body temperature up to a safe level.”
“I said I was cold, not freezing to death.”
“One leads to the other,” he murmured disconcertingly close to her ear. His breath was warm on her earlobe and a shiver passed through her entire body. And it was emphatically not a shiver of cold.
His arm fell across her stomach and curled up her side, his hand tucked under her armpit mere inches from her breast. She about leaped out of bed in her shock. If not for the easy strength of his arm pinning her down, she might actually have bolted. But as it was, she merely lurched hard enough against his forearm to register that she wasn’t going anywhere if he didn’t want her to.
His leg slid across hers, his thigh resting intimately across both of hers. Under the wet suit the Navy had given her to wear yesterday, they’d also given her a skimpy pair of stretchy running trunks and an equally skimpy tank top. Those were all she was wearing now. And apparently, he was wearing pretty much the same thing.
She registered the general muscularity and hairiness of his leg against her smoothly waxed legs, and something shifted in her gut, a sharp awareness of Cole Perriman not as her mission commander and temporary boss, but as a Man. Capital M. With a side of hubba-hubba thrown in.
Other details registered. The hardness of his stomach against her right arm, trapped at her side. The width of his shoulders towering over her as he lay on his side facing her. The sheer mass of the man. He was all muscle. There was nothing soft about him. No flab to ease the hard contours of his muscles, not even a thin layer of fat beneath his skin to cushion the bulging veins and corded sinews in his arms or legs.
And good grief, he was as hot as a furnace. She was going to break out in a full-blown sweat if he stayed like this for much longer.
He muttered, “How does your hair smell good? You just spent all night swimming around in the ocean and wading through a swamp. You should smell like seawater.”
Bemused, she replied, “I got hot during our minimarathon to run here. I pushed back my hood and the rain rinsed out my hair. And, while you guys were getting the well’s pump running, I used the first water that came out of the pipes to take a quick sponge bath. Salt’s bad for your skin. You shouldn’t leave it sitting on your flesh for any longer than necessary.”
“Thanks for the beauty tip.”
“I’m serious. It can cause rashes and even burns.”
“I know. It’s not an uncommon form of torture to rub salt into a person’s skin.”
Eew. She might be a collector of seemingly useless trivia as part of her work as an intelligence analyst, but torture was not one of her fields of expertise.
“Warming up?” Cole murmured against her temple.
“Umm, yes. I’m toasty warm now.” He didn’t move, so she added, “Thanks for sharing some of your heat with me.”
It was a blatant invitation to leave her bed, but he didn’t accept it. Instead he remained spooned around her.
His hand, the one thrown across her body, slid up her arm toward her shoulder, dragging the quilt higher to tuck it in around her neck. At least his hand hadn’t headed toward her chest...which was throbbing disconcertingly at the moment.
She would love to pull her right arm out from between them, but she was vividly aware of how close her hand was resting to parts of his anatomy that could easily be encouraged to throb, also.
Cole didn’t move, and goodness knew, she wasn’t about to move. But they might as well have been crawling all over each other the way the electricity built between them. She was excruciatingly aware of every inch of his body against hers, and it didn’t help that she could picture his body encased in that insanely sexy sea-land suit of his.
She’d tried really hard yesterday to keep her mind solidly on business, but there’d been no missing the fact that he’d looked like a statue of a Greek god wearing a wet suit.
A particularly violent gust of wind slammed into the wall beside her, and even the light fixture overhead rattled. Terrified, she rolled against Cole and buried her face against his chest.
His arms swept around her, drawing her closer, creating a living bulwark of protection around her. “I’ve got you. Hang on to me,” he muttered.
The shaking around them diminished, but her insides still quaked like mad. “You must think I’m the biggest scaredy cat you’ve ever met.”
She felt the smile against her scalp. “I’ve met worse.”
“How much longer is this storm going to last?” she asked.
“The rest of the night, I should think.”
She groaned into his pectoral, which flexed in an impressive display of bulging muscle.
“Hungry?” he asked her.
“No. You?”
“I ate a little while ago.”
They lay together in silence for a moment, listening to the storm. Then he said quietly, “Try to get some sleep.”
She almost confessed that she didn’t want to go back to sleep because she was afraid of a repeat of her dream from before, but she bit it back.
“Do you need me to stay with you?”
“I’m a CIA analyst on a mission with a Navy SEAL team. I can survive my nightmares.”
He chuckled. “You don’t have to prove how tough you are to me.”
Another gust struck the cabin and she stared worriedly at the rafters overhead. “Is the roof going to stay on?”
“I think it is. This place may look like a dump, but it’s solid.”
“We’re going to have to find out who owns it and send a thank-you note.”
Cole grunted as if thank-you notes weren’t part of his job description. He shifted his weight, turning fully onto his back, and Nissa found herself rolling toward him as the mattress sagged beneath his greater weight. She braced herself to stop the roll and froze in dismay as she realized she’d planted her hand on his stomach. Ridges of carved marble formed beneath her palm before she managed to jerk it away from him. Good grief. Touching him was like sticking her hand into a volcano.
Sharp awareness of how much bigger than she he was, in every dimension, made lust shoot through her nether regions, hot and liquid, and nearly as disorienting as her dream.
Had they actually kissed, or had that been part of her dream, too? Nissa could swear she still felt him on her mouth, still tasted him on her tongue. And her face around her mouth definitely felt razor burned. Or maybe that was just chapped skin from the wind and salt water. Confused, she stared at the silhouette of his lips barely visible beside her.
He clicked his flashlight on and shined it up at the underside of the roof, exposed beyond the rafters. Methodically, he ran the light over every inch of the ceiling.
“How does it look?” she asked.
He
