“To crank the generator,” he told her. “It’s out back. I’ll get wetter, but we’ll have power.” She made note of the fact that he was taking the backpack with him, and presumed there was a reason. For one thing, she guessed that he wasn’t about to give her an opportunity to grab the phone that was in there, and that would be because he still didn’t trust her, because he had trust issues the size of Texas. “If you’re hungry, groceries are in the bag on the table. Bottled water is in the lower left cabinet. Bathroom’s through the door closest to the bed. There should be a towel in there. It’ll be about fifteen minutes before there’s any hot water.” Having reached the door by that time, he paused with his hand on the knob to look back at her. “And, Caroline—you realize that if you were to do something stupid, like try to run away, if you didn’t wind up hopelessly lost or drowned in a bog or eaten by alligators, I’d track you down and drag you back before you could get out of the bayou, right?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “Get it through your thick head: I’m not going anywhere.”
His eyes swept over her.
“One more thing: don’t ever try to manipulate me by kissing me again,” he warned softly. Then, without another word, he went out.
She was left to scowl at the closed door. Her plan to prove to him that he could trust her had clearly been a waste of effort, because he still didn’t trust her. Worse, he was obviously still feeling all pissy because she had kissed him to get his gun. Which, in hindsight, had been a mistake on so many levels that she didn’t have the energy to count them. Like opening Pandora’s box, it had released all kinds of unexpected things into the atmosphere. First and foremost was sex.
Simple solution: sleep with him already,
said a little voice inside her head.
The attraction between them was so strong that even while she was just standing there staring at the door, she caught herself having blazing microfantasies about screwing his brains out. If a relationship between them wasn’t in the cards—and, given the circumstances, she had to face the truth that it was a long shot—what was wrong with settling for however many sessions of really mind-blowing sex they could squeeze in?
There were problems with that, and the reasonable part of her brain knew it, but the hot and bothered, I-am-so-turned-on part didn’t want to know.
You’ve wanted him for ten years
.
Carpe diem. Seize the day. This is your chance.
You might never get another.
That was the kick-in-the-teeth thought that was the equivalent of an icy shower.
Screw him until he was killed? Or arrested? Or forced to go on the run for the rest of his life?
That wasn’t going to work for her.
That complicated her body’s single-minded demand for a purely sexual thrill ride, because she realized that sex was maybe the smallest part of what she wanted from him.
There was no easy solution, so she turned her attention to seizing the day for more urgent matters, grabbing the lantern and heading for the bathroom, where she made use of the facilities, then grabbed the lone towel and used it to quickly towel dry her hair. The room was small, maybe six by eight feet, and gave the impression of having once been a shed that had been attached to the shanty as an afterthought. The fixtures were basic, but they were all there: cheap white toilet and white sink with a standard mirrored medicine cabinet over it, molded plastic shower with frosted acrylic doors. All clean and fairly new. The floor was generic white tile, as were the walls up to about five feet from the floor. After that, the weathered cypress planks that made up the shanty rose to the ceiling. A blue plastic laundry basket in one corner was there presumably to act as a hamper. On the floor in front of the shower was a small gray rug. The bathroom looked like a do-it-yourself special, and she found herself wondering if Reed was responsible. She frowned a little as she thought about that: she had no idea if he was handy. She
wanted
to know, she discovered. She wanted to know every little detail about him.
The scary truth of it was, she was developing a real thing for Reed.
She’d had her fair share of boyfriends, but none of them had ever really gotten under her skin
. Ice, ice, baby
wasn’t only her professional motto.
How ironic would it be if the exception to that turned out to be Reed? If the man she finally decided to give her heart to was the one person most likely not to make it through the next twenty-four hours?
There has to be a way out of this.
The problem was that he wouldn’t tell her anything, and she was almost too tired and mentally fried to think.
A small overhead light flickered once, then blinked on, emitting a dim, pale glow. It distracted her. Glancing up at it, Caroline realized that the faint buzzing sound that now joined in with the rattle of the rain beating down on the roof was the exhaust fan, and that both amenities had sprung to life because, obviously, Reed had gotten the generator going.
