“Do you have any aspirin or anything like that around here?” he asked.
She blinked and shook off the heat and the fantasies. “What? Aspirin?”
“Yeah. Or ibuprofen or whatever.”
“You…you’re in pain.”
“A little.”
She got hold of herself, flung her covers back and forgot about her own overheated libido. The man she loved was hurting. Her own needs could wait. “Lie down, Cory. I’ll see what I can find.”
It wasn’t a lie, exactly. He was hurting, a little. But no more than he had been all along. It was just that when he came into the bedroom and caught a look at her, lying there with her arms wrapped around her waist, her eyes closed, her head tipped back, he’d known exactly what was going on inside her mind. He knew a woman deep into a sexual fantasy when he saw one. And then when he spoke, he’d heard the sound she made: half whimper, half moan. Those blue eyes opened; he saw what was in them.
Hunger. That woman wanted to eat him alive. And yeah, it shook him just a little. God, had any woman ever wanted him the way this one did? She was building his ego up to dizzying heights, and he wasn’t vain enough to think every woman saw him this way. Even without a memory, he knew that wasn’t even close to the case. She saw something more in him. Something he didn’t even see in himself.
It made him feel powerful to be so desired. It was heady. And it was probably dangerous.
It threw him, too, and so he came up with the pain thing, knowing that would cool things off in a hurry. She wanted him, yes, but she seemed to care about him, too, for some odd reason. She wouldn’t jump his bones if she thought he was in pain.
And why the hell was that a good thing? he wondered.
He made his way to the cot, and sat on its edge while she rummaged around the room. She went to the kitchen to broaden the scope of her search, and he told himself it had been a good move to distract her from thinking about sex tonight; a wise, smart, prudent thing to do, and the only correct course of action right now.
His body wasn’t believing it, though.
“Couldn’t find any pain reliever,” she said, coming back into the room. “But I have a couple of solutions. Here’s the first one.”
She was holding a cup full of steaming liquid that smelled kind of rotten.
“Valerian root. I added mint and some honey to make it taste better. Trust me.”
He took the cup from her, sipped just a little. It tasted better than it smelled, which was a good thing. He took another sip. “You carry this shit around with you?”
“No, it’s some Tessa had in a canister in the kitchen.”
He nodded, confirming his earlier suspicion that this Tessa was one of the witches. “So, is this supposed to be good for pain?”
“Mostly it’s good for tension, but if you relax the pain should ease. Couldn’t hurt the memory any, either.”
“Okay.” He took another sip. “So what else have you got?”
“Reiki,” she told him.
“Gezundheit.
She sent him a smirk. “It’s a healing modality from Japan. Been practiced for centuries. I tried it on you in the hospital, remember? It seems to have worked pretty well so far.”
“Well, it did something good,” he said, heading for the cot.
“Not the cot, the bed. Cot’s not big enough for this. I need room.”
He lifted his brows. “Room for what? You getting into the bed with me, Selene?”
“Yeah. I need to be able to put my hands on you.”
He almost closed his eyes and groaned aloud. Maybe she was right and this thing was inevitable. Maybe he should just stop fighting it. Hell, he was only human. He shrugged off the shirt, took off the jeans, waiting for her to object, but she never did. Then he got into the bed.
He pulled back the covers, then lay on his back. He started to pull the covers up over him, but she covered his hand with her own, stopping him. “Leave them off.”
“All the better to see me?” he asked.
“All the better to touch you.”
“You’re killing me, Selene.”
“No. I’m healing you. Just close your eyes and relax.”
He closed his eyes, but he didn’t relax. Not by a long shot. Especially not when she got onto the bed, making it move with her weight as she shifted herself around until she was sliding her ass in between the pillow and the head of the bed.
“Lift up a little,” she instructed.
He almost asked if he shouldn’t roll over first, but bit his tongue, and let her slip underneath him until his head was resting in her lap, and her legs stretched out along either side of him. Her hands lay across his head, warm and comforting as a wool cap in the winter time.
“What do I have to do?” he asked.
“You don’t have to do anything. Just relax. Let your mind rest.”
“And while I’m resting, what are you going to do?”
“I’m already doing it.”
He popped his eyes open. She was upside down, from his point of view, her head bending slightly forward so her spun-silver hair hung down close to his face, and her pale spooky blue eyes were almost lazy as they mated with his. Half closed, utterly calm, gently smiling eyes.
His head registered something, and he realized it was heat—not the sexual kind, though that was still simmering as well—and it made him frown. “Are your hands always this hot?”
“Not always.”
“So why are they now?”
“Because your head needs healing. Relax.”
“You, um…. you’re sure you know what you’re doing, right?”
She smiled a little wider, held his gaze. “The beauty of Reiki is that you can’t mess it up. I’m just a channel for the energy. It knows what to do, where it’s needed, how to work. I just plug you into it and let it do its thing. Understand?”
“Not really.” But he didn’t care. It felt good. As if someone had put a hot pack across his forehead. He’d had a slight headache. Tension, stress, whatever, but it was fading fast.
