Page 66 of The Vet from Snowy River
The rocky cliffside, when they reached it, had a deep cleft worn into the rock and a waterhole had formed from the run-off seeping down its mossy face. It was, she thought, just shy of heaven. Valleys spread out below them, and to the north-east shimmered Lake Jindabyne, cool and blue in the morning stillness. The river which gave the westerly mountain range its name shone silver in the wide grassed plains, and Hanrahan’s church spire could be seen to the south on the ridge above Lake Bogong. The old, restored paddle-steamer was puttering along the lake, perhaps on its first run of the season.
‘It’s deep enough to swim. Tempted?’ Josh quizzed her as he helped her down from the horse.
She brought her gaze away from the view and dipped a hand into the water. An icy spear shot up her arm and jangled in her brain, worse than nails on a chalkboard. ‘Not if I was on fire.’
Josh’s fingers stilled on his saddle pack. ‘You know,’ he said, shooting his eyes sideways at her, ‘a guy could take that as a challenge.’
A challenge? Surely he wasn’t going to throw her in?
‘My watch isn’t waterproof. My hair will go frizzy. Maybe I can’t swim.’ She forced herself to stop gabbling.
He smiled. ‘I threw Hannah in here once, years ago, when we were teenagers. She put a striped legless lizard in my bed a few days later as revenge.’
Holy hell. She’d barely met Hannah, but made a mental note to never, ever, ever tick her off.
Josh pulled a rug from his saddle pack, followed by a battered thermos, and spread the rug out over a wide granite slab. ‘Shimmy over,’ he said, and sat down, his legs, like hers, dangling over the edge of the waterhole. He reached out and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear … lingered a second or two before he turned his attention to the thermos.
Oh boy. Was that a move? It sure felt like a move. Not that she’d been on the receiving end of enough of them to have formed a database of what did and did not constitute a declaration of man-woman interest.
Fingers skimming hair. Picnic rug. Isolated location with running water, romantic mossy melodies playing just a few feet away … surely that had to be a move. She turned her face to look at him and froze. Oh yes. His eyes were sending out incoming kiss signals.
There was no way this could happen. No way, nuh-uh. It wasn’t fair to him. It wasn’t fair to her, but since when had the world been fair to her? The one thing she absolutely should not do was lean a little closer to the big, caring, hot-as-sin guy sharing the mountain air with her.
But the thin stand of gum trees was whispering a different message in the spring breeze, as was the gurgling of the melting snow. She and Josh might have been the only two people in the world. And if they were … if everything else that stopped her living, stopped her having choices, stopped her reaching out and taking what she needed … if all of that was no longer there, then whatwasstopping her?
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
She leaned a little closer, reached up to slide her fingers into the tangle of hair at his collar. How long had it been since she’d shared herself this way? She had known women—friends, colleagues—who’d thought nothing of flirting with guy after guy in as little time as it took for a loaf of bread to go stale.
Not her. There was something … vulnerable … about resting your skin on someone else’s. Your mouth. Hearing, seeing, feeling them so close your heart spoke to their heart, your breaths fused.
Yeah … when she got that close to someone, she liked to be sure she wanted to be there.
And she sure wanted to be as close to Josh Cody as the laws of clothing and friction allowed.
She slid a hand up the rough denim at his hip, furrowed in with her fingers until she’d found the hot skin of his side. Muscle shifted over his ribs as she spread her hand over his heart. Then she pressed her lips to his.
There it was. There was no truer moment than this. His lips were on hers and she wound herself around him, wanting to press herself into that steady, beating warmth.
Strength. Heat. Kindness. They were such ordinary words when you said them one by one—but not to her. Not when you’d lost hope in ever feeling surrounded by them again.
She could drown in Josh’s heat and drown happy.
CHAPTER
20
There was strength under the softness. Resolve under all that prickly reserve.
The woman who’d snuck her way into his thoughts had layers to her, all right, and Josh had no problem with taking his sweet time unpeeling them.
For now, pouring his way into the kiss she’d blown him away with by initiating was about as sweet as he could imagine sweet could be.
But sweet was just where the kiss started. Before his brain could react, strong fingers slid up his skull like they owned it, and she’d clamped her mouth to his like she’d become part of him. His heart rate flipped from steady to gallop.
He had to see her as well as feel her. He didn’t want to miss a second. He pulled back his head, and she swayed into him, her lashes a sweep of chestnut brown across pale, pale cheeks.
