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the box again and ripped open
another gauze square with her teeth. Peering in yet again, she
pulled out several sterile cotton swabs in paper. Matt couldn’t
help but pull away a bit as she ripped them open and reached for
his head. Gina paused and looked down at him. “I’m not going to
hurt you.”
    Matt felt like a heel. It was second nature
to pull away from anybody. “I know. Just habit. Go ahead.”
    Gina reached forward again, slower this time,
and Matt just felt plain stupid. It wasn’t her fault he had been
raised to expect being hit.
    She pulled away the gauze pad, and he was
startled to see how much blood was on it. Gina must have seen the
look because she pressed the second one to his head gently and
tossed the used square onto the paper it had been originally
wrapped in. “Head wounds always bleed a lot. You probably just have
a tiny cut. We’ll hold this here for a minute and then clean it and
see what we have.”
    Matt tipped his head into the pressure,
praying that the thing would stop bleeding sooner. Gina stood so
close, he could smell peaches. It had to be her shampoo or body
lotion. For the first time, he realized his eyes rested on her
breasts, directly in front of him. He slammed his eyes closed, but
he could still see the gentle swell of the purple T-shirt stretched
thin over the heaviest part of them and the shape of her nipples at
the crest. Blood began to head south and it was all he could do not
to pull her to him. He crossed his hands over his lap and the
erection that hadn’t completely gone away, but it did no good. He
was hard as a board as she pulled the second pad away and tossed it
to the counter. She stepped away for a moment to retrieve the
swabs, then came back to stand in front of him again. This time,
though, she leaned forward to look at the wound even closer.
    Matt felt his breath stall in his lungs as he
was blasted by the heat of her body and the scent of her skin. Only
this time, her breasts were mere inches from his face. He had no
idea what size they were, but he knew if he shaped his hands to
them, they would fill them perfectly. It was a battle to keep his
hands clenched together.
    “Now this may hurt a bit,” she warned as she
reached across with her casted hand to pull the hair away from the
cut.
    Good . It did hurt a little bit, but
not enough to distract his body from what was directly in front of
his face. He closed his eyes again and tried to breathe slowly, but
her scent was all around him, keeping him on edge.
    “Well,” she said suddenly, “looks like it’s
just a little spot. It could probably use a stitch, though.”
    “No stitches,” he grumbled.
    “You may have a scar if we just bandage it,”
she warned.
    Shrugging, he pointed to his right eyebrow,
which had a line through the middle of the brow where his father
had tossed him against the coffee table. “I’m used to scars.” He’d
probably shock her if he showed them all to her.
    When she pulled back and looked in his face,
Matt wished he had kept his damn mouth shut.
    “How did you get that one?” she asked.
    Yep, stupid, that’s what you get. “Coffee table when I was a kid.”
    Gina seemed to know there was more to the
story than he was saying, but she didn’t press. Pulling the swabs
from their paper sleeves, she cleaned his head. It was difficult
for her to place the butterfly bandages with the cast on her hand,
so he held his own hair out of the way. With a last swipe of a pad,
she was done and stepped away.
    Matt took his first deep breath in several
minutes as she cleaned up the bloody paper mess, and his brain
cleared. He had other things to worry about.
    “I’ll fix the banister,” he said.
    Gina smiled at him over her shoulder. “I know
you will. I never had any doubt. Honestly, that thing has been
loose for a long time.”
    Matt frowned at the lie. She was trying to
make him feel better. The post had been sturdy. Until he’d grabbed
it, that is. “I’ll go get my tools.