It’s not a bad look. Eli seems incapable of bad looks. I may be rinsing my hair under the running water for longer than strictly necessary, just getting an eyeful of him where he won’t catch me.
After a minute of that, he saunters over, standing next to me.
My heartbeat picks up, despite my brain asking it not to do that.
“You need soap?” he offers, holding up a bottle of Dawn.
It’s tempting. My hair still feels gross, but I can’t imagine that dish soap is great for my hair either.
“I’ll use shampoo when I get home,” I say, still rinsing and scrubbing. “I’m just getting the chunks out so I don’t get frosting all over my car.”
“It’s all the same stuff,” he says.
I just laugh.
“Not at all,” I tell him, still upside-down, combing my fingers through my hair, making sure I’ve gotten as much sugar out as I can. “I doubt dish soap will give me the bounce and volume I require.”
“You know that’s all marketing,” he goes on. “Make it smell nice and promise manageability and they can charge you twice as much for soap.”
I reach up and turn the water off, wringing my hair out into the sink. When I stand right-side-up again, Eli hands me a kitchen towel.
“Thanks,” I say, scrunching my hair in it.
For a moment, I study him. He studies me, something oddly unguarded between us.
“But you can’t convince me that you don’t shampoo and condition,” I say.
Eli has nice hair. It isn’t showy or dramatic, but it’s a brown so intense and deep it’s nearly black, framing his face and flopping over his forehead in exactly the right way. There’s no way he doesn’t spend some time on it.
“And why would you say that?”
Because you look too good.
“Come on. You’re coiffed. There’s probably even hair gel or something in it,” I say, rubbing the towel vigorously against my head. “Mousse, maybe?”
“Why would I put an ungulate in my hair?”
“Moose aren’t ungulates,” I say.
I have no idea whether moose are ungulates, but disagreeing with Eli is a knee-jerk response.
“I think they are.”
“Because you’re a moose expert.”
“At least I’ve seen one,” he counters.
“Did it tell you it was an ungulate?”
“It didn’t have to,” he says. “It was just so obvious.”
I drape the towel around my neck, dragging my fingers through my hair again. It’s wet and probably looks like a rat’s nest, but at least it isn’t sticky any more.
Don’t ask, I think. Don’t give him the satisfaction.
“It was in North Dakota,” he says, then nods at me. “You need another towel?”
“I’m all right,” I say, squeezing it around the ends of my hair. “What were you doing in North Dakota?”
“Bartending,” he says, then holds out a hand. “I’ll take that back.”
I toss Eli the towel. He catches it and walks off, heading through a doorway to some other part of the kitchen as I look down at myself.
Even if my hair is …not clean, but better, the rest of me is still a disaster. Sighing, I head back to the sink, scrubbing frosting from my elbows and upper arms. More than anything, I need a shower, but I don’t want to get frosting all over the inside of my car on the way home.
“Here,” Eli’s voice says from behind me, and I turn.
Fabric hits me right in the face. I grab at it with wet hands.
“You did that on purpose.”
He grins, his face easy and relaxed as he tosses something onto the counter next to himself. It’s not how I’m used to seeing him.
It’s weird. It’s unfamiliar.
Strangest of all, it’s nice.
“Prove it,” he says, and pulls his shirt off over his head.
I wasn’t prepared.
Eli’s gorgeous. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, his muscles thick and ropy. Even in the ugly fluorescent light of the industrial kitchen, watching them move under his skin as he takes one shirt off and puts another on is mesmerizing.
My face is hot. I want to touch him so bad my hand twitches and I think about it all again, that thirty seconds outside the brewery, about what could have happened if Daniel hadn’t found us.
I want. I want.
So did the maid of honor.
God, I hate my stupid brain sometimes. Can’t I just ogle a man in peace?
Eli turns away from me slightly, grabbing his shirt from the counter, his back toward me.
I notice something else: Eli has a tattoo now.
There’s only one that I can see, but it’s big. It stretches the width of his upper back, lines and circles connected across muscle and bone and sinew. It’s a good, well-done tattoo. A tattoo that clearly took time and effort and thought, a tattoo that was carefully and lovingly planned.
All at once, the enormity of the thing hits me.
Eli’s changed. He’s different. He left this place and then came back, and in the interim he was a chef in Bangkok and a bartender in North Dakota and God only knows what else, and he’s not the same any more.