The Thrill of It All

by Christie Ridgway

  She stumbled alongside him, her movements clumsy. “Where?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Into my car.” Then he was fumbling with the back door latch, his fingers sliding on the wet metal.

  “Oh, of course,” she replied, in an odd, teatime voice. “Thank you. Thank you so very much.”

  He glanced over, and her wooden expression warned him again she was probably just a few fingernails away from a post-trauma tantrum.

  “It’s kind of you to invite me in out of the rain.” She smiled, and it was eerily sweet with the raindrops running down her face. Then she kept yakking in that well-mannered fashion, as if the moment required the making of small talk. “Did you know that what’s inside a man’s car reveals what’s inside a man’s heart? I read that somewhere.”

  He’d seen climbers stumble into crevasses while mumbling crazy stuff in that same half-dazed tone, so he wrenched open the door and in one quick movement picked her up and shoved her inside, then crawled in after her. Kneeing over her sopping skirt, he heard her continue the tea-party talk, punctuated by the distinct chatter of her teeth.

  “Oh. Michael, inside your car is…nothing.”

  Except for the two of them, he thought, shaking his head again. He’d wanted to get loose of her, and if he could he’d put her squarely in Tahiti and himself in Timbuktu, but it appeared now as if they were stuck with each other.

  Felicity blinked, trying to acclimate herself to the new surroundings. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the desert dark, but it was gloomier inside the Iron Maiden machine. There wasn’t a whole lot to see, though. Metal floorboards, metal roof and sides, requisite windows. One seat. The driver’s seat, of molded plastic.

  At least the open floor space gave Michael plenty of room to maneuver past her toward the dashboard. She didn’t have the energy to get out of his way, not when her head felt as if it had been stuffed like a pillow and her body was starting to shake. Wet leather squeaked as she wrapped one arm over the other.

  Hugging herself tight didn’t help.

  Oh, well. She couldn’t work up a worry about it, especially when she felt more numb than cold. So her arms dropped, her hands splashing into the shallow puddles her sodden clothes had created. Idly, her gaze roamed the interior of the vehicle again. Found Michael.

  He was cursing beneath his breath and jabbing his keys at the glove box.

  Hmmm. A concern niggled at the back of her fuzzy brain, and she remembered she’d been trying to tell him something before. She’d wanted to thank him for something. Something big. Something really big. But the rain had washed it from her mind.

  Thinking back took effort, but after a moment she recalled the last thing she’d said to him. Uh-oh. Had she offended him? That was very bad of her, especially when he’d been nothing but nice in an abrupt sort of way.

  “M-M-Michael,” she called out, fighting her chattering teeth because it seemed imperative to sort this out. “I w-w-was w-w-wrong.”

  He didn’t look up from his task. “Huh?”

  “Ab-b-bout n-n-nothing inside your h-h-heart.”

  He mumbled something that sounded like, “I hope like hell you are right.” Then the glove box door sprang open. “Ah-hah!”

  He swung around to face her, smiling in triumph.

  Oh, he had such a nice smile. It was white and reckless, deepening the brackets on either side of his mouth. She smiled back, she couldn’t help herself. It was the strangest thing, she thought, but that he was happy made her happy.

  “It’s going to be okay now,” he said, moving toward her. “You’re going to be fine soon. Warm.”

  She smiled again, delighted by his interest. “F-f-fine now. Warm. P-p-perfectly warm.”

  He paused, his upbeat expression dying, then he scrambled forward again. “Dollface.” His voice was urgent. “Get your clothes off. You need to get your clothes off right now.”

  She blinked some more. “W-w-whatsamatter?”

  He didn’t explain. Instead, he started on her himself, wrenching the leather coat away and tossing it down. But then he stopped, his hands hovering over her goosefleshed bare shoulders.

  “How does this damn thing come off?” When she didn’t immediately respond, he grabbed her chin and forced her to meet his gaze. “We need to get your clothes off.”