Turning to check out the medicine cabinet in a quest for soap—there was none visible—she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the sink. Her now damp and tousled hair hung in a darker-than-usual tangle around her shoulders. Her hazel eyes were shadowed with fatigue, which was no surprise given the hour. Her high cheekbones sported a hectic flush. Her ordinarily reasonably full lips looked several degrees plumper and rosier than usual, which she attributed to Reed’s kisses. Or, possibly, to the effects of the duct tape. Remembering the duct tape brought a frown to her face—she was still mad at Reed about that—and she was still frowning as her gaze fell lower and she saw, to her embarrassment and chagrin, how closely her wet blouse clung to the contours of her body. Something—probably the fact that she was soaked through and chilled now because of it, possibly her reaction to those blazing kisses—had caused her nipples to pucker and harden. They were embarrassingly visible through the wet silk, and she plucked the fabric away from her skin with dismay.
When she’d been dressing for the date that her call out to the Winfield mansion had interrupted, which would be her second one with Ben Paxton, a very nice, handsome, thirty-year-old accountant who lived in an apartment two floors below hers in a boxlike high-rise in Kenner, she’d been going for a little festive, a little sexy, but nothing too suggestive because, while she liked Ben, and she looked forward to a Christmas Eve dinner with him and a group of friends at the elegant Le Foret restaurant, she wasn’t seeing the night ending with anything more than a good-night kiss at her door. The blouse had seemed perfectly appropriate then.
Of course, she hadn’t foreseen that, before the night was over, she would wind up out of the chic little blazer that she had worn over it, or that she would get soaking wet. Just like she hadn’t foreseen getting kidnapped, or casting in her lot with the villainous hostage taker—or, in a word, Reed.
That was it in a nutshell: she hadn’t foreseen Reed.
Recalling just when the rain had started to fall, she realized that the only one who would have seen her looking like a contestant in a wet T-shirt contest was Reed.
That’s what he had been looking at before she’d kissed him. She remembered his eyes on her, remembered the sudden sexy gleam they’d taken on, and the memory made her breasts tighten still more. It made her breathing quicken. It made her hot.
Face the truth:
he
makes you hot.
You’ve got it bad,
she told herself with disgust, and opened the medicine cabinet to continue her search for soap. There were supplies in there, she was glad to discover. Besides a couple of unopened bars of—yes!—soap, which she immediately made use of to wash her hands and face, there were the usual first aid products, including AfterBite, which she happily grabbed on sight. She had a number of mosquito bites on her legs, which she had been dealing with by ignoring them in hopes that they would go away. This would be infinitely better. But as she looked down at her legs, she hesitated. Her ankles were gritty with the residue of the dirty water they’d splashed through, while her calves were streaked with mud.
She was just glancing speculatively at the shower when there was a tap at the door.
“You decent?” Reed asked through the crude panel. Like the rest of the cabin, it appeared to have been handcrafted from cypress, and it hung a little crookedly in the equally primitive door frame. It also lacked a lock, as she had noted when she entered.
How stupid was it that just the sound of his voice made her heart beat faster? “Yes.”
He pushed the door open and walked into the bathroom. She was standing in front of the sink, and had to take a step back to let him in.
Despite her best intentions to remain unaffected, Caroline couldn’t help but suck in her breath—inaudibly, she prayed—as Reed entered. His black hair was slicked close to his head, he had a towel hanging around his neck—and he was gloriously, completely shirtless.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
F
OR AN UNGUARDED MOMENT,
Caroline simply looked.
He was built like an athlete, all long, hard muscle. His chest was deeply tanned, silent evidence of a considerable amount of time spent outdoors without a shirt. Wide and muscular beneath broad shoulders, his impressive expanse of chest tapered down to his waist in a classic, masculine vee. His biceps bulged. His forearms were honed and powerful looking. In the center of his chest, a wedge of black curling hair, not too thick, traveled downward until there was no more of it remaining than a thin line snaking over abs that were totally ripped. After that, the waistband of his pants, slung low on his hipbones, obscured her view. Realizing where she was looking, she jerked her eyes back up to his face, but not before she felt a flush of heat and her pulse picked up.
