Page 59 of Enchanted to Meet You

Silence on the other side of the door. Then, a low sigh. “What did you break?”

“I didn’t break anything!” I insisted, clutching the towel tighter against my chest as if he could see through the wood. “I just... I dropped the shirt you gave me on the floor of your room.”

A long beat of silence stretched between us. I could practically hear the smirk forming on his face.

“So what you’re saying,” he said, his voice dropping an octave, sounding amused, “is that you’re stuck in there.”

“I am asking you to hand me the shirt,” I demanded, heat flaring up my neck and flooding my cheeks. “Just pick it up, open the door an inch, and pass it to me.”

“Or,” Rhys mused, “you could just walk out and grab it.”

“I don’t have a shirt, Rhys.”

“So wrap up in a towel.”

That was a decent idea, I supposed. But I wasn’t going to admit that to him. My fingers brushed over the towel, but then reality hit me and I dropped the plush fabric. “I’m not walking out there in front of you in a towel.”

“I’ve seen girls in bikinis, Ainsley. I think my heart can handle a towel.”

“Rhys, I swear⁠—”

The door handle turned. I gasped, pressing my back against the sink, but the lock held.

“Relax,” he laughed softly, though there was a rough edge to his voice that hadn’t been there a second ago. “I’m turning around. Open the door and take it.”

I waited three excruciating seconds. “Are you actually turned around?”

“Yes, Ainsley. My back is to the door. Hand on my heart.”

I took a deep breath, unlocked the door, and pulled it open a few inches.

He was telling the truth. Rhys was standing two feet away, his back to me, holding the gray shirt out over his shoulder. He was wearing a fresh dark tee and athletic shorts himself, his hair damp from a quick rinse in another bathroom. The muscles in his broad back flexed slightly under his shirt as he held the clothes out.

“Quickly,” he murmured, his voice surprisingly gruff. “We’re going to be late.”

I reached my arm out, my fingers brushing his as I grabbed the fabric. His skin was warm. Too warm.

“Got it,” I whispered.

I started to pull back, but as I did, I lost my grip on one and the shirt fell to the floor. Again. I mumbled a curse. Rhys must have heard the soft rustle of it hitting the tile, because before I could utter a single word of warning, he instinctively spun around. “Did you drop⁠—”

He stopped dead. The world shattered into a thousand suspended seconds.

Rhys’s eyes widened. His gaze dropped from my face, taking in the view of me in one agonizing sweep—my bare shoulders, the towel I was now keeping a very tight grip on, the water droplets running down my skin.

His jaw clenched so tight I heard his teeth click, a muscle ticking wildly in his cheek. For three long, agonizing heartbeats, neither of us moved. I wasn’t even sure either of us were breathing. The air in the hall suddenly felt thicker than the air in the dance studio, heavy with a suffocating tension that made my skin prickle from head to toe.

He wasn’t looking at me like I was his rival’s little sister. He wasn’t looking at me like a prop in a fake dating scheme. He was looking at me like he wanted me.

He swallowed hard, his throat bobbing, and shoved a hand through his damp hair, forcefully ripping his eyes away from my body to stare fixedly at the wall above my head.

“Seriously, Ainsley,” he choked out, his voice thick and entirely stripped of its usual smooth confidence. He picked up the shirt from the floor without looking down and shoved them back into my hands, his fingers trembling slightly against mine. “Put... put the shirt on. I’ll be downstairs.”

He turned on his heel and almost fled out of his own room, pulling the door shut behind him with a sharp click that reverberated through my bones. I stood in the silence of the bathroom, my hand pressed against my chest, feeling my pulse racing at a terrifying speed.

My skin felt like it was on fire. The scent of his body wash was still clinging to me, but now it was mixed with the dizzying memory of the way he’d just looked at me. It wasn’t fake. Nothing about those three seconds had been fake.

It took me three tries to get it over my head correctly. It was hilariously large, the soft gray fabric swallowing me whole, falling well past my hips, smelling cleanly of detergent and faintly of him.