Jill Shalvis - Instant Attraction

Yeah. Um. Much slower to retrieve his hands than she’d been, he took a deep, steadying breath because she wasn’t the only one reeling. “That might have been me who got carried away. Do I need to apologize?”

“No.” She lifted her shaking fingers to her mouth. “No. Was that…” Her face went a little pink. “I’m sorry. I need to know.”

He automatically tensed, but she just blushed a little more. “I was wondering, was that wow for you, because that was pretty wow for me, and I just-” Her hand fluttered in the air. “It’s been so long-I don’t know. Was it? For you?”

Her eyes were so clear, so deep he could see all the way into her heart, which was far, far, far too pure for him.

“Oh.” Her smile faded. “Gotcha.” She hopped off of him and quickly turned away. “Okay, well, thanks again for the ride-”

He caught her hand just in time. Tugging her back around to face him, he waited until she looked into his eyes.

Christ, she slayed him. Slayed him dead. “Katie.” His voice was a little thick, his heart hammering, and he was still a whole lot hard. “It was pretty damn wow.”

She hesitated, clearly not sure whether to believe him.

“A mind-staggering wow,” he clarified.

At that, her smile warmed again and absolutely stopped his poor, confused heart.

“I thought so.” And with that, she squeezed his hand and walked away, not asking him for anything more.

Or expecting it.

After surviving the bridge collapse, Katie had divided her life into two compartments: pre-accident and post-accident.

But now she had new criteria in which to separate things: pre-snowmobile ride and post-snowmobile ride, which had been the time of her life. The sense of wild freedom, the speed, the wind in her face…

The utter lack of fear.

There’d been an initial terror, of course. Would they crash, hit a tree…die. But she’d learned something about herself during that blissful hour while holding on to Cam. It wasn’t death she feared at all.

It was pain.

But there’d been no pain. Nothing except a real joy and laughter.

And…and more.

Because it wasn’t just the ride she was thinking about but what had happened after, the feel of Cam’s warm, calloused hands gliding over her body, slipping beneath her jacket, caressing the small of her back, her breast…

And how even when they’d pulled back, he’d left his hands on her, almost as if he couldn’t stop touching her. She’d looked into his eyes and had known. She was going to get a whole bunch of adventure here at Wilder, and hopefully a lot more.

She just hoped that that didn’t involve pain either.

“You okay?” Stone asked when he walked by her desk, stopping to look at her oddly, making her realize he’d had to ask her twice. She managed to nod her head. “Fine.” Just daydreaming about your brother having his tongue down my throat.

“You okay?” Annie asked her an hour later.

“Fine.” Still daydreaming…

But Annie didn’t buy it as easily as Stone had, and stopped to give her the once-over. “You look flushed.”

Yep, that’s what happened when one got caught thinking about having her boss’s hands up her shirt. “I’m good,” she said weakly.

“Well, at least you’re finally looking warm.”

“Yeah.” When Annie had moved on, Katie let out a breath. “Try hot. I’m hot. Hot for him. Dammit.”

“Hot for whom?”

Katie jumped, then turned to face Nick, who’d come up the stairs. “No one. And if you could not ask me how I’m doing, that would be great.”

“Right.” His mouth quirked. “Because you’re hot.”

“I-” Ah, hell. “Well, I-”

He lifted a hand and shook his head. He didn’t need to know.

Which was good. Great. Excellent. She really didn’t want to explain how it was that she was overheating over a kiss.

At the end of the day, she closed up and made her way downstairs. Generally, Annie had food in the kitchen. People came and went as they pleased, though several times a week they all managed to eat together. Tonight not being one of those nights, she grabbed a bowl of stew on her own. Afterward, she stood in the foyer pulling on all her layers to make the trek to her cabin-hat, gloves, jacket, boots. Just as she finished the whole production, Cam stepped inside, filling up the small area with his size and nearness that kept her warm in spite of the slap of frigid air he brought with him. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself.” He started to move past her, appeared to war with himself, then turned back.

She liked that he clearly had no idea what the hell to do about her, and rewarded that fact in a smile she couldn’t have hidden anyway.

He shook his head but smiled back. He wore loose jeans, a hoodie sweatshirt with Wilder Adventures’s logo on a pec, and a thick black scarf. He looked his usual scruffy, solidly muscled mountain-man self, and gorgeous with it, of course. Not to mention his scent. Good Lord, that scent should be bottled and sold under the name IMPENDING ORGASM. Just thinking it, she shivered.

He came close again, pulling off his scarf. Lifting it over her head, he settled it around her neck, still holding on to the ends. “Better?”

“I don’t mind the cold,” she murmured, turning her head so the scarf stroked her cheek. It held his body heat and smelled like him. Which was to say delicious.

Still holding her gaze, he slowly pulled on the ends of the scarf, tugging her closer.

Her pulse kicked into gear, her head fell back a little. Another mind-blowing kiss, please…

Looking down at her, he went very still. Only a heartbeat ago, he’d looked so big and bad and wickedly sexy, so sure of himself. And he was still big and bad and sexy, only suddenly he no longer seemed quite so sure. “You shouldn’t look at me like that,” he said softly.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re good with being this close to me, like maybe you want to be even closer.”

“You think you can read my mind?”

“You weren’t thinking that?”

“Well, yes. But I wasn’t going to say it out loud.”

“Good. Don’t. Not to me.”

“So you don’t want me to think about you.”

