Out of This World

by Jill Shalvis

  She changed into a camisole, sans bra, and matching pj bottoms, thin and insubstantial enough that I could see she’d gone commando beneath.

  Seriously. She was going to kill me, and I was going to die with a hard-on. I could only hope they wouldn’t ask my mother to identify me.

  Finally, the lights went off in the main house. Rach pulled on a sweatshirt—mine—and out we went into the night.

  Damn, the nights were pitch-black here, and the first thing I did was stub my toe on the porch step. Hopping up and down, I swore the air blue, while Rach laughed breathlessly and bent down to try to see the damage.

  I looked at her crouched in front of me, in an extremely erotic position, and could only groan.

  “Is it broken?” she asked anxiously.

  “No.” I hauled her up. “Not broken. It’s just too bad my superpowers don’t extend to seeing in the dark.”

  “Mine do.” She bit her lower lip as she took me in from head to toe, stopping at one particular spot in the middle. “And, um, wow.”

  Yeah. Wow.

  We sneaked into the dark inn together. She led the way, clearly seeing with ease, while I felt like a bumbling idiot, still limping because of my toe. Having her warm, curvy body pressed up to mine didn’t help much either, and she seemed to know it. Every time I stumbled, she threw her arms around me, pressing her breasts into my ribs, holding on tight, until I began to wonder how long a male could have an erection and not die from DSB—deadly sperm buildup.

  In the kitchen, Rach went directly to the freezer and grabbed a handful of cookies. “For strength,” she said with utter seriousness.

  We moved through the living room, Rach pulling me to safety before I could fall over a big chair in the way. Past the living room we went, down the hallway.

  Rach stopped at a coat closet, then quietly opened the door and shoved me inside.

  “Um—” I started to say.

  “Shh.”

  She closed the door. In the dark, coats and sweaters brushed my face, and then Rach was plastered up against me.

  “I can’t see,” I whispered.

  “Scared?” she asked, sounding amused, and smelling like chocolate mint.

  “Rach, we don’t have time for this.”

  “For what?”

  For all the wicked things running through my head.

  “Silly man.” She pressed me through the coats and opened another door. Which is how I found myself in a small room just off the living room, facing a tiny, cramped desk, a row of metal filing cabinets and stacks of files everywhere—strewn haphazardly across the desk, on the floor, on top of the cabinets—basically everywhere but where they belonged.

  “Apparently Gertrude wasn’t so great with the paperwork,” Rachel said.

  “A hidden office.”

  Rachel smiled. “Suits Great-Great Aunt Gert, believe me. Where should we start?”

  Hard to say, given the state of things. “The file cabinets. Since the files all appear to be scattered out here, what’s in them?”

  She tried to open one, and couldn’t. “They’re locked.” Frowning, she concentrated on the first one, then blinked. “Kellan.”

  The tone of her voice alerted me, and I remembered what she’d found in the guest house: guns. “What do you see?”

  “Whiskey in the bottom drawer. Good to know,” she said softly. “And a laptop in this one.” She pointed to the next. “But that one? It’s got…cash. Lots of it.”

  “Well, isn’t that just fascinating.”

  “A bit, yeah. And the top one—” She gulped. “A pistol.”

  “Okay. Give me some room.”

  There wasn’t much room to be had in the small confines of the office, but she sat on the desk, while I pulled open the locked drawers with my new muscles, finding a laptop, a Blackberry, a gun and, indeed, a drawer full of cash.

  “Jackpot,” Rachel whispered, and put a hand to her head.

  “What? What is it?”

  “I feel weird.”

  I think my heart stopped. “Headache? Piercing pain?”

  She shook her head.

  “Dizziness?” I set everything down, and strode toward her, which took all of two steps. Putting my hands on her arms, I waited until she looked up. “Talk to me.”

  Her eyes shimmered brilliantly, and she shook her head. “I’m sorry. Not sick weird.”

  “What then?”

