His eyes zeroed in on the movement.
The electricity that surged between them made her dizzy. Her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. Swaying toward him instinctively, she leaned her own warm curves against the solid, muscular length of him and lifted her face toward his. A surge of sizzling heat suffused her body at what she saw for her there in the dark, sexy gleam in his eyes.
“Reed,” she murmured, her voice all low and husky.
He breathed in maybe a little too sharply and his hand tightened on her arm even as she went up on tiptoe, lowering her lashes, parting her lips in anticipation just before she touched them to his.
They moved against hers—and then they were gone. His now-iron grip on her arm was all that kept her from stumbling forward even as he stepped back so abruptly that he collided with the wall behind him.
For a second all she could do was frown at him in incomprehension. His eyes were ablaze with what she had no trouble at all in recognizing as passion—and at the same time were as hard as pieces of onyx.
“Reed,” she protested in a far different tone, affronted, a little plaintive.
“Forget it, Caroline. I am not going there with you,” he said grimly. “We’re not having sex. I may want to, you may want to, but it’s not happening. We’re going to take a shower, and we’re going to get some sleep, and after that I’m going to see about getting you back where you belong. End of story.”
Caroline’s eyes widened. Her spine stiffened. He was still holding her arm in that unbreakable grip. Her hands curled into fists. Indignation swamped all her hot, sexy feelings like a tidal wave of ice water.
“What do you mean, forget it? Like I’m the one who has sex on the brain? Who dragged who into the shower? Who was just checking out whose butt? I— Let go of my arm.” She jerked her arm free of his hold, turned, and thrust a hand out toward the shower door. “Forget the damned shower. I’m out of here.”
“You’re not out of here until I say you’re out of here.” He sounded like he was talking through his teeth—she wouldn’t know, because she wasn’t looking at him, or at least she wasn’t looking at him until she shoved the shower door open and he hooked her with an arm around her waist, hauling her back toward him like a fish on a line. Then she looked at him, glared at him, but it didn’t do any good because he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking toward the tap while he twisted it hard.
The pipes groaned, a few drops of water spurted from the sunflower-size shower head, and then a deluge of hot water shot out, interrupting. With the initial drops as a warning, she just managed to close the door and jerk her head back out of the way in time to prevent her hair from being soaked by the rush of water that poured down like it was spurting from a giant hose. She scowled at Reed through the cascade.
“Jackass.” Okay, the hot water felt wonderful. She had not realized how tired and sore her muscles were, or how chilled she was.
“The water will last for about five minutes,” Reed yelled through the pelting torrent, and passed her a bar of soap, which she reluctantly—she was mad at him, but soap was soap—accepted. “You might want to get a move on. When it’s gone, it’s gone.”
With that in mind, she put aside her outrage in favor of soaping up quickly, and then had the soap scooped out of her hand so he could do the same. The steam rising around them wrapped them in a welcome cocoon of soap-scented heat. With space as tight as it was, it was impossible not to have their bodies touch, their legs and arms brush, and it was maddening to realize that she was burningly aware of each glancing contact. Watching him rub suds over his face, then vigorously scrub his chest and arms, was way more intimate than brushing her teeth with him had been—and she discovered that she couldn’t help but watch. As water sluiced the suds down the length of his powerful body, she found her eyes following the path of the suds and felt her heart start to beat faster again, as a delicious tightening sensation began to build deep inside her. With a silent curse, she deliberately averted her gaze.
It had been beyond infuriating when he’d told her to forget about sex. It was even more infuriating to discover that she couldn’t.
The water stopped just the way it began: the pipes groaned, and then the deluge slowed to a trickle, and then that was it. When it’s gone, it’s gone, indeed.
Soaked to the skin, not even allowing herself to think about how clingy and revealing her blouse must be at this point, Caroline found herself face to face with an equally soaked Reed.
His eyes slid over her. Her eyes slid over him. With his boxers now as thoroughly drenched as her blouse was, the hard bulge at the front of them was unmistakable. No matter how much he might want to deny it, there was the absolute proof that he was thinking about sex, too.
They both looked up at the same time. Their eyes collided. He knew where she’d been looking: she could see it in his expression.
“Caroline—”
“Forget it.” Her voice held a note of malicious enjoyment. “I am not having sex with you. No matter how much you want it. Not even if you beg.”
For the briefest of moments he simply looked at her with his eyes all heavy lidded and gleaming, totally confirming what she already knew: he was as turned on as she was. Then he reached up, grabbed one of the towels from the top of the enclosure, and handed it to her.
“Good to know we’re on the same page,” he said, and, taking the other towel with him, stepped out of the shower.
Caroline was left glowering after him.
Safely alone in the shower, she undressed, dried off, and wrung out her saturated blouse and undies, hanging them from the tap and the door handle in hopes that, by the time she needed to put them on again, they would be at least marginally dry.
Then, wrapping herself in the towel, which covered her from approximately the armpits to the tops of her thighs, she stepped cautiously out of the shower, shivering as she left the remnants of the steam behind.
Reed was nowhere in sight. Neither was his gun.
A T-shirt hung from the hook near the sink.
