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And yet she didn’t pull away. She shifted closer to him, marveling in the hard planes of his body.
She’d always been skinny and angular and had never once considered herself soft or particularly feminine, but against him she did. She felt soft. Womanly. Desirable.
A deep, throbbing ache bloomed between her thighs and she squeezed them together as the alarm that had been clanging faintly in the back of her mind grew louder. Or maybe that was her heart thundering in her ears.
What was she doing? He was obviously hypothermic, the cold affecting his thinking. She shouldn’t be kissing him like she wanted to see him naked. She should be warming him up and doing everything in her power to get them to the next nearest town so he could have proper medical care. At this point, he needed more than a warm drink and a fire. His body temperature wouldn’t regulate as long as they were out in the cold.
And still, she couldn’t make herself pull away from the kiss. It had been so long since a man had shown interest in her. And the last one had been an epic disaster. This would be, too. She knew that. How could it not end badly?
But for the moment, she wanted this. She wanted to feel sexy. Desired. Normal.
Ellis broke the kiss first, a shiver rattling through him hard enough that they nearly knocked heads. Which just went to show he wasn’t feeling up to more than a kiss.
Dammit. She knew better. Shame burned up her neck and she turned her back to him. “Go to sleep. Tomorrow’s not going to be any warmer.”
13
The plane was abandoned.
Abbot Krane could tell even before he brought his snowmobile to a halt on a ridge above the frozen lake. The GPS he’d slapped on Brielle Ives’s plane when he sabotaged the fuel line had led him right to his target, but his target was nowhere to be seen.
Fuck.
It took longer than he would’ve liked to find a path down to the lake from the ridge. Alaska was a bitch of a state, a beast all its own. Rocks and trees. Mountains that scraped the sky. Barren tundra. Ice. He both hated and respected it.
He finally made it to the lake and scowled at the empty plane. He hadn’t expected Brielle Ives to die in a fiery crash—though it would have made his life easier if she had. But she was a bush pilot, and any halfway decent bush pilot would know how to land a dead plane. And so it looked as if she had.
He scanned the lake, mentally calculating distance. It was just barely long enough for a runway, and the trees and mountain ridge at one end made for a particularly difficult landing. High pucker situation, but Brielle Ives had nailed it. The women deserved respect for that. Not many men could’ve pulled that off.
Too bad she had to die.
While Krane hadn’t expected her to die in a crash, he had expected her to be stranded out here. Alone. Vulnerable. Praying for help to arrive…
And then he’d show up.
It was so easy to make a person disappear out here. If she had stayed put like she was supposed to, it would’ve been so easy.
But Brielle had more surprises in store for him.
It had been a long time since his prey surprised him. Even Will Hunter hadn’t put up much of a fight. He’d only gotten away due to outside interference. Brielle Ives was turning into a challenge. A delicious game of cat and mouse that had the thrill of the chase pumping through his blood.
Krane backed away from the lake’s edge and scanned the snow. It had been too cold for any fresh snowfall and all of her prints had frozen. She had a dog sled team with her. No wonder she didn’t stay put. She didn’t have to.
And she wasn’t alone. Two sets of boot prints, one smaller and one larger. She had a man with her and that was a wildcard.
Will Hunter?
That would make this game more interesting.
The mess of tracks—dogs, humans, sled—finally narrowed into one solid track that pointed northwest.
Solitaire.
Made sense. It was the closest point of civilization. If you could call a town of four-hundred people civilization.
Krane glanced back at his snowmobile and winced. He had plenty of arctic survival training. He knew how to hunt, make shelter, start a fire. He could live out here if he needed to and he had enough fuel with him to get all the way to Solitaire. He could easily follow them, but why put himself through that? He’d head back to Anchorage, get himself a plane, and fly out. He’d still probably beat them there.
It was a good thing he’d spent the last few months cultivating a persona there. His sudden appearance wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. He climbed onto his snowmobile and glanced back at the trail Brielle and her dogs had left. The urge to follow, to hunt, was strong. The uncivilized killer inside him attempting to claw free. He could unleash that part of him out here, and suddenly saw the appeal of this arctic wasteland.