  “Hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  Instead, she pulled me in for a hug and held on tightly. “An I-need-you weird.”

  Need me. That should not have meant so much. She was scared and had no idea what she was saying.

  “Am I making any sense at all?” she whispered.

  “No.”

  But Christ, she was. And unable to resist the pull of her see-all eyes or the tremor of her lush mouth, I compounded my errors and held onto her tightly.

  “This is nice,” she whispered. “But by ‘need you,’ I mean naked.”

  “Uh…”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, and if I wasn’t mistaken, she blushed. “Have you ever noticed that it’s always me coming onto you?” she whispered.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” she said very quietly, looking…embarrassed?

  No. No, I didn’t want that. “Let’s fix that right now,” I said. Clearly I’d lost my mind, but she was right.

  How was it that I’d never even attempted to make a move on the most beautiful woman in the world? Oh, that’s right, because we’d never been on the same plane before, much less both yearning and burning.

  But there we were, on the same plane.

  Yearning and burning…

  I cupped her face and leaned in, watching her watch me as I touched my lips to hers, keeping it quiet and warm and intimate. And only when her eyes flickered did I kiss my way up her throat, making my way to the sensitive spot beneath her ear, then over her jaw, her scent and taste driving me wild, and by the time I got back to her mouth, she had her hands fisted in my hair and was helping.

  “No, let me,” I whispered.

  And she did.

  Chapter 15

  M y name is Rachel, my name is Rachel…I had to keep repeating this to myself as Kellan kissed me halfway to orgasmic bliss, because I’d discovered that if I didn’t repeat my own name when he had his mouth on me, I could actually forget it.

  That’s how good he kissed.

  We needed to get out of the office, obviously, before we were discovered, but the feel of his lips brushing my earlobe, then the sensitive skin beneath it, locked me into this weird place. Our close proximity, the dark, the danger…it all gathered together, like a cloak of intimacy, and I turned and put my face into the crook of his neck.

  How was it he always smelled so orgasmically good?

  Finally he pulled back, eyes so hot they were flaming, and breathing hard enough that he could have generated his own electricity. “Damn it, you are distracting.” Then he pulled his hands from me and shoved them both into his pockets, turning away to stare glumly at the file cabinet.

  “Do you really think…” I licked my lips and asked the question that had been haunting me. “Do you think this…animal magnetic attraction is just a part of the swap?”

  He was quiet for a moment. “I think your attraction to me is a result of what happened to us, yes.” He stood there, all tall, long and edgy, broad shoulders hunched, the muscles of his back rigid, tension coming off him in waves.

  I wanted to touch him, to turn him to face me, but something held me back. Maybe it was how quickly he assumed that what I felt for him wasn’t real.

  So instead, I opened the laptop and hit the power button. When the thing booted up, Kellan, apparently unable to help himself, turned around and came to join me.

  Just as he did, Marilee stuck her head in from the closet. “Sheee-it,” she muttered at the sight of us and what we were doing. “I should have known.”

  “You should have told.�
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  She took in the open laptop. “I suppose you found the petty cash, too.”

  “More than petty.”

  Marilee lifted a shoulder. “Gert hated checkbooks and credit cards.”

  “Good thing for you, as now paying you and Axel won’t be a problem.”

  She looked insulted. “I wasn’t worried.” She sniffed. “Just so you know, Gert didn’t like people in her stuff.”

  “Gertrude is gone,” I reminded her. “And I’m here now.”

  “For the weekend.”

  “For as long as I want.”

  “So you’re going to stay here indefinitely?”

  “What if I did?” I felt Kellan look at me in surprise, but I just kept my eyes on Marilee. “You have a problem with that?”

  “Why would I?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s just that Gertrude was so sure you wouldn’t. That you’d go back to Los Angeles, because that’s who you are: an L.A. artist.”

  “Maybe I’m more than that.”

  “She said you weren’t.”