She held her hands there for a long while. He noticed they stopped being as hot, seemed to cool a bit, and that’s when she moved them to a new spot. She laid them over his face for awhile, but they didn’t get hot there. Then she let them rest on his neck, and then on his shoulders, where they got pretty warm again. Sometimes she left them a long time, and other times only for a few minutes.
“I’m going to move now,” she said, her voice deeper than before, soft and almost hypnotic. And he was feeling kind of hypnotized, come to think of it. “Just relax.”
She slid out from beneath his head, and lowered it gently onto the pillow. Then she moved around beside him, and finally blew his relaxed state entirely by straddling him. None of her weight was on him, though. She supported it with a knee on either side.
“Easy now. This is just the most efficient way to get to you.”
“Right. And you do this with all your…dare I say ‘patients’?”
“No, I don’t do this with everyone. But there’s no point in being shy with you, is there, Cory?”
“Isn’t there?”
“None whatsoever.”
He was about to ask why the hell not, but she was pressing those warm, warm hands to his chest now, skin on bare skin. And he liked that. He just wished she would rub a little, rather than simply leaving her palms still that way. And yet it tingled and got warm where she touched him, and he tried to just let his mind go still and run with this thing.
Eventually she moved her hands lower, resting them on his abs, covering the knife wound this time. And that hand got really hot. So hot it almost burned him.
“Wow.”
“Yeah,” she said. “The more you need healing, the more energy moves through. I expected it here. But it was just as bad around your head, and that threw me.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t know what’s wrong up there.”
“The amnesia?”
&nb
sp; She closed her eyes. “But why do you have amnesia? Jimmy said the doctors suspected you’d been drugged. Did they ever say for sure?”
“No.” It took her reminder to drive it home to him anew, that niggling feeling that there was something more wrong with him than a knife wound in his belly. He drew a deep breath. Her hands were hot again, but no longer burning. “They ran a bunch of tests on me at the hospital, but I left before I ever heard any results.”
“I see.”
Her hands grew cooler. She moved them away, and then shifted them lower, toward his groin. But before she pressed her palms to him there, he caught her wrists, stopping her.
She met his eyes, hers no longer relaxed but startled.
“I’m only human, Selene. If you don’t want to have sex with me, then back off, okay? It’s not nice to torture a guy like this.”
She blinked rapidly, and her cheeks heated. But she held his eyes, though he thought she really would have rather looked anywhere else.
“It really is one of the hand positions. I just…wasn’t thinking.”
“And I can’t seem to stop thinking.”
Her brows drew together. “It’s not that I don’t want to. Please don’t think that.”
He tipped his head to one side. “I don’t know, Selene. I mean, how am I supposed to think anything else?” He knew better. Knew she wanted him. He knew why he was holding back, though he was on the brink of changing his mind. He wanted to hear her tell him why she was.
“It’s…. complicated.”
“It’s simple. Beautifully, blissfully simple, Selene. We’re two adults, without a reason in the world to deny ourselves a night of pleasure. I want you.”
“You do?”
“So much my eyes are crossing.”
She smiled, relaxing a little, he thought.
“So if you want me, too, then what the hell are we waiting for?” he asked.
She thought and thought. He could see her searching her mind for a reason, any reason, and she finally caught hold of the easiest one. “Your wound—”
“Is a very convenient excuse. But not a reason. Not really. You know that, Selene. You were lying there thinking of ways you could take me without hurting me when I walked in here a while ago.”
She shot him a look, then averted her eyes quickly. “It showed?”
“Yeah. It showed. Unless I’m totally misreading you. Unless you really don’t want me at all and I’m just imagining all of this chemistry I feel bubbling up between us and—”
“Shut up.”
He shut up.
She sat there on the edge of the bed, mulling and pondering. Then she turned to him. “I’ve never done this sort of thing before.”
“Had sex?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “With a man I just met. It’s not me.”
“But it’s different with us, right? You said it was inevitable. You said—”
“Don’t pretend you believe any of that. I know you think I’m flaky.”
He shrugged. “You believe it. Does it really matter if I’m skeptical right now? If you’re right, I’ll find out sooner or later, won’t I?”
She nodded. “You…we haven’t even…kissed. Yet.”
He smiled slowly, and reached up for her, slid his hands around her back until they rested between her shoulder blades, and drew her down until her chest was only an inch from his, and her mouth hovered a breath away. “I’m about to fix that.”
“Okay.”
He pulled her just a little further. Their mouths met, and some kind of explosion went off inside him. It wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t planned. He’d intended to kiss her gently, get a little bolder, a little deeper as he went along, but definitely take his time and seduce her mouth into full surrender.
It didn’t happen that way. He felt her lips under his and then felt something go “bam.” And there wasn’t any thought after that. He was twining his arms around her and ravaging her mouth while his hips arched into her to tell her what he wanted. His heart pounded so hard it made his teeth rattle. His skin got damp and he was shaking. And to say he was hard for her didn’t come close. He was throbbing. For her.
More. He needed more. He needed all of her.
She jerked herself up and away from him all at once. Hair in her eyes, lips wet and parted, eyes glassy. Panting. And her nipples were hard and straining into the tiny pink tank top. He stared and wanted to touch. Pinch. Taste. Nip.
