“If I trust you,” she said, straightening her shoulders and meeting those eyes steadily, “can you agree to trust me?”
“Why would you trust me?” he asked warily.
“Because you’re my best friend’s fiancé and a gentleman.” She paused a beat. “Because we’re both adults and neither one of us wants anything to happen between us.”
He continued to eye her with a curious mix of circumspection and concentration, as if he were searching back through her words looking for hidden traps. She scooted to the other side of the bed, which, being a double, wasn’t a terribly long way.
But it was a stance and a demonstration of intent. Me on my side, you on yours. When he still didn’t move, she patted the mattress she’d cleared. “Don’t be a chicken, Alex. Get your pillow and sleeping bag and give it a try.”
The coward taunt worked. When he got up to fetch his things, Zara silently congratulated herself. She also took the opportunity to drink without choking, and it was only after he’d returned and stretched his long body out on top of his carefully positioned sleeping bag that she questioned what she’d just done.
Nothing, she answered herself. Nothing is going to happen.
That’s what her brain said while her breathing grew shallow and her heart rate blew up and her glands pumped a steady stream of I-want-stuff-to-happen hormones into her blood.
From the corner of her eye she could just make out his figure in the low light. On his back, hands resting on his abdomen, bare feet crossed at the ankle. A couple of feet separated them, yet she could feel his proximity in every cell of her body.
She could not just lie there, saying nothing, doing nothing. She wanted to talk about something light and easy and safe. Her gaze fastened on the ghostly silhouette of her bike. Their only means of transport in the morning.
“I bet I know why you can’t sleep,” she said.
He didn’t answer.
“I can hear you thinking.”
“That’s my stomach rumbling,” he said.
Zara smiled. “No, it’s definitely your brain. You’re worried about tomorrow.”
That got his attention. She felt the shift of interest, heard the subtle friction as his head turned on his pillow. “What am I worried about, exactly?” he asked slowly.
“About putting yourself in my hands. When you get on the back of my bike.”
She’d expected him to scoff at that. Or to suggest that he’d be in charge and she would ride pillion. She didn’t imagine Alex Carlisle rode in life’s passenger seat too often.
She sure didn’t expect the long, still stretch of a pause or his quietly spoken answer. “I’m not worried about putting myself in your hands, Zara.”
That answer seemed laced with everything she felt. Every wired strain in her body, every thud of her heartbeat, every shiver of heat in her blood. Man, but she ached to turn on her side, to look into his eyes, to see if they reflected the sensual ache low in her body.
But she didn’t, she couldn’t, in case she did something silly like inviting him into her hands. He wasn’t hers to touch, he wasn’t hers to hold.
“What’s the first thing you’re going to do?” she asked instead. “When we get back to town? I’m thinking about a long, hot shower.”
“I’m thinking about eating.”
She smiled at that, at the tone, at the certainty, at the dryness. At the fact that she’d inadvertently hit upon the one thing that would take her mind off her other hunger. “Well, yes, but I figure we’ll do that at the first roadhouse or café we come across. I’m thinking about one of those big truckie’s breakfasts. Bacon and eggs and sausages.”
“With mushrooms?”
Her tummy growled and she did too, in sympathy. “Oh, yeah.”
“Tomatoes?”
“Grilled and drizzled with cheese.”
“Coffee,” he said, low and sybaritic. “I don’t even care if it’s instant.”
She made a low mmm of assent as she pondered her cup of hot tea. “Afterwards,” she continued dreamily a few seconds later, “I’m going to have one of those chocolate bars I foolishly denied myself yesterday.”
“For breakfast?”
Frowning, she turned to look at him. “I thought you loved chocolate.”
“Never before noon.”
“Are you always so disciplined?”
For a moment he continued to stare up at the ceiling, then slowly he rolled his head on the pillow and she felt the burn of his gaze as it fixed on hers. “We’ll see.”
The breath caught in her throat, a hitch of sound they both heard and understood. A hitch of the knowledge that, despite her earlier avowal of trust, only her sleeping bag and his discipline separated them on this bed.
We’ll see.
Those words beat through her with the same constant driving rhythm as the rain on the roof, with the same beat as forbidden desire, strong and thick and unrelenting. “I guess you’ll be going back to Sydney,” she said. “Once we get out of here.”
“If I can’t find Susannah. Yes.”
“You’ll go looking for her? Do you still think you can change her mind?” she asked on a rising note, alarmed at the prospect that nothing had changed.
“Yes, I’ll look for her. We need to talk. But I can’t make her marry me, Zara.”
No, but if he looked at her with that intensity, if he spoke to her in that low, smoky voice… “I’m sure you can be very persuasive.”
“When I want to be,” he said, and that confidence shivered through Zara in a contradiction of desire and disquiet.
Yet she couldn’t leave it alone. Despite the moody heat that licked between them, she was enjoying this soft-voiced exchange in the near dark. “Do you want to be married?” she asked after a second. “I mean you, yourself, not because of the will or your family.”
“Yes. I want a family, a wife, a marriage.”
“You’re…how old?”
“Thirty-five.”