“No.” Slowly, with great care, he tucked the ends of the scarf inside her jacket, his fingers lingering on her throat, skimming over skin, causing all sorts of reactions within her. “Yes,” he corrected, then shook his head. “Katie…”

Her eyes drifted shut. He had that effect on her, creating an odd state of bliss. And God, the way he said her name. She really hoped his sentence was going to end with “can I strip you naked and taste every square inch of you?”

“I’m not someone you want to get close to,” he said instead.

Damn. That wasn’t anywhere close. She opened her eyes. “How do you know what I want?”

“I’m going off the way you kissed me.”

“Hey, there were two tongues in that kiss.”

“I know. And I started it.”

Well, that wasn’t technically true… But she didn’t plan on mentioning that. “Good night, Cam.”

Leaning past her, he opened the lodge door and gestured her out ahead of him. “You just got here,” she said.

“I’m walking you to your cabin.”

“You don’t have to-”

“I’m walking you.” When she didn’t move, he took her hand in his.

The moon wasn’t out yet, so it was a dark night, but she didn’t notice any of that, just the man holding her gloved hand along the path. They didn’t speak, which was fine with her. It wasn’t talking she ached for.

Halfway there, the bushes rustled. Cam didn’t even flinch, so she sucked it up and pretended not to notice.

At the front door of her cabin, she turned to face him. In his eyes was the same fierce hunger she was fighting inside of her own body, which was both cheering and sobering because he could fight this much better than she could. “Cam-”

“I mean it,” he said quietly. “You don’t want me. Trust me, this thing can’t go anywhere. I don’t have anything to give. Nothing. Do you understand?”

“I do.” She looked pointedly at his hand, still holding hers. “But I’m not the someone touching the someone they don’t want to get close to.”

He immediately let go of her. “It’s a good thing one of us is strong then, isn’t it?”

“Me?” She laughed. “You think I’m so strong? I’m trying, believe me, but at this point, it’s still just an illusion.”

“You’re here, doing something new. Out of your element and handling it. You are strong. You’re one of the strongest women I know.”

They were standing close, toe-to-toe. She wanted to be closer, she wanted to be touching, like they’d been on the snowmobile, and she let her gaze soak up his face, his mouth…

With a low moan, he leaned in and opened his mouth over hers, making her sigh in sheer, unadulterated pleasure.

A rough sound rumbled up from his chest, and he stepped into the kiss, slipping his hand around the back of her neck, gliding his tongue deeper, pulling her in tighter, hard to his body.

At her tremble, he broke off the kiss, though he took his time to do so, leaving his mouth touching hers for a few breaths before pulling all the way back.

“Cam-”

Breathing no steadier than she, he stroked a finger over her temple, then rimmed her ear. “Go inside, Katie.”

She looked into his eyes. Yeah, he wanted her. It was there in the dark, swirling depths of his gaze, in the tension in his body, in the erection she could feel pressing into her belly.

He wanted her badly, which did her no good if he didn’t want to want her. So she did as he asked and went inside. Shutting the cabin door, she leaned back against it, heart still racing. He’d been right about one thing.

She was stronger than she’d thought. But so was he.

Several days later, on a “good road” day, Katie took a drive into Wishful to make a deposit for the business account. Stone had asked Cam to do it, but he’d come up with some excuse, making her realize that in the two weeks she’d been here, she’d never seen him go into town.

Because it’d snowed the night before, she drove one of Wilder Adventures trucks and held her breath the whole time. The roads had been declared clear, but that didn’t mean anything to her. They were still white with snow, slippery as hell, and gave her more than one bad moment. She just kept telling herself that the cab was large and roomy, and there were no bridges.

But pulling into town always made her smile. Wishful was an authentic Old West mining town, filled with nineteenth-century false-front buildings. Back in the day, that being the 1800s, Wishful had been infamous for its wild saloons and lawless residents. Tamer now, it was still alive thanks to its close proximity to Lake Tahoe.

As she headed down the main street to the bank, she kept her eyes peeled for a source of caffeine. No Starbucks in sight. She got in and out of the bank in three minutes, then a sign caught her eye: WISHFUL DELIGHTS. From within the bakery came a mouthwatering scent that had her stomach quivering hopefully. She practically dove inside, delighted to find the place decorated like an old-time French café, complete with black wrought-iron tables and chairs, and pale-pink-and-white stripes on the walls, which held prints of the French countryside.

Behind the counter stood a tall brunette who was so beautiful she looked like she might be an actress playing the part of baker instead of the real thing. Perfectly put together in black pants, a white blouse, and a black-and-white checkered apron, she smiled pleasantly at Katie. “Hello.”

“It smells like heaven in here.” Her nose was twitching. “I’ll take one of everything you’ve got in low fat.”

The woman laughed softly. “Sorry. No low fat in the house.”

Katie sighed. “Yeah, I was afraid of that.”

“You’re new. Small town,” she explained at Katie’s look of surprise. “Everyone knows everyone here, and I don’t know you.” She held out a tray with an assortment of the most spectacular-looking cookies Katie had ever seen. “Sample?”

“Oh, most definitely yes.” Katie took a bite of something warm and soft and chocolaty, and it melted in her mouth. “My God. Some of those. Lots of those.”

The woman nodded and began to fill a pretty black-and-white paper bag with the cookies, her gaze coming back to Katie, and the red bank bag she held that had WILDER AD-VENTURES blazed across the front. “You’re the temp at the lodge?”

“Yes. You know the Wilders?”

The woman wrapped a ribbon around the top of the bag to close it. “Everyone does.”

“I guess they do,” Katie said, still eyeing the samples, wondering if it would be rude to take another. “Cam told me the Wilders are somewhat of a legend around here.”