Trey practically growled at her, but the effect was spoiled by the fact that he still looked like a wet mop and was shivering so violently his teeth were on the verge of shattering each other.
Ambi smiled back innocently. She imagined it was innocent, at least. In reality, she probably looked like the guilty cat who had just swallowed its owner’s favorite canary whole and wasn’t sorry at all.
“Anyway, you can have a bath while I dry out your wet clothes.”
“Those clothes are d-dry c-c-clean o-only,” Trey shivered.
“Good.” Her smile grew wider. “I’ll throw them in the dryer.”
Trey’s eyes widened in horror. Please. Surely there were worse things than a two-thousand-dollar suit and an expensive wool coat hitting the dryer. Just because things said they were dry clean only, didn’t mean that they actually were.
She followed up with the best part of all. The part she had no doubt that Trey would be absolutely thrilled about. The icing on the cake, the item that would seal the deal.
“While they’re drying, I just so happen to have a nice, fluffy, pink quilt for you.”
She turned and left Trey dripping all over the tiled floor of her office, shivering and breathing heavy. She went straight to the stairs to her apartment. It only took Trey a few seconds to do the whole suck it up, buttercup routine and follow.
Ah, humble pie had never been so freshly baked or smelled so delicious.
CHAPTER 9
Trey
It turned out that there were few things better in life than a warm shower. He stripped out of his sopping wet clothes, left them outside the bathroom door as instructed, and cranked the shower on to something somewhere between scalding and fucking unbearable. The water was hot enough to melt him and hurt like hell on his frozen feet, hands, and face, but it also felt pretty damn near heaven.
He was so enraptured by getting warm again when he felt cold straight to his bones, the kind of cold that can’t actually be properly eradicated without being so hot that sweat beaded his brow even under the pounding water, that he didn’t actually stop to take in any details of the bathroom until after he’d shut the water off.
Black spots danced in front of his eyes from the brutal temperature change, then the boiling alive. His blood was probably sizzling, and he figured passing out on top of everything else wouldn’t be smart or conducive to anything. He kind of wanted to keep his skull in one piece.
He stepped out of the tub and grabbed for the towel on the rack. Of course, it was pink. Pink and fluffy. Ambi always did like pink. She liked her towels big enough to wrap around her three times since she was always cold.
Thinking about the towel now wrapped around his hips on Ambi’s body worked miracles for his dick. It was good to see that the bastard hadn’t frozen off in the whole frigid trek from hell he’d forced himself to undergo. Then again, desperation made people do really stupid shit. He’d let Ambi go once. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.
Trey glanced slowly around the bathroom, breathing in the colder air. The mirror was fogged up, even with the fan clanking away overhead. The office was one of those old brick buildings that must have had a few thousand previous lives. The apartment on top was large, but it was old and unique with tons of character. Brick walls, exposed ceiling beams, beat up hardwood floor. Exactly what Ambi liked.
The bathtub was a claw foot, number one on her bathtub wish list, and an old cast iron one at that, none of the fake plastic shit. The sink was a simple pedestal and the toilet was nothing special, but the exposed gold radiator at the end of the bathroom was pretty cool. The whole thing screamed Ambi.
Footsteps sounded in the hall outside the bathroom. Trey could practically hear Ambi breathing through the old wood door- also the real deal with the five panels and the antique knob that looked like it might fall off at any given minute.
“Yo, Ambi? My clothes are done in the dryer yet?”
She snorted through the door. It was muffled, but he could imagine her face, half pissed off, half annoyed. No, wrong. A third pissed off, a third annoyed, a third trying to hide that she actually didn’t find his company that repulsive. That might be wishful thinking, but he knew for a fact that if she did, she would have told him to go fuck himself and left him downstairs to thaw out in her office and figure out his own way home.
Fuck. He couldn’t think about the term fuck himself at the moment. Not with Ambi so close and nothing more than her towel wrapped around his hips. His dick throbbed at the idea of any kind of action.