  The Wood family of overachievers loved to make me the butt of their jokes, the odd duckling in their roost. Without my dad around, I was the only nonconformist, the artist. No career path, no real plan. I’d always smiled and taken it, but right now I didn’t feel like smiling. “Maybe Gertrude was wrong.”

  Marilee glanced at the computer again. “Maybe you won’t be able to get in.”

  “Why don’t you just save us some time and trouble, and tell us what it is we’re going to find?” Kellan said.

  Marilee cut her eyes to him. “I think I hear Axel calling me.”

  Of course she did.

  When she was gone, Kel pulled the laptop toward him and began clicking on the keys. “It’s password-protected. Any guesses?”

  I stared at the screen, and focused. “Bite me,” I said, startled at how fast the words came to me.

  Kellan went still, only his gaze moving as it slid over my face, stopping at my mouth. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s the password,” I said, and then laughed at the expression on his face. “Did you want me to bite you?”

  “You have no idea.”

  My body heated, but I pointed to the keyboard. “Bite me.”

  His eyes positively smoldered as he leaned in close enough that I could see each individual dark, long eyelash over his gorgeous baby blues.

  Why were men allowed to have such pretty eyelashes? It just didn’t seem fair. “Bite me,” I whispered again.

  “Say it one more time,” he promised in a low voice that sent tingles down my spine and to other places as well, “and I will not be held responsible for my actions.”

  I was tempted. Oh God, how tempted. There was just something about this new alpha-ness, the quiet fierceness of it and the utter confidence. He seemed both alien to me and yet almost unbearably familiar at the same time, and I stared at his mouth, the words on the tip of my tongue.

  “Say it,” he dared silkily.

  A dare, damn it. I couldn’t pass up a dare. “How about I do it instead?” Holding his gaze, I cupped his jaw and sank my teeth into his lower lip.

  Shock held him immobile as I lightly tugged, then stroked my tongue over the sting of the bite.

  When I straightened, I was breathing unsteadily, and he was looking pretty flustered.

  “Um,” he said.

  Yeah. Um.

  He brought his fingers up to touch his lower lip, which was still wet from my tongue. “You take every dare that comes your way?”

  “You know I do.”

  His eyes went soft and dark and dreamy, and my thighs tightened in reaction to that. He went to push his glasses high on the bridge of his nose before remembering he wasn’t wearing them. “We’re not kids anymore,” he said carefully.

  “Did anything about that feel childish to you?”

  He let out a rough laugh, but his amusement faded quickly, and he hauled me close, making me gasp as his teeth sank into the flesh between my neck and shoulder, the bite a definite aggressive sexual claim.

  I shuddered with need, but he gently set me away from him and turned me toward the laptop. “Now we’re even,” he said, and typed in the password.

  I had to blow out a breath before I pushed his fingers away and clicked on the main menu, and then on the financial application, and ran right into another password-protected area. “Huh.”

  He leaned over my shoulder, his arms on either side of mine, surrounding me with his body. “What?”

  It would be appealing to turn in his arms and let him bite me again, then kiss me, then…And yet it was one thing when I was chasing him. Then it was fun, it was easy, it was playful.

  A game.

  But more than that, and it scared me. He scared me, because I knew he wasn’t playing at all.

  And if I did this, got involved heart and soul…God, what would I do without him when it was over? I couldn’t bear to think about it, so I tried the password again, but it didn’t work here. Incredibly aware that our faces were close enough that a strand of my hair had caught on the stubble of his jaw, that he was watching me and not the screen, made breathing difficult, if not impossible. I closed my eyes and concentrated on another password. Nothing. Just like old times. I tried typing in Gert’s name, Marilee’s name, Axel’s name—

  A sticky-note program suddenly opened, and a pop-up sticky appeared in a pretty pink color and fancy font:

  Did you really think it’d be that easy?

  Stunned, I sat back, staring at the computer screen. “She knew. Whatever’s going on here, Gertrude knew all about it.”

