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She hoped they weren’t caught up on sleep, because there were some long hours between now and daylight, and she didn’t want to lie awake all that time in the dark with a half-naked Dare right beside her. Sleep was better, less risky.
Tilting her head, she listened to the rain. It didn’t seem to be quite as heavy as before, but it was still steady, and until it stopped and the flash floods had subsided, she and Dare would inevitably be having more of these too-intimate conversations. There was something about being enclosed in this small space, safe and dry, that freed her tongue. On the other hand, she couldn’t really regret any of the personal things she’d told him.
He couldn’t know what it meant to her that he understood what she’d done—and she would never, ever tell him.
She capped the bottle of water and set it aside, then to her surprise was overtaken by a huge, jaw-popping yawn. She covered it with her hand, then blinked at him. “Sorry. You’d think I’d have caught up on my sleep by now.”
“Takes a lot to make up for something like what you went through. I could use another few hours myself.” He capped his own bottle, then reached down to turn off the lantern. Plunged into total darkness, Angie stretched out again and snuggled under the sleeping bag. A warm, muscled arm circled her waist, tugged her back until she nestled snugly against a very hard chest. He nuzzled her hair aside, lightly kissed the back of her neck, and murmured “Sweet dreams” in a voice that already sounded a little drowsy to her.
Her eyes popped open, straining wide against the darkness. After kissing her like that, he expected her to go to sleep? She could still feel the slightly moist heat of his breath, the barely there pressure of his firm mouth, as intensely as if he’d branded her instead of kissing her.
Abruptly her breasts were aching, and she caught herself pressing her thighs together to contain and relieve the tightening she could feel deep inside. No. Oh, no. She wasn’t going there. No matter how
he kissed her she wasn’t going to let her own body sabotage her resolve.
She tried to find some anger she could use to bolster herself, but there simply wasn’t any. Instead, she had to admit that sleeping beside him was sweeter and more seductive than anything she’d ever done.
She was in deep, deep trouble.
Chapter Twenty-three
It was still raining. Angie pondered that awful fact for a moment, then pushed it away, because there was nothing she could do about it. She sat up, yawned, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and said to Dare, “If you don’t have coffee, I may have to kill you.”
He opened one vivid blue eye, surveyed her in silence for a moment, then muttered, “Hell, I believe you.”
“So?”
“So I guess I’ll get up and make you some coffee.”
“Good deal.” She’d been pretty sure he would have coffee; he had a percolator, didn’t he? But there had been the chance he’d kept the percolator up here only for his clients, and that he was some kind of unnatural creature who drank only water.
He stretched his long body, his arms banging against the partition wall and the sleeping bag sliding to the side. She had to swallow a sudden rush of moisture in her mouth; he looked both disreputable and delicious, with a beard that was about forty-eight hours past being a five o’clock shadow, and sleep-mussed dark hair. Angie deliberately looked away from the play of muscle, instead focusing on the more mundane, such as the tiresome need to take care of physical matters.
Maybe she could put some weight on her ankle today, which would make the trip outside so much easier. She eased her right foot from under the sleeping bag and surveyed it. Her toes still looked a little swollen, but not much. Very carefully she wiggled them, just to see if she could. That felt okay, so she wiggled them some more. “If my ankle was broken, would wiggling my toes hurt?”
“I don’t know. I’ve broken my arm, three ribs, a collarbone, my nose, and cracked my kneecap, but I’ve never broken an ankle.”
She turned to look at him, frowning. “Are you accident prone?”
“I prefer to think of it as adventurous. I broke my nose when I was eight, trying to jump my bicycle over a ramp.”
“It doesn’t look as if it’s been broken.” And it didn’t. The bridge was perfectly straight.
“Kids heal better than adults. The ribs were broken when a horse kicked me when I was fourteen. The cracked kneecap was a football game. The broken arm and collarbone were a training accident.”
“What happened?”
“It was a climb. The guy above me lost his grip and fell, and took me and another guy with him.”
He could have been killed. If he’d hit his head, or his spine … Angie had to turn her head before he could read the sudden horror in her expression. She felt sick at the possibility, even though it was in the past, much as she felt sick whenever she saw the scar on his throat and realized how easily that piece of shrapnel could have killed him if it had hit his carotid artery. He’d been so close to death so many times, a matter of inches, a split second of time—
She loved him. Or at least could love him. She pressed a hand to her stomach, fighting to control the same nauseating sensation she got on a Ferris wheel, which she didn’t enjoy at all. Her own history had taught her that having feelings for someone didn’t automatically turn everything into wine and roses. There was some sexual attraction going on, Dare had made that plain, but odds were sexual attraction was all that was going on.
“You okay? You look a little green,” he commented as he stuffed his feet into his boots.
“Headache,” she automatically replied, which was true enough because she hadn’t had coffee, or any other caffeine source, in two days. “I need that coffee.” She hoped he wouldn’t mention that she’d been pressing her hand to her stomach, not her head, because she didn’t want to get drawn into a personal conversation. Her instinct was to pull back, to protect herself. Maybe someone more self-confident in relationships would react differently, but she wasn’t that person, never had been. She was confident in her career, in commonsense stuff, but as far as she could see emotions had nothing to do with common sense.
“Yes, ma’am, I’m putting the water on to heat right now,” he drawled, though he was obviously still lacing his boots.
