Now, that got her attention. “Um . . . do what?” Surely, she had heard him wrong.
“Take your shirt off. I need to see if you have any damage to your back or your stomach. It looked like you damn near fell on every single inch of your body.”
Ava sat silently for a moment, feeling the old familiar panic set in. Damn it, if she couldn’t even take her shirt off in front of the man she was supposed to love, then how would she ever convince him that she was ready for a real relationship with him? She was so tired of being scared all the time. Taking a deep breath, she silently cursed the fact that she had worn a plain white cotton bra this morning. She dearly hoped he didn’t notice the slight tremble of her hands as she gripped the edge of her top and slowly pulled it over her head. He removed the shirt from her nerveless fingers, dropping it to the floor. His gaze seemed to zero in on the creamy swells of her breasts exposed by her no-frills bra, and she was horrified to feel her nipples hardening under his attention.
After a moment, he put his hands on her shoulders, and she groaned inwardly as she did a full-body shiver. Something about the feel of his warm hands on her bare skin was causing her pulse to rocket. The moment was broken, though, when he started mumbling under his breath before touching an area of her upper back that felt as if it were on fire. “Ouch!” Was he . . . ? Alarmed, she asked, “What are you doing with my bra?”
With obvious strain in his voice, Mac said, “Relax, Avie; I need your bra strap out of the way. You’ve got a nasty laceration back here. The asphalt ripped a hole in your shirt. You must have hit the ground even harder than I thought. You’re damn lucky you didn’t break anything.” Suddenly, his face was back in front of hers, looking her face over anxiously. “I didn’t see you hit your head.” His hands started roaming over her scalp, looking for signs of injury. “Shit, tell me you didn’t. I can’t feel anything. If there is any possibility of a head injury, we need to go to a hospital and have it checked out. I should have checked for that before I moved you. I just . . . panicked.”
Ava grabbed his forearm, pulling his hand back down. “Mac, my head is fine. I think most of the damage was to my butt and my pride.” When he looked down at her shorts, she knew what was coming next, and her cheeks were already coloring in response.
“Er . . . take your shorts off, then. I need to see what we’re dealing with.”
“No! I’m not taking my shorts off. I’m perfectly capable of looking at my own . . . butt later.” She might have caved to pressure to remove her top because truthfully the feel of the fabric against the scrapes on her back was painful. But there was no way she was removing her bottoms. She had worn her granny panties, and it’d be over her dead body that he would get a look at them. When she finally worked up the nerve to disrobe completely for Mac, she would be wearing something sexier than one hundred percent cotton. He looked ready to argue with her, so she shifted his attention back to her upper body by wincing and moving her shoulder. “Could you put a Band-Aid or something there? It hurts like the devil.” Now that she’d mentioned the pain, it seemed to be all around her. As her adrenaline dropped, her body started throbbing. Running into a parked car was damn painful. “Ouch!”
“Hang on, baby; let me get you some Advil before we clean all your cuts.”
Ava wanted to swoon when Mac called her baby. He had used the endearment a few times over the years, but that was twice already today. He mostly called her Avie, which had always made her feel special, but baby . . . yeah, she liked that a lot. Unless . . . did he call Gwen that? She looked down at the couch she was sitting on. Had Gwen been here with Mac? Had they held hands, touched each other, had sex together . . . right where she was sitting? The thought made her physically sick, and she wanted to do nothing but run. She didn’t want to be anywhere that another woman had staked a claim to the man Ava loved.
Ava winced as she tried to move off the couch. Agony raced through her body as she leaned down to pick up her discarded shirt. She needed to get out of here . . . now. She was balancing unsteadily on her feet when Mac walked back in carrying a bottle and a glass of water. He looked surprised to see her standing there, with her shirt gripped tightly in one hand. “Mac . . . I’m just going to . . . I mean, I need to get back to my car.”
He shook a couple of tablets from the bottle that he was carrying out before setting it down. He handed them to her along with the glass, waiting until she had taken them before commenting on her sudden need to leave. “Avie . . . sit down, please. I need to patch you up before I take you back.”
She stood there uncertainly before asking, “Could we use a kitchen chair? I, um . . . just don’t want to sit back down on the couch.” No doubt, he thought she was cracking up, but after a moment’s hesitation, he walked toward his kitchen and returned seconds later with a wooden chair. She was so glad that he hadn’t questioned her aversion to his leather couch. What could she possibly say? “Oh, sorry. I’m afraid that you had sex with your girlfriend on it and the thought of sitting there makes me want to puke”? Nothing strange about that statement at all. Especially when she had handed him to Gwen on a shiny platter with a damn red bow attached to it.
Mac picked up his first aid kit and started cleaning her abrasions with an antiseptic wipe that stung bad enough to bring tears to her eyes. Having his hands gently touching almost every exposed inch of her skin was torture for a different reason. She only hoped that he thought the few times that she hadn’t been able to stop herself from flinching was from the pain and not the foreign feeling of his warm hands touching her body. She both feared and craved his touch. How many nights had she lain awake wishing he were there, lying next to her? Wishing she were a normal person who could wake up in the arms of the man she loved—without remembering another man’s hands on her body, holding her immobile and stripping away her innocence? The one thing she had wanted to give Mac from the moment she had started to see him as something more than her brother’s friend. It was always supposed to be him and only him, and that had been brutally stolen from them both. They could never get that back, but if she continued on the path of avoidance that she had taken for so many years, then the bastard who had raped her was still ruining her life, and she didn’t want that. She wanted to be free. She wanted to know what it felt like to be touched by someone who cared about her. It had to be Mac, as it was always meant to be.