It wasn’t as if she’d never seen a man’s chest before. She had. But this was Reed, Reed wearing nothing but black tuxedo pants and a towel around his neck—in other words, sexy personified.
In sheer self-defense she frowned at him.
His eyes as they met hers were dark and impossible to read. He’d definitely noticed her looking, and she waited for some wiseass remark.
It didn’t come.
“I brought you something,” was what he said, in a clipped tone that told her he was still bent out of shape about the kiss. Thanks to the feeble light of the overhead fixture, she noticed fine lines at the corners of Reed’s eyes, and deeper ones bracketing his mouth, that hadn’t been visible earlier. He looked tense, tired, and faintly grumpy.
He held up a new toothbrush, still in its packaging, which he waggled at her. In his other hand, he was carrying his gun, which was still in its holster.
“A toothbrush!” With a gift like that in hand, she didn’t care if he was still mad at her. Caroline reached for it with genuine enthusiasm. A second one was in his hand, which she presumed was for his own use. They’d probably been in the bag of groceries on the table, which she hadn’t taken time to look at before heading for the bathroom. She’d seen a tube of toothpaste in the medicine cabinet, she recalled. Turning back to it, she set the AfterBite down on the edge of the sink, and grabbed the toothpaste from the shelf with gusto.
“You’re lucky I bought two.” He pulled the towel from around his neck, which actually turned out to be two thin, cheap white ones intertwined, and slung them over the top of the shower, which lacked about two feet of reaching the ceiling. The display of rippling muscle that was involved sent her pulse fluttering. As she redirected her gaze in a hurry, he walked around her to place his gun on the back of the toilet, and she noticed that he was barefoot. Clearly her mind had been focused on something—somewhere—else, or she would have noticed sooner. As he turned back toward her his eyes slid over her, and Caroline was reminded once again of the revealing state of her blouse. Of course, he’d seen her accidental display before, but she’d just as soon he didn’t keep seeing it. Casually she angled her body a little away from him. A quick glance as she squirted a dab of toothpaste on the brush found him looking at the AfterBite. He lifted his eyebrows at her inquiringly.
“Mosquito bites?”
“A few on my legs,” she replied. It was, she discovered, perfectly possible to engage in innocuous conversation with a gorgeous, bare-chested guy who was biting his words off at her while he stood right beside her, seeming to take up way more than his share of the limited space. What was harder was not looking at his chest—or his muscular arms, or his taut abs—while she did so.
He glanced at her legs.
“That’s the problem with showing so much leg: no telling what you’ll attract.”
“I was on a
date
. Sorry I didn’t get the memo on the proper dress code for being
kidnapped
.” Okay, so much for friendly chitchat. The bathroom was feeling way too small. “Look, do you mind going away? I’d like to brush my teeth. And take a shower.” She remembered the towels he’d been wearing around his neck. “Unless you want to shower first, of course.”
“There’s no showering first,” he said. “Since I don’t have anywhere to lock anything up, and I’m not prepared to leave you out here on your own with my gun and everything else, we’re showering together.”
At the idea of showering with him her heart gave a little hiccup. The picture it conjured up was so tantalizing that her mouth went dry. Which was why she had so many problems with the suggestion that she practically sputtered.
“What? Oh, no we’re not. If you’re thinking I’m getting naked with you—”
“Cher, we both know you’d love to get naked with me.”
She was indignant. In spite of the fact that it just might be true. “In your dreams!”
“But I didn’t say you had to get naked,” he continued smoothly. “I’m going to strip down to my boxers, you strip to whatever you feel like stripping down to. Or not. You can stand fully dressed in the corner out of the spray for all I care. We get in, we get out, we hit the sack for a few hours. I’ve got a dry T-shirt you can sleep in. It’s big enough so you’ll be decent.”