She could hear rustling behind her, and she was absolutely not thinking about the fact that he was naked. Nope. Not even a little bit. She caught a brief reflection of his bare ass in the window off to her left, and a tight sound escaped the back of her throat. She squeezed her eyes shut.

“What?” he asked.

She took a breath and then glued her attention onto the blank wall in front of her. “Didn’t say anything.”

“You looked, didn’t you?”

She snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

“Pervert,” he said with no ire in it. “All right, I’m good.” The bedsprings squeaked as he sat. “Except for the fact that my foot hurts like hell.”

She turned around, not comforted at all by the sight of Ash in his underwear. The boxer briefs hid even fewer secrets than the towel. He crossed his ankle over his knee to get a look at his foot, and her face got hot at the unencumbered view of the bulge between his legs. Eyes up, woman. Good Lord, what was wrong with her? This was Ash.

This was a clear sign that she’d gone too long without a date. Her brain was separating past Ash from current Ash, pretending as if this man in front of her was simply some hot stranger. She could not be thinking these thoughts about Ashton Isaacs.

“How bad is it?” she asked, shoving a packet of disinfectant wipes and a box of bandages at him.

He eyed the cut, which had made a mess on the bottom of his foot, and took the wipes from her. “The glass got me pretty good, but I don’t see any shards stuck in there. I won’t need stitches, so there’s that.”

“Excellent.”

He looked up and smirked. “Next time just use the pepper spray, Breslin. The recovery time will be quicker.”

“I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m in a dark room and startled by a naked stranger,” she said wryly.

Ash hissed in pain when he cleaned the cut and then quickly bandaged it. “I guess I should be happy you aimed for my shoulder.”

“Oh, that’s not where I was aiming, sunshine,” she said, taking the box of bandages from him and setting them on the side table. “Just be thankful I wasn’t on the softball team.”

He chuckled under his breath, and the simple act changed his whole face, making him look more like the boy she used to know, the one who used to make her days at the bookstore fun with his sneaky, dry sense of humor. “No possibility of that. You were the worst at softball. Remember that time you accidentally let go of the bat and almost took Coach Orion’s head off?”

She crossed her arms as Ash got up and hobbled over to his suitcase to fish out a pair of jeans. “I’m not sure that was an accident. I think that was my subconscious getting him back for that time he made me run laps in the boys’ gym for being late while the girls went outside and played four square.”