  His new mood baffled her, but she reacted to the command in his tone and half-lifted her left arm. He went about unzipping the dress and then working it off. Since he didn’t seem to require any help, she let her mind wander.

  He was mumbling again, “cold,” “emotional shock,” “hypothermia.” Maybe she was cold, because her skin was so numb she didn’t feel his hands on her. Amazing, because when he’d touched her before…

  “M-Michael.” It was on the tip of her tongue, that big thing she needed to tell him about. “M-Michael—”

  The rest of what she’d been going to say was lost as he threw a lightweight cloth over her. Within another minute she was wrapped like a rolled taco from her head to her toes and deposited on the other—dry—side of the vehicle.

  “Better?” Michael asked. He didn’t wait for an answer, just held a flask to her lips. “Drink.”

  She didn’t have any choice but that, even though the vile stuff burned her throat and a lot of whatever it was dribbled out the corners of her mouth.

  “Take another.”

  Sputtering a refusal didn’t work, and with her arms bound beneath the blanket, she could only turn her head aside. That got her nowhere, too. He forced another swallow of the stuff down her, and another, then he rocked back on his heels.

  “W-what is th-that?” The numbness from before was wearing off. There was a burning at the pit of her stomach and she was shivering so badly that her spine was banging on the metal he’d leaned her against. “P-poison?”

  “No. It’s…” He glanced down at the flask in his hand, and then his brows drew together. “I…It’s not mine. I thought it was brandy.”

  He lifted it to his nose and a hint of a smile quirked his mouth. “It’s tequila. Lousy tequila. The favorite of a friend. We must have mixed up our flasks.”

  Then he eyed her again, leaning forward.

  She tried shaking her head. “F-f-fine!”

  But Michael fisted his hand in the back of her hair and poured another couple of sips down her. “Sorry, dollface, but you need the heat. Champagne might be what you’re used to, but this will do.”

  At swallow six, Felicity’s shivering started to ease. But she was aware of the cold now and she could see it in every puff of breath they released. It occurred to her not only had Michael not taken his turn at the flask, but that he was still wearing wet clothes. “You,” she said, working to control her chattering. “B-blanket for you, too.”

  He plopped down on the other side of the cargo area, resting his forearms on his knees. “There’s only the one.”

  “I’m wound like a m-mummy,” she got out. “There’s enough for us both.”

  He hesitated another moment, then his fingers moved to the buttons of his shirt. She leaned the back of her head against the car and closed her eyes. Rain pattered down outside, a cozy sound. Despite the chill in the air, she was starting to warm nicely, she thought. As the heat in her stomach started to meander its way through her bloodstream, her still-fuzzy mind floated behind in its wake.

  Her eyes stayed closed as some of her blanket wrapping was peeled back and Michael moved beneath it. When she felt metal against her lips, she took another obedient sip.

  A layer of cloth away, a shoulder bumped against hers.

  “Warmer?” His breath washed over her temple.

  “Warm. Getting to be lovely warm.” Her mind continued drifting along. “A little hungry, though.”

  “Unless you want to snack on packets of fast-food-joint salt or salsa, you’re out of luck. That’s the only stuff I found in the glove box besides the flask and the survival blanket.”

  “Survival blanket.” Eyes still closed, she wormed a ha
nd free to stroke the light, crinkly fabric, and words materialized in her head. “Indispensable. Versatile. Everyone should have one—more than one. Has half-a-dozen uses—as a blanket for a picnic, the stadium, on a boat. As a desert sunshade. You can even make it into a cooler for drinks.”

  “That’s only five.”

  His voice snapped her out of her hazy reverie and her eyes popped open. “What?”

  “You said half-a-dozen uses. That was only five.”

  She hadn’t been aware of talking aloud, so now she could only stare at him. Like her, he was sitting up and leaning against the side of the car, but because he was so much taller than she, the blanket that reached to her neck cut him across the torso.

  Revealing, even in the semidarkness, impressive masculine features: a wide plain of pectorals, heavily rounded shoulders, sinewy arms that rippled with muscles she’d been previously unacquainted with. Even his hands appeared more male than most, the palms broad, the fingers long and limber. Long enough to wrap—

  Reality struck. Haziness lifted. Alarm tickled her spine.

