by Selena Scott
He stopped walking, a dapple of sunlight over his face. “Where you’re from, is it all mountains and forests?”
Milla thought of Manhattan. “Definitely not.”
“Okay, then think of that. Imagine the scents there.”
Pretzel stand, hot mustard, summer sun on heated concrete, newspapers, perfume, the stale air up from the subway grates, body odor, people, people, people. The scent of Manhattan raced through her mind’s eye, almost as brightly fresh as if she’d been standing there.
“And then imagine smelling this in the middle of it.” He stepped forward and laced his fingers through her hair at the back of her head. He drew her head forward and Milla, so shocked at the unexpectedness of his touch, let him. He pulled her nose straight into the crook of his neck.
She took a deep, almost involuntary inhale of his scent. And she finally got it. He was untraceable in the forest, because he smelled exactly like the forest. Young saplings battling for spring sun. Old, wheezy trees. The roly poly bugs on the bottom side of a log. A bird’s nest in the crook of a maple. Pine needles layered a foot deep. Wind in the night. He smelled of all of it.
Milla took one more deep draw of his scent before she stepped back from him. She was in the confusing position of feeling both drawn to him and deeply suspicious. Had he meant to turn her on? Did he know that he’d just made her want to lick at the vein in his throat? Did he know that he was heating that place between her legs?
She stepped back another step. “I see,” was the best she could do.
He shrugged and turned back in the direction they were walking and a minute later, tossed his bag down under the shade of a tree.
Instantly, he yanked off his grubby jacket, revealing a holed and deeply worn, formerly black shirt underneath. A second later that shirt was off and his hands were at the belt of his pants.
He looked up at her, a look of confusion on his face. “Are you not bathing?”
Milla blinked at his words. She couldn’t quite make them make sense as she stared at his chest. She’d been right about him being wiry. But she’d been wrong about his muscles. He certainly had them. All long length and understated strength. She could tell, just from the way the sun shadowed his back, that these were muscles gained from the nature of his life. These were not gym rat, spray-tanned muscles. No protein shakes or Instagram likes for this guy. Nope. This was just full-on efficiency of form, a brutal arrangement of the body’s most useful attributes. There was a patchwork of raised scars across his skin and even a few scrapes still in the process of healing.
John Alec the Warrior.
The way he’d introduced himself filtered back to her. Suddenly it didn’t seem quite so ridiculous.
“Are you really a warrior, John?”
It was his turn to freeze then. If only for a second.
“Alec,” he corrected automatically, although the second he did, he sort of wished he hadn’t. “Yes. I am. Are you not bathing?”
“Oh.” She nodded her head once and dropped her own bag next to his. He was apparently always doing this to her. Drawing her in and making her even more suspicious all at once. She quickly divested herself of her own clothes, not looking up at him again, her thoughts whirring the way they sometimes did. Privately, she thought of this state of mind as a thought tornado. When everything went so painfully fast, she’d be lucky to grab on to a single component of it.
Milla folded her clothes, laid them on her bag and took a deep breath. One thing at a time. Right now, bathing. Later, figuring out John Alec the Warrior.
She turned and saw that he was already standing hip deep in the river, but he was facing toward her and making absolutely no secret of the way he watched her.
Milla, naturally confident, had never had a problem being naked in front of someone. But she almost stumbled under the intensity of his gaze.
She was uncommonly beautiful. He could admit that to himself. Even if she was an odd, prickly woman who was more soldier than feminine. But that was on the inside. On the outside, she had the blood pooling between his legs at an alarming rate. Even standing in the freezing cold river. She just… looked like she tasted good. That was as good a way to describe her as he could come up with.
He was a warrior, not a poet.
Feeling a whippy, strangling heat start to rise up in him, Alec stayed perfectly still as he watched her enter the water, inch by torturous inch. If he’d been a younger man, he might have dunked his head to cool off, or swum away from her to avoid temptation. But as it was, he’d seen many seasons pass by, and many women. Alec held still and observed her.
When she was hip deep she dunked herself. That befuddlingly short cap of white blonde hair she had came up dark gold. The same color as her fur when she was in bear form. She slicked the water off her hair in a rough, efficient way and then immediately dunked herself again. When she came up again, it was with a satisfied noise on her lips.
“God, that feels good,” she moaned into the sunlight, the water like drops of crystals sliding down her perfect body. Alec thought she looked like a queen, bathing in a river of jewels.
When she went under again, this time he joined her and he had to admit, the water felt incredible. He held his breath for as long as he could, attempting to swim against the current and laughing when he came back up and saw that he’d lost ground instead of gained it. This river always won.
“Here,” Milla called; she held a small bottle in her hands that he hadn’t noticed before. He’d probably been too busy ogling her. She upended the bottle into her hand and then tossed it over to him.
He snatched it from the air and frowned at it. “Smells like soap.”
“It is soap. Liquid form.” She scrubbed some over her neck and face, down each arm. “Trust me. You’ll love it.”
He did, actually, love it. Though he didn’t admit that to Milla. Liquid soap was kind of his new favorite thing and he watched in amazement as it turned his skin a lighter color. Wow. Had that all been dirt? Huh.