  “Strange family you’ve got, Rach.”

  “Tell me.” I chewed on my lip for a moment, considering. My great-great-aunt Gertrude had always been a loner. I could remember my mother sighing in frustration when another invitation to a family gathering was politely declined.

  “Just as well,” my mother had always said. “She’s too looney to mainstream.”

  “Looney how?” I’d asked on any number of occasions.

  “We don’t discuss it,” my mother had always replied. “Let’s just say she thinks she can…do things.”

  I had to wonder what things. Like see through stuff? Like using superhuman strength? I picked up the Blackberry and turned it on.

  “Check her calendar for the entries before she died,” Kellan said.

  Not surprisingly though, her social engagements were nonexistent. She’d kept track of her grocery list, and of requested supplies, of the number of guests going in and out—

  “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Kellan asked over my shoulder.

  I looked at the entries again. “What?”

  Reaching his arms around me, he took possession of the Blackberry, pointing out the Fridays of the last month. “Each has a star.”

  “So?”

  “So yesterday was Friday. What happens on Fridays that would warrant starred entries?”

  We looked at each other.

  “The swap,” I whispered.

  “And there are dots on Sundays. Fuck.” He shoved his fingers through his hair. “What’s going to happen tomorrow?”

  I got up, went to the bottom file drawer and pulled out the whiskey. We each drank two fingers straight from the bottle.

  “Jesus,” Kel said, blowing out a breath. “Strong stuff.”

  I could have used two more fingers. “Kel?”

  He’d gone back to fiddling with the Blackberry. “Yeah?”

  “Let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

  He looked up, grimaced at the fear that had to be written all over my face and pulled me in for a hug that felt more real than anything had since…since he’d kissed me. Burrowing in tightly, I closed my eyes and just held on. “I mean, maybe we could hike out of here.”

  “Rach, it’s too far.”

  On the other side of the closet, door someone rattled the handle.

  Kellan set me aside and quickly moved
through the clothes in the closet, putting his hand on the door handle, holding the door shut. With his other hand, he lifted a finger to his mouth, signaling me to be quiet.

  Marilee had just walked in, not concerned with being seen. Whoever this was clearly didn’t want to be seen.

  I put both my hands over my mouth and concentrated on breathing. We watched the handle turn from side to side as someone very quietly tried to come in.

  Kellan kept his hold, his T-shirt stretching at the shoulders, his jeans falling off his narrow hips, his hair wild as always, easily preventing the door from opening in such a way that the person on the other side of it probably imagined it was a jammed lock.

  “Who’s there?” Kellan mouthed to me

  I focused on the wood, and gasped. “Serena and William,” I mouthed back.

  Kellan blinked. He hadn’t expected that, and truthfully, neither had I. What would two guests want in Gertrude’s secret office?

  And, if they’d never been here before, how did they even know this office existed?

  On the other side of the door, the two of them looked at each other, shrugged and walked away.

  “They’re gone,” I whispered.

  Kellan came out of the closet, looking lean and rangy and spoiling for a fight. “I want to know what the hell is going on.” He paced the small office, which meant he could stride two whole steps before having to whip around and repeat the process. Tension and grimness rolled off his broad shoulders, and so did unused adrenaline.

  I stood, and stepped into his path. “Hey.”

  He didn’t look at me, so I held on when he started to stalk past me. “Hey.”

  He wasn’t happy when his gaze met mine. Not even close. “What?”

  “Maybe we’re keeping the new abilities. You ever think of that?”

  “What? No.” He thrust his fingers into his hair, making it stand straight up. “I am not putting my hand through doors for the rest of my life, or worrying about how I touch things for fear of breaking them. Jesus, Rach.” He looked me straight in the eyes, letting his own worry show, and behind that, the fierceness of his desire for me, and something deep inside me physically ached.

  “What?” I whispered. “What is it?”

  He looked away, then back. His jaw tightened. “What if I accidentally hurt you?”