  She was stranded in the middle of the desert.

  With a strange man.

  A naked strange man.

  Her behind wiggled. And oh, yes, she was naked, too.

  Then the how and why of it came back to her, in one staggering rush.

  In her mind’s eye, she saw it all over again. She’d been dead. Oh, God, she knew she’d been dead. That’s what she’d wanted to tell him before it started raining. That’s what she’d tried to tell him when she’d pointed out that rip in the back of his shirt. That she’d already seen it, from outside of her body.

  She’d watched the man—Michael—pull her from the car. His shirt had caught on her sideview mirror and he’d torn it free. Then he’d placed her body gently onto the sand and bent over her, breathing for her, pleading with God, pleading with her, and because he’d asked her to stay, because he’d wanted so much for her to stay, she had.

  Her heart pounded against her breastbone.

  “Dollface? You all right?”

  “Fine,” she whispered.

  But much more than fine. Euphoria—she was living, breathing, thinking, feeling!—bubbled up inside and then shot through her veins. Alive alive alive alive alive!

  Heart pounding harder, she turned to tell him, thank him…

  And found herself speechless and staring at him again, once more fascinated by his smooth male skin and hard male muscles. My God. Just looking at them was making things inside of her stir, stretch, come awake, just as his voice had done for her when she’d been lying on the sand.

  Heat flashed over her as she ran her gaze over him slowly, stroking his flesh visually like she wanted to stroke him with her hand. With her tongue.

  Her tongue?

  The idea of licking a stranger should be shocking. Lewd. Disgusting.

  But her pulse was tripping all over itself at the thought, while desire slowly flexed its muscle in the depths of her belly. Her gaze bumped over one of his dark nipples and excitement washed across her skin like goosebumps.

  She heard his breath catch.

  Suddenly heat was everywhere. Pouring off of her, radiating off of him. It was a heat that matched the heat in her belly and the heat in her blood. It was the heat of life, of the living. Of being alive.

  Her gaze jumped from the thick column of his neck to that tangled hair and then to his bad-boy face. Her focus landed on his mouth, edged by dark whiskers. His nostrils flared and he sent off another blast of heat, of citrus-and-leather scent, of seductive, all-senses-alive-and-well arousal.

  Her heart was a drum and desire the primal beat.

  What was this?

  She’d wanted men before—but men she knew well. She’d wanted sex before—when the time was right and the man was, too. For her, being intimate with a man had always required a crucial mental component.

  But this was physical. Purely, edgily physical.

  More excitement prickled her skin and she shivered.

  “Michael.” She lifted the hand she’d freed from the blanket.

  He met it with the flask. “Take another drink,” he commanded in a raspy voice.

  Her gaze lifted to his. He had to know it wasn’t a chill she was feeling. But despite the scorching awareness still pulsing between them, his expression was remote. Cool.

  Embarrassment joined the hot tangle inside of her.

  Cool. He wanted to play it cool.

  And she should be thankful.

  With effort, her fingers closed on the flask. She couldn’t stomach another swig of the stuff, but she had to do something with herself—with her hands and with her mouth—or she just might forget who she was.

  And she just might try showing him exactly how thankful she could be.

  Taking a deep breath, she looked away from his nothing-remotely-like-her-type face, and said the only thing that made good sense to a woman like Felicity Charm when choosing between coming on to a perfect stranger or chugging down more bad tequila.

  “Pass the salsa, please.”

  The night was just one stupefication after another, Magee decided, as the woman started doing salsa shooters. Salsa shooters! She might be doing them in ladylike sips, but they were salsa shooters all the same.

  “When was the last time you had something to eat?” he finally ventured.

  “Don’t know.” She was using the time-honored lick-sip-suck method: first she sprinkled salt on the side of her fist and licked it off, next she swigged the tequila, then she sucked some salsa out of a plastic packet. “I’m pretty sher—sure—I didn’t eat dinner.”

