Out of This World

cash.

“Jackpot,” Rachel whispered, and put a hand to her head.

“What? What is it?”

“I feel weird.”

I think my heart stopped. “Headache? Piercing pain?”

She shook her head.

“Dizziness?” I set everything down, and strode toward her, which took all of two steps. Putting my hands on her arms, I waited until she looked up. “Talk to me.”

Her eyes shimmered brilliantly, and she shook her head. “I’m sorry. Not sick weird.”

“What then?”

“Hard to explain.”

“Try.”

Instead, she pulled me in for a hug and held on tightly. “An I-need-you weird.”

Need me. That should not have meant so much. She was scared and had no idea what she was saying.

“Am I making any sense at all?” she whispered.

“No.”

But Christ, she was. And unable to resist the pull of her see-all eyes or the tremor of her lush mouth, I compounded my errors and held onto her tightly.

“This is nice,” she whispered. “But by ‘need you,’ I mean naked.”

“Uh…”

She squeezed her eyes shut, and if I wasn’t mistaken, she blushed. “Have you ever noticed that it’s always me coming onto you?” she whispered.

“Is that right?”

“Yes,” she said very quietly, looking…embarrassed?

No. No, I didn’t want that. “Let’s fix that right now,” I said. Clearly I’d lost my mind, but she was right.

How was it that I’d never even attempted to make a move on the most beautiful woman in the world? Oh, that’s right, because we’d never been on the same plane before, much less both yearning and burning.

But there we were, on the same plane.

Yearning and burning…

I cupped her face and leaned in, watching her watch me as I touched my lips to hers, keeping it quiet and warm and intimate. And only when her eyes flickered did I kiss my way up her throat, making my way to the sensitive spot beneath her ear, then over her jaw, her scent and taste driving me wild, and by the time I got back to her mouth, she had her hands fisted in my hair and was helping.

“No, let me,” I whispered.

And she did.

Chapter 15

My name is Rachel, my name is Rachel…I had to keep repeating this to myself as Kellan kissed me halfway to orgasmic bliss, because I’d discovered that if I didn’t repeat my own name when he had his mouth on me, I could actually forget it.

That’s how good he kissed.

We needed to get out of the office, obviously, before we were discovered, but the feel of his lips brushing my earlobe, then the sensitive skin beneath it, locked me into this weird place. Our close proximity, the dark, the danger…it all gathered together, like a cloak of intimacy, and I turned and put my face into the crook of his neck.

How was it he always smelled so orgasmically good?

Finally he pulled back, eyes so hot they were flaming, and breathing hard enough that he could have generated his own electricity. “Damn it, you are distracting.” Then he pulled his hands from me and shoved them both into his pockets, turning away to stare glumly at the file cabinet.

“Do you really think…” I licked my lips and asked the question that had been haunting me. “Do you think this… animal magnetic attraction is just a part of the swap?”

He was quiet for a moment. “I think your attraction to me is a result of what happened to us, yes.” He stood there, all tall, long and edgy, broad shoulders hunched, the muscles of his back rigid, tension coming off him in waves.

I wanted to touch him, to turn him to face me, but something held me back. Maybe it was how quickly he assumed that what I felt for him wasn’t real.

So instead, I opened the laptop and hit the power button. When the thing booted up, Kellan, apparently unable to help himself, turned around and came to join me.

Just as he did, Marilee stuck her head in from the closet. “Sheee-it,” she muttered at the sight of us and what we were doing. “I should have known.”

“You should have told.”

She took in the open laptop. “I suppose you found the petty cash, too.”

“More than petty.”

Marilee lifted a shoulder. “Gert hated checkbooks and credit cards.”

“Good thing for you, as now paying you and Axel won’t be a problem.”

She looked insulted. “I wasn’t worried.” She sniffed. “Just so you know, Gert didn’t like people in her stuff.”

“Gertrude is gone,” I reminded her. “And I’m here now.”

“For the weekend.”

“For as long as I want.”

“So you’re going to stay here indefinitely?”

“What if I did?” I felt Kellan look at me in surprise, but I just kept my eyes on Marilee. “You have a problem with that?”

“Why would I?”

“You tell me.”

“It’s just that Gertrude was so sure you wouldn’t. That you’d go back to Los Angeles, because that’s who you are: an L.A. artist.”

“Maybe I’m more than that.”

“She said you weren’t.”

The Wood family of overachievers loved to make me the butt of their jokes, the odd duckling in their roost. Without my dad around, I was the only nonconformist, the artist. No career path, no real plan. I’d always smiled and taken it, but right now I didn’t feel like smiling. “Maybe Gertrude was wrong.”

Marilee glanced at the computer again. “Maybe you won’t be able to get in.”

“Why don’t you just save us some time and trouble, and tell us what it is we’re going to find?” Kellan said.

Marilee cut her eyes to him. “I think I hear Axel calling me.”

Of course she did.

When she was gone, Kel pulled the laptop toward him and began clicking on the keys. “It’s password- protected. Any guesses?”

I stared at the screen, and focused. “Bite me,” I said, startled at how fast the words came to me.

Kellan went still, only his gaze moving as it slid over my face, stopping at my mouth. “Excuse me?”

“It’s the password,” I said, and then laughed at the expression on his face. “Did you want me to bite you?”

“You have no idea.”

My body heated, but I pointed to the keyboard. “Bite me.”

His eyes positively smoldered as he leaned in close enough that I could see each individual dark, long eyelash