Caroline picked it up and looked at it. It was medium gray, had Coors written in bold black script across the front, and looked and felt clean. It was also big. As she pulled it on, she noticed that it smelled very faintly of some mild detergent, and it was indeed big. The sleeves reached to her elbows, and the hem reached halfway down her thighs.
Plenty of coverage. The only problem, of course, was that she didn’t have a stitch to put on underneath.
It couldn’t be helped. She took her hair down, quickly combed through it with the poor little pocket comb that was the only hairstyling implement she could find, made use of some lip balm from the medicine cabinet, applied dabs of AfterBite to the bites on her legs, and finally left the sanctuary of the bathroom, turning the light off behind her as she went.
Reed was lying on his back on the far side of the double bed, his head on a flat-looking pillow, one arm folded behind his head, his eyes already at half-mast with the need for sleep, clearly waiting for her to emerge. The only light in the room came from a small lamp on a table beside the bed. A red and blue pieced quilt covered him to approximately the middle of his chest. Above it, the rest of his chest and his shoulders were bare.
Hesitating in the bathroom doorway—which meant that she was standing almost at the foot of the bed—Caroline took a moment to assess the situation. He was looking impossibly hot, dangerously sexy, way tired, and slightly grouchy. Her heart beat a little faster and her body temperature rose just from the sight of him in a bed waiting for her. But he wasn’t the only attraction. With Reed in it, or even with Reed in it—she wasn’t quite sure which—the bed itself looked as appealing as an oasis in a desert. She was suddenly drooping with fatigue. Jelly legged. Fuzzy brained. Exhausted.
“Jesus Christ, you took long enough,” Reed groused, and threw back the covers on the other side of the bed for her. “Get in here.”
When she sent a questioning glance winging around the rest of the room—there
really was no other place to sleep—he made an impatient sound.
“It’s almost 6 a.m. With the day we’ve got coming up, we both need some sleep. Nothing else involved. So come park your ass.”
Her brows contracted. By “nothing else,” she knew he meant “no sex.” “How could I possibly say no to that?”
But she was too tired to really argue, and too aware of the futility of it, too. If she didn’t get into bed with him, she had little doubt that he would get up and physically put her where he wanted her. Anyway, besides the mild enjoyment she might get from annoying him, the only real reason she had to refuse was that she might find sleeping beside him too arousing, which he would instantly guess and mock her with. So, frowning, she moved along the narrow space between the mattress and the wall, then sat down on the side of the bed. Sliding in beneath the covers, she fell instantly in love with the too-thin mattress, just because stretching out on it felt so good. The pillow was thin, too, and flat, but it felt like the fluffiest down beneath her head. Her leg brushed Reed’s; her arm brushed Reed’s. Her whole body brushed Reed’s. There wasn’t any way around it: the bed was too small to avoid contact. Warm, sexy feelings abounded, but she was suddenly too tired to do more than experience them in the most pleasantly abstract way.
“Good night,” she said, and was just snuggling down deep beneath the covers, just getting ready to roll onto her side with her back ostentatiously turned to him, when his hand, warm and strong, slid down her arm, leaving a trail of heat in its wake. She smiled a little as she flicked a look up at him, ready to taunt him by saying something on the order of, wow, you really can’t keep your hands off me, can you?
Then she felt the cool slide of metal encircling her wrist.
Even as she heard the click and felt the thing lock in place, she knew what had just happened: he’d handcuffed her again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
SHOOTING INTO A SITTING POSITION, Caroline twisted around to slay him with her eyes. Her sudden movement caused the springs to squeak. The iron headboard clanked into the wall.
“Really?” Lifting her shackled wrist—of course he had handcuffed her to himself again, her right wrist to his left one—as high as she could, she shook it at him. The chain rattled. His heavily muscled arm barely lifted off the bed. “Again?”
Reed didn’t look particularly perturbed by her anger. Tucking his free arm beneath his head, he once more settled onto his back. His eyes gleamed darkly up at her. His mouth was an unrepentant line.
“Same thing as the shower,” he said. “I’m not prepared to leave you in a position to get your hands on my gun or the phone or anything else, and I need sleep. So do you, which this arrangement means we’ll both be getting. So unless you were hoping to get the drop on me again, or make a call or something like that, I don’t see why you have a problem with it.”
That was so infuriating that for a moment all she could do was blink at him.
“You—don’t—see—why—I—have—a—problem—with—it,” she repeated witheringly, spacing the words out. “You can just take it from me: I have a problem with it.”
“Best I can do.” Unfolding the arm from beneath his head, he reached out and turned off the lamp. They were immediately plunged into pitch darkness. “Go to sleep, cher. I’ll still be around when you wake up. You can be mad at me then.”
Glaring at him was a giant waste of time, because he couldn’t see her. For a moment she sat there in the dark seething. She was acutely aware of the weight of his arm on the other end of the handcuff, the solid warmth of his leg brushing hers, and the steady rhythm of his breathing. It grew deeper and slower even as she listened. Clearly he was not letting her anger bother him. After a few minutes of this, she reached the conclusion that there was nothing she could do to free herself, so she might as well give her body what it was crying out for, and simply lie down and go to sleep.
