide her flaming-red face from Buck. “I was just a little shocked to find a strange man handcuffed to my bed, that’s
