Page 37 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
“It means . . . okay.”
They both knew it meant far more than that, but they both pretended it didn’t. Since she was an expert at pretending, this suited her just fine.
With swift grace, Hawk stood. For the first time, Jack noticed he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and the knowledge that he’d been sleeping right beside her half naked for the entire night made heat rush to her face. She glanced away, heartbeat fluttering, mouth dry.
“I’ll get some food, and then we’ll get going again. I’ll only be a few minutes.”
r /> As swiftly and silently as he’d arisen, Hawk disappeared over the side of the suspended boughs. She heard the slight rustle of leaves, then nothing more.
When she was certain he was gone, she lay back down into the leafy comfort of their makeshift bed, put a hand over her face, and cried.
Hawk took longer than necessary gathering food for their breakfast, for two main reasons. One, he sensed she needed to be alone. Two—
He was having a tremendously difficult time marshaling his fragmented emotions.
This wasn’t like him at all, this nurturing stranger who felt things like pity and understanding and the urge to offer comfort. Especially to someone like her!
She’s your enemy, he reminded himself every time she pinned him with the raw force of that blue, blue gaze. She’s evil. She’s a danger to us all.
Only she didn’t feel evil. Or dangerous. Or like an enemy. She irritated him, yes, she angered him, yes—he thought she had a long way to go in the open-mindedness department—but she also sparked an emotion he’d never felt before in his life. Not for a woman, not for anyone.
Protectiveness.
In a show of completely irrational, testosterone-driven idiocy, he felt protective of this walking contradiction under his charge, and he was supremely pissed off at himself for it.
When she’d awakened—screaming and thrashing out of her dream—his guarding instincts had gone into overdrive. If he’d had a sword in hand at that moment, he was sure he’d have chopped the tree in half before coming back to his senses. As it was, he’d barely restrained himself from leaping from the hammock, Shifting into panther, and snarling bloody murder into the darkness to keep the proverbial wolves at bay.
But there were no wolves. There was only Jacqueline, wild-eyed, pale, and shivering, looking as if what she really needed was a hug.
He’d had to restrain himself from that, too.
“Você está seguro comigo,” he’d told her in a moment of foolishness. You’re safe with me. What had he been thinking? Was he thinking? No, he decided, he wasn’t thinking. At least not with the head atop his neck.
Violently yanking the plum-shaped yellow fruit from the low-hanging boughs of a camu camu tree as if it had personally offended him, Hawk mused over what his strategy should be. Obviously he needed a plan to move forward; he couldn’t just march ahead blindly, allowing his emotions to take charge. What he needed was distance, but that was an impossibility in their current circumstances.
Physical distance is an impossibility. But emotional distance . . .
Right. Emotional distance. Keep the walls up. Don’t talk about anything personal. Stop wondering what was going on in that mind of hers. Don’t look at her, either, he chastised himself. Every time his gaze lingered too long on that incredible mouth, that fiery hair he’d gripped fistfuls of as he’d shoved himself deep inside her—
Hawk stilled, closed his eyes, and hissed an aggravated breath through his teeth.
This was going to be harder than he thought.
By the time Hawk returned half an hour later, Jack was in much better control of herself. She’d dried her face, combed her fingers through her hair, and smoothed her wrinkled clothing; and she was sitting with her back against the trunk, legs crossed, with what she hoped was a cool, unreadable expression on her face.
Hawk was carrying an enormous, glossy monstera leaf, the scalloped edges gathered in one fist, center bulging. He set it in her lap.
“Eat as much as you can,” he said curtly. “You’ll need the energy. We won’t be stopping for another break until late tonight.”
Jack looked down at the big leaf unfurling between her legs, and gasped in surprise.
Orange and red and green and yellow, smooth skinned and freckled and shiny and rough, the variety of fruit and berries he’d gathered was astonishing. There were passion fruit, figs, mangoes, and prickly pear; there were bananas, Brazil nuts, and purple-blue acai berries still on the vine. There was a dozen more varieties she’d never seen before, all of them unblemished, as if he’d selected only the most perfect specimens and left the rest to the birds.
“This is amazing!” Jack inspected the bumpy skin of a canary-yellow star fruit with awe. “Do you know how much this stuff costs in a grocery store? What’s that one? And that?”
Hawk took a seat across from her. “There are more than three thousand different kinds of fruit in the rainforest. The vast majority of them are unknown in the Western world.” He pointed to each in turn. “That’s chirimoya, and the small red ones that look like cherries are capulin.”
Jack’s mouth began to water. Her stomach grumbled its discontent.
