A Wedding on Lilac Lane by Hope Ramsay (best book clubs .txt) 📕

the sun sank over the island. It might have been a perfect moment for romance or something.

Was that it? Was he afraid of romance?

Was she?

She whirled around, ready to broach the untouchable subject, when she saw the red bumps swelling across the patch of chest that his unbuttoned golf shirt exposed.

He scratched absently. “I’m being eaten for supper.”

Her gaze dropped to his exposed feet, and sure enough little red welts encircled both of his ankles.

“Oh my god. You are being eaten.” She gave her exposed arms and legs a quick exam. No sign of bites. “I guess they like the way you taste?” The words made her blush, but she continued. “You do taste good, you know.”

He ignored the flirtatious remark and strode past her, opening the unlocked sliding door that led to Mom’s living room. “I need to take a shower. Now. Which way is the bathroom?”

She pointed.

He ran, and a moment later, the sound of water running in the bathroom reached her ears. A little part of her wanted to tiptoe into the bathroom with him. But she couldn’t do a thing like that. Not in Mom’s house. Even if Mom and Jim had gone out for dinner and probably wouldn’t be home for a while yet.

She jettisoned her evil thoughts and went in search of some calamine lotion or hydrocortisone cream, but she couldn’t find any in the linen closet. The best she could manage was a big container of aloe gel.

She returned to the living room, aloe in hand, just as Dylan came out of the hall bathroom with Mom’s fuchsia and yellow beach towel around his middle, the words HELLO SUNSHINE strategically centered on his butt.

She tried mightily but she couldn’t keep the laugh from bubbling up out of her. He looked more delicious than Granny’s fried chicken. Last night, the lights had been turned down low, and she hadn’t gotten a good look at his chest. Now it made the spit dry in her mouth.

But the welts along his neck, which continued in a line down toward his left armpit, brought out her inner Florence Nightingale. “Oh my. You’ve been eaten.”

“You should go shower too. Now. Just to be on the safe side. And don’t put your clothes back on.” He said this like a doctor issuing orders, not a lover giving her a direction. It was kind of disappointing.

“I’m fine,” she said. Her chance to get naked with him had come and gone. She wasn’t going to shower alone. Besides, she didn’t have any bites that she could see or feel.

“I’ve got aloe.” She held up the bottle of green goo. “It should tide you over until you get some hydrocortisone.”

He snatched the bottle, a grumpy frown on his face as he went to work smearing the gel on his chest and ankles, giving her an exceptionally entertaining show that made the palms of her hands itch.

So when he turned around and said, “Do I have bites on my back? I’m itchy down my back,” she stepped closer to him and investigated. He did have bites all down his back, across the bumps in his spine, and over one hip.

“Oh my word, it’s like one of those chiggers got stuck in your shirt and went on a march over your skin.”

“And all because I unbuttoned my top button,” he said in a somewhat savage tone.

“Hand me the gel,” she directed.

He handed it over, and she pumped out a generous dollop that cooled her palm. She rubbed the gel into the welts along his warm back, her fingers tingling, not from the aloe but from system overload. His back was just as sexy as his front.

She put heart and soul and libido into rubbing the gel into his skin. And she might have worked harder than was absolutely necessary because touching him was such a turn-on.

But when she let go of a small, inarticulate sound, he turned. His eyes dark, wide, and unreadable as he began to lean in. She braced herself, ready to receive the kiss that was coming, her heart thumping in anticipation.

But right before he made his move, the sliding-glass door opened, and Mom and Jim walked into the house.

Dylan jumped back as if someone had goosed him.

Mom gasped.

Jim said, “What the hell?”

Ella turned, and without so much as a blush said, “The chiggers came to our picnic. I think we need to find another spot for the party.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Mom said, pressing her hand to her chest.

Jim gave her a weird look, then strode over to Dylan, who had the presence of mind to say, “I took a shower.”

“Right. Good move,” Jim said. “You need more than aloe on those bites.” He turned on his heel and found the hydrocortisone cream in the linen closet, which someone (probably Jim) had moved to the upper shelf, where Ella hadn’t seen it.

She stepped back and let Jim take over the doctoring, while Mom gave her a strange, assessing look out of a suddenly pale face.

Chapter Seventeen

Dad lent Dylan a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt for the drive back to town and seemed perfectly happy to accept the explanation that Ella was rubbing aloe onto his back when they were caught.

Dylan never thought he’d regard a hundred chigger bites as a silver lining, but the welts were there as evidence that nothing untoward, or even salacious, had happened.

Good thing Ella hadn’t followed his orders and taken a shower. Otherwise she might have been caught naked too. And that might have been a lot harder to explain, since she seemed to have escaped the no-see-ums.

Now she sat in the passenger’s seat as he guided the Honda along the beach road that would eventually connect with Harbor Drive. She hadn’t said a word in five minutes, and the tension between them had grown as thick as the humid night outside.

“We’re okay,” he finally said, hoping to put her at ease. “I have a hundred bug bites to prove it.”

She let out a