“And you waited this long to decide you want to marry? Forgive my bluntness, but I imagine you’ve not been starved of opportunity.”
This time he didn’t answer straight away, and she sensed a different tension in his hesitation. “I almost married once before.”
Zara felt an odd pressure in her chest, a tightness, a lack of breath. “What happened?”
“She married someone else.”
Oh, Alex. What could she say? She recalled his closed, hard expression when he’d asked if Susannah had met someone else. The second woman to have changed her mind. How could Suse have done that to him? The day of the wedding, no less.
Yet she knew he wouldn’t want her sympathy. Knew that reaching out to touch him would be a bad, dangerous move. Instead she shrugged, as best one can when lying down, and said, “Her loss.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, and Zara sensed an ease in his tension. Her heart skipped with a kind of gladness because she had picked the right tone, because she had lifted the mood out of murky waters. “I couldn’t marry a woman who didn’t want me.”
She wasn’t sure he meant Susannah and she didn’t ask. Suddenly she felt less sympathetic toward her friend and much too sympathetic toward this man she’d grossly misread. So many layers, every one more intriguing, every one adding to her fascination.
“I believe I owe you an apology,” she said softly. “I misjudged you.”
And Lord help her, this time she couldn’t help turning and touching. Just her hand on his. A brief touch, a quick kiss of heat in the dark.
He didn’t thank her. He didn’t say anything for a moment and then he shook his head and she heard the heavy expulsion of his breath. “I want to get an early start in the morning. How about we try to get some sleep.”
“I’ll try,” she said dubiously and closed her eyes.
Amazingly she slept.
Hours later Zara woke and for a long moment lay perfectly still while she made sense of her surroundings. The storm had passed, leaving behind a quiet broken
only by the creak of wet timber expanding and the faint drip, drip, drip of water somewhere outside. The darkness was more complete, and she realized the fire had gone out. Not even an ember sparked to break the solid wall of black. Yet she wasn’t cold.
Oh, no, she was very, very warm, snuggled as she was against the intense body heat of the man in her bed.
Surreptitiously she stretched a hand toward the edge of the mattress. The distance she needed to stretch confirmed her suspicion. She had backed into the center of the bed. She had spooned into his hips and curved her legs to trace the line of his.
His arm was thrown over hers, trapping her there. So close she swore she could feel the hard line of him against her backside. Despite at least one sleeping bag in between.
Heart thudding hard in her chest, she fought an almighty surge of temptation to press back against him. To unzip the cursed bag. To turn and touch.
No, no, no, she whispered silently in time with the dripping rainwater. Move your backside forward. Away. A little wriggle forward, one hip and then the other—
“Zara.” The hush of her name washed over her, quiet as the night. Dark as temptation. She stopped wriggling but the impact of his voice—the notion that he too lay awake, hard and hot at her back—rolled through her like molten chocolate. Sweet and thick in her veins and her senses.
“Yes?” she managed to breathe.
“Best you don’t do that.”
Oh, man, did he think she was shimmying up against him on purpose? That was altogether possible seeing as he still lay on his side of the bed.
Mortified at being caught out, at unconsciously seeking his heat and shelter while she slept, at thinking of doing exactly what he suspected, she resumed her effort to twist away. He made a sound low in his throat that might have been a groan of discomfort. Or disapproval. Then the arm impeding her escape tightened, pulling her back against him.
Zara swallowed. Yup, he was definitely aroused. Very much so.
“I thought you didn’t want me to know about that,” she said.
The hand at her waist twitched, but when he spoke, his voice was coated with dry amusement. “I think you pretty much know every inch by now.”
What could she say to that? Certainly not the wicked response that leaped into her mind and pooled low in her body. Nope, she better not make any crack about how she could get more intimately acquainted with those inches.
“What did you mean by ‘best you don’t do that’?” she asked.
“You were squirming.”
“I was trying to move away without waking you. Why did you pull me back?”
“I like the feel of you against me,” he said frankly. “If you just lay still like you’ve been doing for the last couple of hours, we’ll do fine.”
Zara exhaled slowly. Felt the spread of his fingers on her abdomen, the tiniest shift in pressure. He expected her to lie still? Now she knew that he touched her, now she knew that he wanted her?
“You’ve been—” she moistened her lips “—lying there…awake…for hours?”
“Yeah. Awake.”
Again that lick of dry amusement. Oh, yeah, he recognized her slight pause for what it was. He knew she’d been thinking of him lying awake and hard for hours.
“Go to sleep, Zara,” he said quietly.
Go to sleep? Was he for real? Or had she missed something in the translation?
Using her shoulder and elbow for leverage, she managed to push free of his hold and roll onto her back. Then onto her side to face him. “You expect me to just go back to sleep? As if I don’t know that you’re aroused?”
“That bothers you?”
She blinked, unsure how to respond. Wishing the night weren’t so dark so she could see more than an impression of his strong, dark face. “Shouldn’t it?”
“I’m not going to use it for anything. No matter how nicely you ask.”
To her credit, Zara’s mouth didn’t fall open. Much. She drew an audible breath and let it go. Replayed that shockingly candid admission in her mind and let its impact settle. She believed him. Even if she made the moves, if she reached out and put her hand on that hot, hard body, he would resist.