“What the hell was that?” she panted.
“You’re the Witch, babe. You tell me.”
She shot him a look that made him regret the words. “You think I put some kind of…sex spell on you?”
“I was kidding.”
“Well I didn’t! I don’t work that way.”
“I told you, I was kidding.” Although, now that he thought about it, it bore a little more thinking. She did claim to be a Witch. And he was pretty sure that if he’d ever experienced that kind of reaction from kissing a woman before, he’d have remembered it.
Then again, maybe he wouldn’t.
And he didn’t believe in Witchcraft anyway. At least, he didn’t think so.
“I didn’t expect that,” she said. Her voice was a whisper. And she seemed pretty in awe over the power of this thing between them.
“I didn’t either. You want to do it again?”
She looked at him, and he knew she was about to say yes, knew it right to his toes, but then her eyes slid lower on his belly and stayed there, on the wound. “You’re bleeding again.” She shook her head. “And no matter how gentle I try to be, with this kind of dynamite between us, I don’t think it’s going to work.”
She slid into the bed beside him, and pulled the covers up. “We’re going to have to settle for snuggling tonight.” Rolling onto her side, she lay one arm over his waist, and rested her head on his shoulder.
She was kidding, right? She had to be kidding.
But no. If anything she snuggled closer, and he felt her body relax, felt her drift off into sleep and heard her breathing pattern change.
She wasn’t kidding. She was killing him.
He was surely going to die before morning.
He woke to a round of delicious smells wafting through the cabin. Bacon and coffee were foremost among them, and they tickled him awake as they wriggled from his nostrils to his brain, and triggered his stomach to growl.
He rolled to one side and opened his eyes.
She was lying on her side, facing him, smiling. “Morning,” she said.
He was smiling back before he thought better of it. She was getting entirely too many notions about him. And maybe that meant she wasn’t out to kill him, but he had to wonder if this wasn’t worse. “Morning,” he said. And in spite of himself, it came out sounding sexy and romantic.
“I made breakfast.”
“From here? Must be one of those Witchcraft things, huh?”
Her smile widened. White teeth. Full, wet lips. Damn she looked good in the morning. “I got up and washed up and cooked. You were still sleeping, so I decided to lie beside you and wait for you to wake up.”
“So you’ve been lying there watching me sleep for…how long?”
“A while. Not long enough for the food to get cold, though.”
“Well, thank God for that.”
She bounded out of the bed, and sort of bounced out of the room. That spring in her step, the way her gleaming angel-blond hair swung when she moved, the sway of those hips…. Damn, he was hard again and actively fighting the urge to lunge from the bed, grab her by the waist and haul her right back into it with him.
She’d washed up. Her breath smelled minty fresh, and her face was scrubbed clean. No makeup. She wore jeans and a pale, baby-blue T-shirt. That gave her the edge over him, he thought. He probably had morning breath and stubble.
He’d barely completed the thought and convinced himself to get up out of bed, when she returned with a wash basin in hand, sloshing water all the way. She set it on
the nightstand, where a clean washcloth, towel and shaving gear waited. Beside that was a glass of water, his toothbrush and a tube of paste.
He glanced up at her. “You really have to get over this habit of waiting on me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not that badly injured.”
“So?”
He licked his lips, tried again. “I prefer to feel like I’m pulling my weight. Doing my share.”
“Good. I’ll let you wait on me later.”
“Couldn’t we both just sort of—wait on ourselves?”
She blinked and tilted her head to one side, almost as if his words didn’t compute. Then she shrugged. “I was going to offer to shave you. Always wanted to try that. But um…you go ahead. Wait on yourself. Be quick, though. I’ll have breakfast on the table in five minutes.”
“Okay.” So much for not waiting on him. Hell. He wondered why it bothered him so much and decided it probably was a clue to his personality. He must be an independent prick. Who else would be ungrateful for this kind of attention from a woman who looked like this one?
He made quick work of washing up, ran the razor over his face, and brushed his teeth. Then he toweled down, dressed and joined her in the kitchen, where she’d filled his plate and poured his coffee.
“Taste,” she said, nodding at the cup.
He tasted, grimaced. “Needs cream.”
Smiling, she leaned over him, breast brushing his shoulder, and poured creamer into his mug. “Gas-powered fridge. Everything was just stocked last week, Tessa said, so—there, try it now.”
He sipped again, nodded. “Good. Perfect.” She was acting like a wife. A newly minted, fresh-from-the-altar bride. And it was chafing him under the collar like an overly starched shirt.
His plate had three strips of bacon, two eggs over easy, some golden-brown buttered toast. He reached for the salt shaker, and she beat him to it, grabbing it first and handing it to him.
Instead of taking it, he stared up at her. “Selene?”
“Yeah?”
“Sit down and eat your breakfast.”
She blinked, then averted her eyes and looked a little sheepish. “Sorry,” she said, sinking into her own chair. “I’m the youngest in my family. Everyone tends to try to take care of me, you know? I guess the opportunity to take care of someone else for a change is a little too much fun.”
Dangerous Lover Page 9