“You can wash your clothes with it, too,” Milla called from the shore as she stepped into a pair of small, stretchy undergarments. The thing she wore between her legs was ridiculously small and black. It barely contained her voluptuous ass. And the thing she wore over her chest, also black, seemed to smash her breasts down, hold them in tight in a way that Alec did not approve of. It looked like a torture device and constricted what he considered to be one of her most appealing assets.
He got out of the water, sliding on a pair of tight undergarments that he wore for moments like this. They covered him from hip to knee. He watched as she dunked her clothes in the river and then went to washing them with the soap.
He liked to watch her do things. He’d noticed that right from the start. She looked good when she was hopping a fallen log or swallowing down a handful of berries. She looked good when she lithely climbed up a tree to get her bearings on where they were. She looked good when she propped one hand behind her head to blink lazily at the stars at the end of the night. And she looked good with her feet in the river, rinsing out her clothes.
He did the same, putting out his clothes next to hers in a patch of sunlight.
They sat to let them dry and both of them lay back, happy to be relaxing for a few hours. When the afternoon light became overwhelming, they moved under a tree. He reclined in a patch of shade and reached over to pull her knife from the belt that she’d just put on at her hip.
She stiffened and lunged for it. Alec held it easily away from her, holding her back with one hand as he inspected the edge.
“This is dull, Ladybear,” he chastised her before passing it back.
She snatched the knife back and eyed him warily as he dug through his bag and tossed her a sharpening stone. She eyed the sharpening stone with as much skepticism as she eyed him. But, testing the blade on the edge of her finger, she conceded his point. Internally at least.
She turned to face him while she sharpened her tool. She wanted to keep one eye
on him, he knew. But she didn’t distrust him enough to move farther away. He liked that. She sat cross-legged next to him. Close enough that he could reach out and touch her if he wished. So he did.
“This is confusing to me.” He took a finger and drew a line straight through her hair, right along the scalp, leaving a hot trail in every place it had been. He noticed that she didn’t jump at his touch.
“What is?” She raised a skeptical eyebrow, hoping the ice in her voice would be more palpable than the skip in her heart.
“Your hair. It’s like a man’s.” His eyes skated down her body. “But the rest of you is so… well fed.”
Milla scraped her blade across the sharpening stone with a vicious swipe. She turned to face him, the blade startlingly close to his midsection. “What the fuck did you just say to me?”
Alec easily twisted the blade out of her hand and flipped it so that the sharp side faced in a more innocuous direction before passing it back to her. He knew he’d stumbled onto something sensitive, but he had absolutely no clue what the hell that expression on her face meant.
He tilted his head to one side, swiped at the sweat gathering again on his forehead and eyed the river, thinking maybe he’d go in one more time before they went back to camp. “I mean that your hips and breasts have so much flesh. It’s very pleasing to a man’s eye. But then you have the hair of a boy.”
He surveyed her again as she sat, staring at him like she wanted to suffocate him. But he didn’t care. Let her try. He had more to say. “And your face.”
“What’s wrong with my face?” she spat. And he could recognize a challenge when he heard one.
“Not one thing,” he said honestly, reaching out and grabbing her by the chin, tilting her one way and then the next. “It’s the most perfect face I’ve ever seen. Like a goddess.” He paused for another second. “It’s distracting.”
The way he’d said the last part had not felt like a compliment. Actually, none of it had felt like a compliment. With just a few words she felt as if he’d turned her from a useful, efficient, self-sufficient person to an annoying Barbie… with a boy’s haircut. Her snap of temper brought color to her tone and to her cheeks.
“You wanna talk about faces?” She rose and started shoving the rest of her things in her bag.
“You’re angry.”
“No, I just want my turn to talk about your face.” Her still-drying clothes, a few snacks, all of it smashed into her bag. “Your face is completely unmemorable. It’s a plain face. Absolutely boring. And when you’re resting? You look dumber than a– damn it!”
Milla cursed again and cradled her hand against her chest. She hadn’t been nearly careful enough with the knife she’d just finished sharpening. She’d tried to sheathe it at her waist and instantly paid for her haste. Her palm and three fingers had been sliced at least a quarter of an inch deep.
“Come here.” Alec’s voice suddenly had a steel and bite that she’d never heard in it before.
Milla stayed where she was, cradling her hurt hand. “It’s totally fine.”
“No,” he demanded, reaching out and looping his fingers into the waist band of her underwear. He tugged her down on his lap and gently grabbed her hand to inspect it. “It’s not fine. You’ve damn near sliced off your…”
His words stopped as his breath huffed out in a long breath. Milla felt a smug satisfaction as his eyes widened and he fell silent. He watched her wounded hand knit itself back together before his very eyes. Without speaking and not taking his eyes from her hand, he reached beside him to her water bottle that had sat between them. He washed her hand clean and then traced the perfectly unmarked skin that had just healed.
“Beautiful,” he whispered, his eyes shooting up to hers. “That was the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen.”
One of his hands tightened around her waist and suddenly Milla became very aware of the way they were sitting. She was draped across his lap in a pool of sunlight, both of them half-dressed and breathing hard.
