Fire and Ice - Anne Stuart [48]
Clearly Reno, or Hiromasa Shinoda, didn’t believe in central heating, either. She could see her breath in the darkened room, and the thin cotton wasn’t much help. She could always put on her clothes again, and she would if she had to, but she’d run from the compound in nothing but a thin T-shirt that had been soaked with sweat by the time they’d gotten into the taxi. She’d been wearing the same pair of jeans since she left L.A., and her clean underwear was somewhere back at the compound with her backpack. She wanted clean clothes, she wanted a soft bed, she wanted Summer. And she wasn’t going to get any of those things, so she might as well get over it and—
“Enough,” Reno said, sitting up and throwing off the thin blanket. It pooled at his waist, and he was naked from the waist up. Jilly knew she was in even deeper shit than she’d thought.
He was freaking gorgeous. His chest was smooth, lean and muscled, his stomach flat, and if she had even half her mother’s gifts, she’d crawl over there and lick him.
Another flash of heat. Maybe if she just kept thinking random, embarrassing thoughts she’d keep from freezing to death.
“Stop it!”
“Stop what?” she protested. “I can’t help it if I can’t sleep.”
“Don’t look at me like that.”
She could have been foolish enough to ask him what he meant, but she didn’t. Looking at him as if he were a rare steak and she was starving. Looking at him as if he were a box of Godiva and she was a chocoholic. As if she were a drunk confronting a bottle of ancient Scotch. Like a stupid, semivirgin in love with the worst choice she could have made.
It wasn’t as if she’d had any choice in the matter. If she had, she wouldn’t think twice about him. But some things weren’t up to her. She’d taken one look at him, years ago in Genevieve Madsen’s garden in Wiltshire, and she’d been a goner. Familiarity, while it was breeding contempt, wasn’t helping much with the lust part.
Which was actually rather reassuring. She’d been so disinterested in most of the men and boys she’d seen that she’d wondered if she were frigid or simply asexual. The moment she saw Reno again she knew that wasn’t her particular problem.
Her problem was Reno, pure and simple. Though there was nothing pure and simple about him.
He shoved the blanket away and stood up, and Jilly let out a shriek. He was practically naked, all long, lean, gorgeous six feet of him, except for a strip of cloth wrapped strategically around his hips. It was the sort of thing she’d seen on sumo wrestlers. It looked a hell of a lot better on him.
“Close your eyes if you’re embarrassed,” he said, picking up the discarded blanket and tossing it to her. She resisted the temptation to pull it over her head. Except that she couldn’t look away.
He looked alien, golden and savage, and the tattooed dragon snaking down one arm simply added to the effect, running from his shoulder down to his wrist, in vivid colors of red and gold. He strode past her, magnificent, and while she shouldn’t have done it, she couldn’t help but look as he walked past. He had to have the most gorgeous butt in the world.
She let out a quiet moan and buried her face in the blanket he’d tossed at her. And then quickly lifted her head. It smelled like the almond soap she’d used in his bathroom. And it smelled like his skin, something indefinable and unquestionably erotic. And at this point she’d be better off walking straight into a trap of yakuza thugs than spend another minute fantasizing about her unwilling protector.
When he came out of the bathroom, he was dressed again, in black pants and a loose white shirt and black jacket. She couldn’t stop from wondering if he was still wearing that strip of cloth under the clothes or whether he’d gone to more traditional boxers. He didn’t strike her as the tighty-whitie kind of man. Or maybe he wasn’t wearing anything