Page 67 of Kiss Across the Universe
Stop it! Stop it! Stop!
She sat up and threw the sleeping bag aside, suddenlytoohot. She faced the fire, hugged her legs to her chest, and worked to calm her breathing. Now was not the time and place for this. She was being pursued by an enemy she barely understood. True, this ability she had discovered to shield herself on the timescape was keeping Iron Grey from finding them, but that didn’t mean she could relax and indulge herself with Kit.
She tested the timescape and felt the same cool umbrella of sensations flow over her. She was still shielded.
Kit returned to the fire. Like her, he carried his thick dark green jacket in one hand, and the pan and cloth in the other. He had shaved. She blinked at that, then realized he’d used his knife.
Her gaze settled on the sharply delineated line of his jaw. The square solidness of it and the movement of the skin over it was he flexed it. She drew her gaze down to his throat. His neck and shoulders were solid with muscle. In the firelight, the open neck of his shirt revealed the bronzed flesh of his upper chest. A shadow shaped the rise of his pecs, before they were hidden by the shirt.
The insane need to trace that shallow valley of flesh with her tongue and lips grabbed her chest and belly and twisted. Alannah’s breath hastened once more.
Kit squatted and fed the fire. There were no big, dry branches to be had up this high, which meant the fire had to be fed frequently with the twigs and skinny branches they had collected.
She watched his forearms flexing, the twist of his wrists, as he worked. Took in the shape of his hips and the bunched thighs. He was superbly fit, with little body fat, probably the product of scrambling around mountains after those rabid goats. His job was not a sedentary one.
It was next to impossible to sheer away from the seductive images flooding her mind. She had walked all day, eaten well, bathed and now her body was crying out for the natural release it wanted. She wanted to be fucked. Hard. And she wanted Kit.
She drew her gaze back to his face and realized with a jolt he was watching her, his gaze dark and steady and shadowed by the cast of his cheekbones.
Alannah cleared her throat. The sensible thing to do right now would be to tell him she was going to go to sleep, pull the bag over her head and close her eyes. Pretend she had passed out and that her trembling was from the cold.
But she couldn’t move. Not with him watching her as he was.
It felt as though something invisible was reaching across the fire, enveloping her, and growing thicker and heated and unbreakable. Her ache to have him leapt. The images dancing in her brain became pornographic in the extreme. Her breath must surely be telling him everything that was passing through her mind.
But he’d said no. No, he’d said “not now”…and that dangled possibilities for the future that kept her heart thudding heavily.
Lie down. Close your eyes. Don’t do this, Alannah!For Kit was right. This might just be the circumstances. Survival instinct pushing her to mate with the nearest male. She could get back home and hate herself for letting her worm brain get out of control. Worse, she would have to look Kit in the eye and know that he knew she was that weak and pathetic.
How could she know what she would feel when she got home? She had never considered Kit in this light before. It had all happened since they’d left his truck behind and struck out into the woods. Only, she had never spent this much concentrated time in his company before, either. Would she have discovered how much she wanted him had she stayed in the front room with her parents when Kit visited in the past?
“Stop looking at me like that,” Kit said, his voice very low.
Her heart was beating too heavily to jump, but it did lurch a little. “I can’t help it,” she said, her own voice hoarse. “I remember what you said, and I’m trying to pack it away, but it’s…too powerful.”
“Find a way,” he ground out. “I will not do this, not here.”
She tightened her arms around her knees. “Principals. God, that’s…sexy.”
Kit lurched to his feet with a hiss and spun away from the fire, his boots digging furrows in the dirt and leaf litter.
It was out there now. It laid between them. The verboten subject, according to Kit. So Alannah dropped all her hesitation and said, “How do you know there will be anything to…to sort out, when we get back? You say the circumstances distort how we’re feeling. It could be that the circumstances are making us feel this way, and we’ll get back home and…I don’t know. Hate each other.”
Kit lifted his head up to the stars overhead. “Impossible,” he said flatly. “I’ve wanted you too long for this to be a passing thing.”
Alannah held still, while she absorbed that. “What?” she said at last, her voice weak.
He turned back to face her. The fire played strange shadows over his face, making it hard for her to measure emotions. All she could see was that therewereemotions there. He’d let down the shield. “This is, here, this is not how it was supposed to happen.”
Her breath evaporated, making her suck in another quick breath. “You…planned something else?” Her voice was even weaker.
“A dozen different ways, and none of them were here, now, when you’re afraid and vulnerable andanyonewill do as a teddy bear.”
Alannah could only stare at him. No words would form to adequately respond to the massive revelations he’d just handed out. He wanted her…had wanted her…for how long? A long time, it seemed.
Yet she had never once caught even a hint of desire emanating from him. He had been Kit, her parents’ friend, the warden who kept them supplied in fresh salmon almost year round. The man who most often sat very still and silent and listened to everything everyone said, absorbing it all with his dark eyes and the tiny furrows between his brows.
Finally, she found something to say. It wasn’t what she really wanted to say, for that mass of feelings balling in her chest would take time to unravel. “I’m not scared,” she said. “I don’t need a teddy bear. I’ve camped solo in places far more remote than this before. Being alone doesn’t bother me. But Idowant you.”