She hadn’t realized how mad she still was until he snored, a soft rattling noise that told her that he had fallen asleep in the face of her outrage. The sound made her fume.
It made her punch him in the arm.
Which did nothing to stop his snoring. Which told her that it didn’t wake him up. Which told her how truly exhausted he was. Which did not make her any less mad at him.
It only made her realize that under the circumstances, being mad was a huge waste of energy. As he’d said, she could be mad at him when they woke up.
“Asshole,” she threw at him.
A rattling snore was his only response.
Flopping down beside him because she was just too damned tired herself to do anything else, she was still listening to his snores when she fell asleep.
* * *
WHEN REED AWOKE, the first thing he became aware of was that there was a woman sprawled on top of him. She was wearing something soft and short, and from the sound of her breathing she was dead asleep. Lying flat on his back with his eyes still closed, he smelled the soft scent of her hair, and felt its tickle beneath his nose as he inhaled. He felt the size and weight of her: with her head tucked beneath his chin, her bare right foot hit just above his left ankle, and she was slight enough that her weight was sexy rather than bothersome. He felt her unmistakably female curves pressing against him. Silky bare legs were entangled with his. Her face was pillowed on his chest, her hand was clasped in his, and her sweet little twat was pushed right up against some major morning wood. It felt as if a thin layer of cotton—that would be his boxers, the clean, dry dark green ones he’d changed into after showering—was all that was preventing them from going ahead and getting it on right there and then.
His right hand, the one that she wasn’t holding, was curved around a tight, round ass.
As he identified that warm satiny curve, his pulse slammed into overdrive while his fingers tightened on it reflexively. She didn’t stir, but he did. Almost painfully.
He was immediately afflicted with an urgent case of gotta-have-it. The word horny suddenly felt far too mild to accurately describe the way he was feeling.
It had been a while since there had been a woman in his life on any kind of steady basis. When he saw a woman nowadays, and they wound up in the sack, it was usually at her place and he never stayed overnight, because he wasn’t into entanglements.
So who was sleeping . . . ?
He opened his eyes. He was in the shanty, which was shadowy rather than pitch dark, which told him that it was no longer night. Grayish light was entering through the two small windows set high in the front wall. The pattering from the roof meant the rain was still coming down, which would explain the quality of the light. He was guessing it was somewhere around noonish—he never slept longer than five or six hours at a stretch—but until he confirmed it by checking a phone he couldn’t be sure. He slanted a look down at the woman in his arms. Ruffled coffee brown hair met his gaze. More than that of her he could not see: her face was hidden from him, and the pair of them were twisted up in a quilt that covered her to her shoulders.
Caroline.
She was lying half naked on top of him, he was squeezing her bare ass, and his erection was so big that it gave tent pole a whole new meaning. It was right on the verge of popping free of his shorts and going where nature intended it to go.
Whatever else she was wearing, panties definitely weren’t part of the picture.
He breathed in, then wished he hadn’t as the scent of her enveloped him. She was sleeping in one of his old T-shirts. He vividly remembered how she had looked crawling into bed in it, with her slender legs bare and her round breasts, which were the approximate size and shape of baseballs but infinitely more luscious, jiggling around inside it. At the time, he’d been dead tired enough where the need for sleep had trumped all but the most passing thought of sex.
He wasn’t dead tired now. Far from it. And sex was just about the only thought in his mind.
He had handcuffed her to him. He could feel the metal bracelet around his own wrist, feel the short chain
dangling between their clasped hands. At the time it had seemed like a good idea, but now that he was experiencing the result—her nearly naked body sprawled across his nearly naked body—it was starting to seem downright dumb.
When he had fallen asleep, she’d been mad at him. He was willing to bet that when she woke up, she would still be mad at him. Especially if she was still handcuffed to him. And if he still had his hand on her ass. That would probably get her furious.
He should move his hand. He should move himself, get up and out of bed while she was still asleep, before that part of him that was as stupid as it was hard won out. He was going to do both those things. He just couldn’t bring himself to do either—quite . . . yet.
He wanted her so much that he ached with it. So much that it was all he could do not to roll her over onto her back and kiss her awake and fuck her into next week.
She wouldn’t tell him no. In fact, she would enthusiastically welcome what he had in mind. He knew that as well as he knew there were alligators in the bayou. Caroline had been his to take since she was seventeen years old.
Hadn’t done it then. Wasn’t going to do it now.
Having sex with her would be a mistake.
He knew it, and could hardly keep himself from doing it anyway.
Add one more fucked-up thing to the whole fucked-up mess that his life had become: the woman he wanted like a starving man craved food wanted him, too, and the mess he was in meant that he’d be worse than a fool to do anything about it.
The problem with having sex with Caroline was, what was between them wasn’t just about sex. He wanted sex, but even more than sex he wanted Caroline.
Last night, by the time he’d gone outside to start the generator, he’d been so consumed with the need to fuck her that he’d had to stand there in the rain for a while before he had cooled down enough to be able to think rationally.
Hunted Page 22