Suddenly his brow furrowed. “You think I look dumb?”
Milla let out an unexpected laugh. “Maybe.”
She slid away from his lap and as she did, came in contact with a very hard, very large, very compelling argument to stay on his lap. She didn’t. She merely crouched down over her bag and finished packing it.
“I’ve never had complaints about my face before.” There was a teasing note to his voice that she hadn’t heard from him before now. “Actually, women seem downright drawn to it.”
“Is that so?” Milla asked, turning back to him in time to see him dragging his mostly dry pants back up his legs. “You’ve got a thing for women with bad eyesight, then?”
He laughed then. A deep, dry chuckle. He eyed the location of the sun in the sky and Milla followed his train of thought. “Think we’ve given them enough time?”
He squinted at her. “For their coupling? Your brother seems like a virile man, but even so, four hours is exorbitant.”
Milla laughed again, shaking her head at this man who was surprisingly nice to be around. “Sounds like you’ve been messing around with the wrong nearsighted women.”
It was his turn to laugh again and it surprised him as much the second time as it had the first. His sister, Valentina, was one of the only people on earth who could make him laugh.
He slid on his holed T-shirt and watched Milla finish getting ready to head back to camp. Something about her tugged at him and he wouldn’t soon forget the feel of her ass grinding against him. So much of his life was solitary. And devoid of anything soft or feminine or fine. He had four more days with this group. He’d promised that to them, and he’d keep his promise. He didn’t see why those four days couldn’t fill a well he hadn’t realized had gone dry until he’d watched Milla step her immaculate body into the river.
Knowing the path that they’d arrived on, Milla stepped lightly around him and started her way back up the mountain. She hadn’t gone more than five steps before Alec flipped his rucksack onto his back and jogged to come level with her. He slid his fingers into the waistband of her pants and dragged her around to face him.
“Hey!” she griped in surprise, scowling and pushing back from him as she gained her footing. He didn’t lose his grip on her pants. The backs of his fingers were currently pressed into the silky skin at her hip and he was rather enjoying himself. “What the fuck, Alec!”
He scowled right back, for just a second. For some reason, her calling him Alec put him in a bad mood. Which was ridiculous, considering it was the name he asked people to call him. No one had called him John besides his father. But she’d called him John just a few hours ago and it had warmed something in his gut. The name Alec just sounded wrong in that pretty mouth of hers.
“You called me plain, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
She narrowed her eyes for a second, not understanding. “Excuse me?”
Alec tried again. “Earlier, when you were mad at me. You said I was plain and dumb-looking. But many women are attracted to men they find plain and dumb-looking.”
A hint of color came into those high, proud cheeks of hers and Alec found himself very intrigued. So she wasn’t impervious.
She raised an imperial, aloof eyebrow and fooled no one. “Your point being?”
“I have no point. I have a question.” She waited and he couldn’t resist the urge to pull her just a touch closer. “Are you attracted to me?”
A different woman might have been demure, coy, played at confusion. Not Milla Keto. She wasn’t a liar. She wasn’t scared of men. And she wasn’t ashamed of her desires. She shrugged, her chin high and those green eyes sly and bright. “Yes.”
She expected a smug smile from John Alec the Warrior. Something to suggest that he’d somehow won the competition between them. And she knew just how she’d cut him down when that came. With cool reserve and firm refusal of anything he offered. But smugness didn’t come.
It was a smile that came over his face
. It spoke of confidence and of a very good mood. The way it changed his features completely disarmed her. There were smile lines at his eyes and the corners of his mouth. He didn’t suddenly transform into a movie star or anything. But the smile brightened him, heightened his appeal, and Milla felt a corresponding dip in her stomach.
“Good,” he replied, and tugged her closer yet again. “Because I like the way you look. Like you’d taste good.”
Milla’s mouth dropped open and he lifted his hand to close her jaw, that same smile still on his face.
“And you certainly smell good.” He leaned in and pressed his nose behind her ear. “Although your soap obscures it a little now. But I can still smell you under there.”
Milla didn’t shiver. She refused to shiver.
“I still don’t understand your hair,” he squinted down at the top of her head. “But the rest of you, I want. A lot.”
Milla cleared her throat, searching for footing of any kind in this conversation. There he was, drawing her in and making her suspicious all at once again. “And you always get what you want, huh?”
He scoffed. “Milla, I never get what I want. I live a mostly solitary life filled with battle and cold nights and days or weeks of hunger. My beliefs, my honor, my drive for justice, those are the only things that warm me.” His smile fell away and he dropped his hands from her completely. They stood just a few zinging inches away from one another, the afternoon sun bright and hot on their heads. “But you could warm me. For a few days.”
Again, she was completely disarmed by his honesty. The men she played with in Manhattan were easily predictable. Either they were pretending to be confident and the first swipe she took at them made them shaky or angry, or they were actually confident and automatically assumed that she’d bend to their masculine will.
It was a game to them and honestly, it was usually a game to her. She didn’t care, as long as she went away satisfied in the end.
But right now, looking up into John Alec the Warrior’s face, Milla got the creeping feeling that this wasn’t a game. No. She got the feeling that there was only room for truth between them.
