Shower! Warm water, definitely some soap and makeup. Yes, that would help.
Turning on the warm water, she lathered herself with soap, trying to scrub away the terrible feelings of the day before. A fresh start, a new perspective, that’s all she needed to try and figure out a way out of this mess. Surely there was some way she could get herself out of debt and maintain her business. She’d have to work fast, and….
“I brought you some coffee. It will probably help,” a deep voice said from the other side of the shower curtain.
Zoe’s yelp was sharp and painful but she didn’t take the time to recover. Pulling the frosted shower curtain closer, she peered around the edge. Sure enough, there he was, in the flesh. Marco DiAngelo, most gorgeous man in town, confident, cocky and arrogant. And the man hadn’t changed.
“What are you doing in my bathroom?” she demanded.
The smile lurking on his rough, rugged mouth actually made her blush. “Enjoying the view?” he replied casually, leaning a shoulder against the bathroom doorway. “Are you going to take the cup or am I going to get a closer look?”
Zoe followed the path of his eyes and looked through the shower curtain, yelping once again when she realized that, by pulling the shower curtain against her body, she was actually making the material almost transparent. “Get out!” she screamed and jumped back from the shower curtain. “Get out of here right now!”
His reply was another deep chuckle. A moment later, his tanned, lightly haired arm reached in and set the cup of coffee down on the side of the bathtub. “Come on downstairs when you’re finished and we’ll talk.”
Zoe stared at the cup of coffee, her mouth almost salivating over the need to take a sip, but afraid of moving out of the corner of her shower until she heard the door to the bathroom click shut. When it finally did, she sagged against the wall in relief. Marco, after all these years, was much, much hotter than he’d been that summer after she’d finished high school. Much more rugged, more appealing, more confident…and decidedly more dangerous.
With her head pounding, she didn’t have the luxury of ignoring the coffee. Reaching out, she took the cup, but peeked around the shower curtain to make sure he was truly out of her bathroom. With a sigh of relief, she noted that she was alone once again.
Possibly not for long, she thought. He’d done it once and he could easily step right back into the bathroom. Unfortunately, the door was too far from the shower stall to reach out and easily lock without stepping out and dripping water all over the floor. Instead, she washed and conditioned as quickly as she could, gritting her teeth against the throbbing pain in her head.
When she was finished, she had another problem to deal with. She had her robe, but it didn’t seem like adequate coverage when she had nothing else to wear and Marco was downstairs, with no doors or walls to hide behind. Unfortunately, her closet was across the bedroom from her bathroom.
There was nothing to do but step out and get her clothes.
As soon as she stepped out of the bathroom, she was struck by two things. One, the smell of something absolutely delicious and fattening was cooking down in her kitchen and, two, that arrogant, irritating man had already gone through her clothes and laid out an outfit for her.
As if she would actually wear the dress he’d chosen, she thought, stomping past the bed where the orange, red and yellow flowered dress was laying. As she passed by though, she realized that he’d even laid out underwear!
Of all the gall! She felt the blush creeping up her neck all the way to her hairline as she looked at the lacy, almost nothing pink bra and underwear lying next to the dress.
“No way,” she whispered to herself. Even if she were to wear the dress, one simply didn’t wear pink underwear with that color dress!
Feeling silly for arguing with herself about the color of his chosen underwear when she wasn’t going to wear it anyway, she stomped to her dresser and pulled out a pair of jeans, then a simple blue knit shirt, scoop necked and runched at the sides which made her eyes appear much more blue, not that she cared one little whit about her eye color around that man, and cinched in her waist, which she absolutely did care about. The man was the first who had ever really kissed her, and he’d ruined her dating life for the past ten years because no man had ever measured up to that experience. Nor had she ever really trusted another man after that experience, always waiting for the guy to leave her for the next woman and usually pushing him in that direction, or breaking it off with him before he could do it.
She combed her hair quickly, then twisted it into a knot on the back of her head, touched up the dark circles under her eyes with concealer, a touch of mascara, powder and lipstick. She still felt horrible, but at least she didn’t look so pathetic.
As she stared at her reflection in her bedroom mirror, she tried to find a bit of confidence. But the man downstairs was just too….she couldn’t define it, but he had it, whatever it was. And she definitely didn’t have it.
“You look beautiful. Come downstairs and get something to eat,” his deep voice called up from her kitchen. “Breakfast is ready, you’re ready, come eat while it’s hot.”
Zoe almost jumped out of her skin when he called up to her. She didn’t wonder how he knew she was ready. She’d been puttering around while getting dressed, and now she was standing in front her mirror. Obviously the silence in her loft told him everything he needed to know. Or he had telepathy, she thought with a grimace.
Her shoulders sagged as she turned around. She wanted to simply dive right back under her fluffy comforter and hide, but that was the coward’s way out and she’d never been a coward. Besides, she had to get him out of her loft, or he’d haunt her for a long time. She didn’t want to see him all over her loft, she didn’t want that visual of him being comfortable around here. She loved her place, and seeing him in it would ruin the pleasure she got when she worked up here by herself, or had friends over.
She took the stairs slowly, wishing she could just push him out the door. As she walked down the stairs, it occurred to her that she hadn’t let him in. “How did you get in here this morning?” she asked suspiciously.
“Once I got you to bed last night, I took your set of keys so it was easier to get back in this morning without waking you up too early.”
She glanced at the clock and raised an eyebrow. “It’s only eight o’clock now. What do you consider too early?”