Reflexively she curled her fingers tight into the palm that tingled with the suggestion of touch. Deep inside she felt a rush of sensation, not wild and hot like so many times during this long night, but steady and strong.
A knowledge that this was a man she could trust.
“Because of Susannah?”
“Until I talk to her, until I hear it from her lips, we’re still engaged.”
And then? The words jumped from her mind to her mouth but she bit them off. And then he would be in another city, another state, another lifestyle far removed from hers. Then, no matter how nicely he asked, there would be nothing.
Susannah might keep them apart now, but in the end there was nothing to keep them together. Nothing but a cabin-fever attraction he had the willpower to resist.
She would do well to take a lesson.
Five
Alex went to sleep hard and woke the same way. No surprise there, since he lay wrapped around a woman who’d stirred his juices from the instant he’d clapped eyes on her.
He wasn’t sure why he’d insisted on dragging her back into his embrace when she’d woken in the night, except that he did enjoy the feel of her long, strong body matched to his. In his sleep he’d enjoyed the fantasy of unzipping her sleeping bag and running his hands over that amazing body.
The fantasy of starting the day with long, slow morning sex.
With a low groan, he edged away from that fantasy and the torturous pleasure of her derriere nestled against him. He must be turning into a masochist. And a supreme optimist if he imagined himself capable of long and slow anything right now.
Rising on one elbow, he stroked a fall of hair back from her face, then held his breath when she stirred. She slept on but with a frown puckering the skin between her eyebrows. Tension ticked one of the fingers curled around the top of her sleeping bag and her legs shifted restlessly inside its bulky warmth.
She’d moved in her sleep too, not only snuggling closer to his body heat but shifting uneasily as if her mind never rested. Perhaps it was his presence or the aftermath of what must have been a harrowing day. Or perhaps she was simply reciting her anatomy lessons, like she’d told him she did at the traffic lights.
Smiling at that, he slowly traced the length of her exposed arm with the back of his hand. Scapula. Humerus. Radius and ulna. He stopped at her wrist, frowning in concentration as he struggled to remember the name of the next bone. She shifted again, rolling her shoulders slightly as if responding to the light pressure of his touch.
He gave up on the bone thing to watch her face, unobserved, in the thin dawn light. To torture himself with not touching more of her smooth skin, with not kissing the sleep-soft fullness of her lips, with not flicking his tongue against that beauty spot on her cheek.
He wanted all that, and sometime during the night he’d accepted that he could want more. He’d entertained the notion that his first gut instinct may have been wrong. That she might be the right woman, but at the wrong time. But until he’d talked to Susannah, he could not tempt himself with possibilities.
I’m sorry, Alex, but I can’t marry you today.
In his head he heard Susannah’s voice, heard her emphasis on that last word. Until he found her, until he heard her voice finish that statement with any day, he was bound to her and to his marriage proposal.
He rolled from the bed, stood and stretched a dozen tight muscles, and watched Zara come awake. It didn’t bother him that she caught him standing there beside the bed, sporting only underpants and a massive morning erection. Apparently it didn’t bother her either because she took her time looking.
Alex finished rolling his head and shoulders and smiled down at her. “Good morning.”
He liked the hazy distraction in her eyes when they rose to meet his. The husky morning edge to her
voice when she returned his greeting. “What time do you want to get going?”
He reached for his trousers and started to pull them on. “What time do you suppose that roadhouse will be open for breakfast?”
Unable to get around the obstruction of the tree and his incapacitated rental car, they detoured via a longer alternate route. Several miles before connecting up with the highway, they came upon a tiny settlement with a café-slash-petrol-station-slash-general-store and a handmade sign advertising Home Cooked Meals. Carmel, the cook-slash-waitress-slash-store-owner, told them she did a good trade in lumber trucks.
She told them quite a bit, actually, in intermittent slices of monologue each time she returned to plunk something else on their table. In return they told her how they’d missed dinner and she promised to fill them right back up again.
She’d been working on that ever since.
Between feeding their hunger and Carmel’s voluble presence, they’d barely spoken to each other since sitting down at the worn Formica table. But with the edge now off, Alex watched Zara spoon the last of a generous serving of scrambled eggs onto her plate.
She ate with a refreshing lack of self-consciousness, only pausing, her fork midway between plate and mouth, when she caught him watching her. “Please tell me you’re not staring at a big smudge of sauce on my chin.”
“No. I’m enjoying your appetite.” Alex reached across the table and tapped her wrist. “What are these bones called?”
She stared at him, obviously perplexed.
“I was trying to think of the name this morning. Scapula. Humerus. Radius and ulna. I couldn’t remember the wrist bones.”
“Carpals,” she said, frowning.
Carmel returned to gather and stack the finished plates, to ask if they enjoyed it all, to see if she could get them anything else. Alex leaned back in his chair, enjoying the look of confusion on Zara’s face as she tried to work out what the bones thing was about. He decided to let her wonder. He liked the way concentration drew her heavy brows together, giving her an almost fierce look. Like an Amazon warrior queen.
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