‘What reason?’
He was so convincing I almost believed him.
‘You know what I’m talking about.’ I was a sexually experienced woman in her thirties who had no business blushing like a teenager, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. ‘They’ll think we’ve ducked in here for a quickie.’
‘I don’t do quickies,’ he said, his words stealing every sassy retort from my head. ‘Now, shall we get some ice on that sting?’
I drew in a deep breath before releasing my hold on the blanket, allowing it to fall to the tiled floor. My unzipped dress was hanging from one shoulder, revealing quite a lot of cleavage and a large inflamed area of skin that extended beneath the lace of my bra.
All at once it went very quiet in the Ladies’, with only the hum of the fluorescent lighting to mask the fact that one of us was breathing a little raggedly. Maybe we both were. He felt it too. I know he did by the way he took a sudden jerky step backwards as though the bolt of lightning still arced between us.
I could see my breasts rising and falling as my breathing grew shallower.
‘Can you see where it stung you?’ His voice sounded different now.
I peeled the fabric of the bra cup away. The skin was bright red around an angry puncture mark.
I nodded.
‘Is the stinger still in it?’
‘I’m not sure. It’s hard to see from this angle.’
He’d taken a half step towards me before stopping. ‘Do you want me to look?’
It was a question with a hundred different answers, all of them probably wrong.
I nodded, not sure if I could trust my voice.
He stepped forward and I closed my eyes, too scared he’d see things within them that he wasn’t meant to know.
He didn’t touch me, and I truly don’t know if I was relieved or disappointed.
‘I think it’s fine,’ he said, his voice gruff. My eyes flew open, and he was already turning away and reaching for a small hand towel from a basket on the countertop. Taking a handful of ice, he dropped it onto the square, folding it up to make a compress.
‘Hold this against you. It should help with the pain and the swelling,’ he said, passing me the towel and then turning around again as I slid it onto the inflamed skin of my breast.
‘I think it was a bumblebee rather than a honey one,’ he told the wall tiles beside the hand drier. ‘Which is good because they don’t leave their stingers behind.’
‘Excellent,’ I said, then rashly decided to defuse the moment with humour. ‘I’d have hated having to ask anyone to suck out the venom.’
His shoulders twitched. ‘I think you’ll find that’s for snakebites.’
I had another quip at the ready, but it died in my throat when he added, ‘But, for the record, I don’t think there’d have been a shortage of volunteers to help you out.’
I wanted to ask if he’d have been one of them, but I wasn’t that reckless.
Leaving the icy pad inside my bra, I straightened my dress and zipped it back up.
‘All decent,’ I said.
Rhys turned back to face me. It was hard to be sure in this light, but he looked a little flushed.
‘You certainly seem to know a lot about bees.’
He shrugged. ‘You have to when your daughter is allergic to their sting and suffers from asthma.’
His words were a much-needed verbal bucket of cold water. There was a physical attraction here, we’d both be stupid to deny it. But it wasn’t going anywhere. It couldn’t. And if I had to repeat that mantra a thousand times before my traitorous body finally believed me, then so be it.