Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 107096 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107096 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 535(@200wpm)___ 428(@250wpm)___ 357(@300wpm)
“I’ll chase you.”
She looked down at my groin. “In your underwear?”
“In my underwear.”
She followed me over to the fire, coolly indifferent. But even she wasn’t able to hide her relief when the wall of heat hit her. She crouched down and held her hands out, then started turning slow circles, roasting like a rotisserie chicken. But she was still shivering.
“You’ve gotta lose the clothes,” I told her. “They’re sucking all your body heat.”
She raised one perfect eyebrow. “You expect me to strip off for you?”
“I’m just telling it like it is, princess. You want to stay cold, be my guest.” Princess? Where did that come from? But she was like some sort of princess. She could be a Tsarina, with the graceful way she moved and that coldly sophisticated Russian accent.
She sat there shivering by the fire for another few minutes before she grudgingly pulled off her ankle boots and then stood and wriggled her soaking jeans over her ass. I watched, trying to keep my face impassive, as flaring hips appeared, then long, shapely legs. Right in the middle of the smooth perfection of her right thigh was a raised line four inches long. A scar from a knife. Rage boiled up in my chest alongside the lust. I wanted to kill whoever had hurt her.
As she struggled to pull the jeans over her feet, I got a flash of black, lace-edged panties and her lush, pale ass. Then she was crouching again and pulling the vest top over her head. Her breasts swayed, gorgeously full and soft. Her black bra matched her panties and that little touch of sophistication summed up everything about her: even out here in the backwoods, even soaking wet and with her hair all messy, she still had this...mystique. She was like one of those women who come knocking on the private investigator’s door in old movies, all lipstick and come-to-bed eyes. You know she’s trouble but you can’t take your eyes off of her.
She crouched opposite me with the fire between us. The flames were up past our heads and they gave her a little privacy but it was a shifting, flickering curtain. One moment she’d be hidden from me and the next, the flames would curl to the side and I’d catch a glimpse of creamy-white cleavage or the smooth softness of her stomach. I wound up staring so hard at the fire that I saw bright flames even when I closed my eyes. But it was worth it, for those little glimpses.
She turned back and forth, warming her bare shoulders and arms. After a while, she started plucking at the bra, trying to hold the cups away from her skin. I glanced down at my bare chest. I was already pretty much dry. I’d never thought about it before, but bras must suck when they’re wet. “Take it off,” I thought out loud.
She narrowed her eyes, fingering the edge of her bra uncertainly.
“Or don’t,” I told her. “Up to you.”
She thought about it for a moment. “Are you going to turn your back?”
“That didn’t work out so well last time, did it? So no.”
“Chyort,” I heard her mutter. The flames hid her for a moment. When they broke again, she was looking right at me, jaw set and cheeks a little flushed. “You first.”
“Me first what?”
She nodded towards my groin. I looked down at my jockey shorts.
“Then it’s fair,” she said with a shrug.
I blinked. Was she...shy? No. No, no way. I remembered her back at her apartment, teasing and manipulative. This was just another trick to make me trust her, make me like her.
I already like her.
But so what if she wanted me to undress first? It’d feel good to be out of my wet shorts and I wasn’t shy. I stood, slid my thumbs into the waistband of my jockey shorts—
Her eyes were locked on mine. My thumbs ran back and forth around my waist, stretching out the elastic. It was suddenly very quiet: all I could hear was my breathing. And all I could see were those cold blue eyes. Painfully cold. Burning cold. Searingly cold.
This was just a mission. Prisoner and guard. We got wet, now we had to get dry. Getting naked didn’t mean a fucking thing. Right?
Right. I shoved my shorts down over my thighs and let them fall around my feet.
13
TANYA
I tried not to react. I tried not to even look, to keep my cold gaze firmly on his eyes, but as soon as his shorts came down, my eyes dropped like a mountain climber whose rope has been cut. I skittered down onto his chest, rolled off the jutting slabs of his pecs and fell again, grabbing for grip on his washboard abs. Then dark curls of hair entered my vision. Stop! Stop! And then—