  Great. Tequila on an empty stomach. “Maybe you’ve had enough.”

  She looked over at him, seeming to consider a moment. Her gaze wandered from his bare shoulders to his waist, where he’d let the blanket pool because it was getting so damn hot inside the Jeep.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Coupla more.”

  He sighed. Okay, so they were very small hits. And when he’d first pressed the stuff on her, half of it had spilled down her skin. Soft, satiny ski—

  “You want?”

  He started, then realized she was talking about the flask she was holding out to him. “No.” Alcohol made him reckless, and he couldn’t afford to lose even half a scruple.

  Especially tonight with its surprise KOs. Discovering it was Simon’s flask in his glove box instead of his own had almost wigged him out. Though it shouldn’t seem so strange, Magee thought, sliding lower. When he’d cleaned out Simon’s truck before putting it up for sale, he’d found not only his own second-best pair of belaying gloves but his treasured 1999 Topless Chicks Top Mountains calendar, too.

  “You’re smiling.”

  “Am I?” He looked over to find Lissie had shifted lower as well and was half-turned toward him.

  “Yep. Nice smile.” The hand holding the flask made a sloppy gesture toward it, sprinkling tequila over his chest. Then she smiled, and that was sloppy, too. “Uh-oh. Baptized you.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” But he edged away from her anyway, because she was definitely heading toward tipsy and she was definitely staring at his bare skin.

  Then her gaze lifted from his chest to his mouth. So, hell, he indulged himself and looked at her mouth. That puffy, pretty mouth that he knew but that he’d never kissed. Her dark hair had dried and was sticking out in wispy tufts from behind her ears and her lashes were a thick, black fringe around matching dark eyes in the paleness of her small face. With the silver-gray blanket around her, that distracting mouth of hers was her only colorful feature.

  The only thing colorful in his sight.

  It was a dark pink. A bruised pink.

  All night long he’d been half-hard, thinking about administrating first aid on it again—the consensual kind.

  As if she could read his thoughts, the hand holding the flask jerked, spilling more tequila on his chest.

  “Uh-oh,” she said again, and
her free hand reached out to wipe it away. But at the last second, she halted, leaving her palm a crucial inch from his skin.

  The atmosphere inside the car crackled with static and the temperature jacked up another twenty degrees. He sucked in a breath. Though he’d half-expected this phenomenon to reappear, it didn’t make the combustion any less powerful.

  “Uh-oh,” she said, wiggling the fingers of that damn hand. “Mi-chael.”

  “Don’t,” he rasped out. “You don’t want to do it. You don’t want to touch me.”

  She frowned at him. “Yes, I do.”

  He ground his back teeth together, cursing himself for not dealing out the facts the first time they’d almost incinerated. “Dollface, here’s the beta on what’s happening. We don’t really want to bump bones. It’s survival rush.”

  Her frown deepened. “Beta? Bump bones? Survival rush?”

  Taking advantage of her confusion, he inched farther from her hand. “Beta—that means information. Bump bones—that’s a boink, a bang, a score, a screw. Survival rush is just what it sounds like.”

  He’d witnessed it during climbs, even between a man and woman who held an active dislike for each other. Have them survive the same epic snowstorm or hairy roped fall and the next thing you knew, they’d be shedding their packs and their gear and going at it like rabbits. “That urge you’re feeling’s a reaction to stress. It’ll go away.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed. “I kinda like it.”

  Damn, he knew he should have taken the tequila from her. Without its influence, this uptight little cookie would never have made such an admission. But now the shooters had loosened her up, forcing him to play old maid aunt. “Too bad,” he said firmly. “We’re not going to act on it.”

  Her mouth pouted, just crying for a kiss. “Why not?” She put both hands around the flask and brought it up for another sip.

  “Be—” Her movement lifted the top slope of her pale breasts out of the blanket and he had to wrench his gaze away from them. “Because, damn it, there are rules.”

  Like she was three-quarters drunk and he was almost—