Harm wasn’t about to budge without her. Immediately, though, he noticed that her perky questions and zesty smiles all faded once the men disappeared from sight. The clear water revealed her lithe, slim body. She wasn’t soft. Her calves were tight, molded from walking and exercise, her hips more bone than padding. A few sunbeams sneaked through the green canopy overhead, lighting on freckles and a skinny nose, on bare lips.
She looked nothing like any woman he’d ever loved.
But he looked at her, and wondered if he’d ever loved before.
“You wade right into trouble, don’t you?” he murmured.
“Yup. It was one of the things my foster mom taught me. Never avoid trouble if you can help it. It’s the old shark-in-the-water thing. If you don’t turn around and face it, you have no way of knowing if trouble’s on your tail.”
“Are you going to be able to make it back to the boat?”
“Maybe. In a bit.” She opened one eye. One sharp blue eye. “I’m not sick, Harm.”
“I know.”
“It just hurts. The bruise on the hip more than the head. But really, the rest of me is okay.”
“The rest of you is more than okay,” he corrected her.
There now. He got a smile. Softer than butter. Lustrous. But then it disappeared. “There’s a huge piece missing, Harm. Didn’t you hear it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your guys. Your problem. There’s this huge hole that doesn’t make sense. Everybody’s got a loyalty to this formula you all developed. Everybody values the team, what they were doing. Everybody could see success coming, personal and financial. There doesn’t seem to be a single visible gain for anyone to steal the formula, when everyone was already going to get rich, already going to get tons of lauds and credit. So what could possibly motivate the man to steal it?”
Harm was beginning to have his suspicions. But he still told Cate the frustrating truth. “I don’t know.”
“There has to be something we’re missing.”
“Yes.”
“It’s driving me nuts. Trying to figure it out.” She opened both her eyes then. “Maybe…Fiske died of natural causes. Maybe my fall was somehow accidental. Maybe things only look dire and dangerous and they really aren’t.” She frowned. “Harm, I totally realize this isn’t really my business or my problem. But I’m at least a fresh pair of eyes. And I didn’t know anyone before, so I can be objective. So I’m not trying to bug you, I really hoped I could bring something to your table, seriously help. Except…”
“Except that your mind’s spinning sideways?”
“Oh, man. You said it.”
“So how about if we see…if we can make your mind spin in a whole different way? A good way,” he promised. He valued everything she’d said, but it was too much. The more she hurtled into his problems, the deeper he hurtled into her character. He liked that foolhardy character of hers, but for a while, he wanted her to quit worrying. He wanted her to quit hurting.
He wanted to figure out how deep he was in with her.
He found out.
Damn fast, he found out.
Careful of her sore hip, even more careful of the lump on her head, he scooped her closer, using his arms as a cushion for her neck. And then he kissed her. Not softly. Not carefully. But with everything he had.
He took her mouth. Her tongue. Her breath.
A few other people had been enjoying the springs, but no one was in sight now. The only sounds were the splashing waterfalls, the whisper of leaves, the shallow intake of her breath, the beat of her heart…and his.
Somewhere, in the rush of water, the heat, the thick scent of pine, she turned liquid for him. Her limbs flowed over his, around his. Her lips turned slippery-soft, under his, with his.
An hour before, he thought she didn’t have enough clothes on. Now he realized she had way, way too many. Thankfully, they were soaked snug to her skin. It wasn’t as good as naked, but he could still feel her. Her bones, her small, lithe muscles, the cushion of breast and tummy.
She murmured…something in the language of music. A call, a whisper, a tune of longing.
Desire barreled through his pulse like a racehorse at the gate. He stroked the length of her tenderly, with precious care for where she could be sore or bruised…Yet still, he found nipple, found treasure beneath the waistband of her pants, hair that curled around his fingers, inviting him into her private nest.
She murmured again. This time the sound she made was more of a feline hiss. She stroked him too, but not with tenderness or care. Her fingers made prints, denting his back and shoulders, down his sides. Her hands, her mouth, enticed him to forget where they were, who they were, and when she suddenly twisted her full weight on top of him, he went down.
He surfaced almost immediately, sputtering, almost laughing…until he saw the reckless intent in her eyes. It was her turn to slide a hand down his torso, to dip into damp pants, to find the hot, hard core of him and squeeze. It wasn’t a nice squeeze. It wasn’t a sweet, shy squeeze. It was an I’m-gonna-have-you kind of squeeze.
“Cate. Think. You’re too sore,” he hissed.
“Oh, well,” she murmured.
“We’re in public.”
“I’m afraid that’s your problem. I told you not to start something the next time you didn’t intend to finish.” She was teasing. Until she wasn’t. Her hands suddenly framed his face. “Harm. I don’t know where we’re going. But I know darn well we’re moving.”
“You think you can count on me to say no?”
“I think I can count on you to come through for me. And I’m not sure if you know it. But you can trust me.”
That was the thing. Just the thing. He didn’t trust anyone, hadn’t in years, couldn’t remember if he ever had. Yet there was something in her, something different. And for the first time since hell froze over, he felt an unwilling yielding…a wanting to believe, a need to believe in trust again.
She spurred him all the more, because he knew she trusted no one, either.
It was exquisitely clear that she’d abandoned trust when the world crashed on her head as a child, and she’d never given life a chance to hurt her like that again. But she was giving that chance to him. Opening that damned scary door.
And suddenly he was kissing her again, the talking done, nothing else in his head or heart but her. Every instinct condensed into the most basic urge and surge-to take her. Own her. To be owned right back.
The water that had seemed so luxuriously sensual now felt constrictive. He couldn’t move fast in that liquid flow. Her clothes refused to easily peel off, and when he moved, they both seemed to embrace in a languid spin where she ended up under water, then he did, both of them laughing…then not.
He wanted her. Right then. Now. Yesterday. And once he plunged inside her, he wasn’t letting her go. Maybe ever.
“Yes,” she said, in a whisper that roared in his ears.
He was there. At the nest of her, the crest of her, in a tangle of legs and clothes and heat and fire. Ready to plunge. When he heard voices from below the hill. “
Darn hard to run when her head hurt and her side hurt and most of all, her heart hurt. Harm would have been deep inside her. Two seconds. That was all it would have taken. He was right
She’d locked eyes helplessly with Harm for all of a millisecond. Then they’d both surged from the water, gasped from the cold, grabbed clothes and started chugging down the hill. Harm kept waiting for her, trying to help her.
“Harm, don’t wait for me. I’ll get there. You just go see what’s wrong with Ivan.”
But he wouldn’t leave her. You’d think she needed a babysitter. The only thing she needed right then was a heart-sitter, Cate thought, because repercussions were starting to filter into her brain about what she’d done-or what she’d been about to do. No matter how much she wanted to straighten out some things with Harm, though,
