Out of This World

“Shh,” I said again, and put my lips to his hip.

And then a few inches over to the right.

His head thunked back against the couch, his fingers tunneling into my hair, as if he couldn’t help himself. “You don’t have to-Jesus.”

I’d moved my mouth again.

“We need to get up.” His voice was weak now, a mere whisper.

“Hmm.” I loved the taste of him. “But you’re already up, Kel.”

“Funny.”

“I try.” My hair fell over my shoulder and stroked his belly, making him jump a little and his muscles quiver.

The power of that-making this long, rangy, leanly muscled man quiver-rushed through me. Suddenly I felt like a superhero, like I could do anything.

And what I wanted was to drive him right off the edge of sanity, the way he’d done me.

“Rach.”

“Right here.” I took my tongue on a little tour, and his fingers tightened in my hair. He said something completely unintelligible, the rough sound turning me on just as much as what I was doing to him did.

“You need to look out for-”

“We’re okay. I’ve got you,” I promised, trying to give him back some of the security he’d given me.

And as he went over, he held on to me, the both of us lost. Just as together we were found.

As simple and as terrifying as that.

We were still breathing like absused racehorses when he stroked a damp strand of hair from my cheek. “Every time we do that, it gets harder.”

I stood up and looked for my camisole. The last I’d seen it, it’d been sailing across the room. “Thank God for hard.”

“I don’t want to joke about this.”

Where the hell was my top? “What do you want?”

“You.”

I turned back to him. “You just had me.”

“You know what I mean.”

I did know. Just as I was beginning to know how deep my feelings for him really were, despite my hang- ups.

But I really liked how things were right now. The close friendship. The new benefits. Everything that made a good relationship, without the word “relationship” attached to it, so that nothing could be taken away.

Not one single thing.

But I looked into his gorgeous eyes, saw the wanting, the yearning, and felt my heart crack, because he didn’t-wouldn’t-understand.

Proving it, he stood up with a long sigh, his shirt wrinkled, pants opened, looking unfairly sexy.

As he’d been doing all his life, he shoved his fingers through his hair in lieu of a comb. “Look, next time, well, there shouldn’t be a next time.”

My stomach clenched. “So you’re saying what? You don’t want to see me anymore?”

“Not if we’re only going to play at this thing.”

“But-”

I broke off at the sudden pounding of a fist on the door. “Omigod.” I’d forgotten to keep looking!

“Here.” Kellan tossed me my pj bottoms. “Goddamnit, I knew it.”

“Really?” I hopped on one leg while shoving my other into the bottoms. “You knew it, huh?”

“Yes.”

“You knew we were going to come to the Twilight Zone and get hit by lightning, then locked in an attic by a couple of crazies whose favorite words are ‘the swap’ and ‘abilities.’”

He threw me my camisole, which had ended up on the floor. I caught it in the face. I pulled it away and scowled at him as he buttoned up his jeans and grabbed the gun.

“Hurry,” he said.

I opened my mouth, but he clapped his hand over it and pulled me flush to his body. The body that had just sent me into screaming ecstasy and back. “Shh.”

The pounding came again, making the door shudder.

Hell, the walls and the floor shuddered, too. And in spite of being mad and hurt, I allowed myself to cling to Kel.

“We know you’re in there!” yelled a terrifyingly gruff and angry voice. “Open up!”

Whoever it was, he was furious, and I somehow managed to focus on the door-

“Uh-oh,” I whispered.

“Yeah,” Kellan muttered. “Definitely uh-oh.”

“What do we do?”

“You open the fuck up, that’s what you do!” yelled the scary voice from the other side of the door. “Open now, or you’ll be sorry.”

Kellan tried to see in the dark. “We need a better place to hide.”

“You think?”

“Any more of those handy closets-that-aren’t-really-closets around?”

How he remained calm, while the hair on the back of my neck was standing straight up and my knees and teeth were knocking together, was beyond me. I searched the room and tried to focus.

But a gunshot rang in the night, shattering both the unnatural quiet and the bolt on the door, not to mention shaving a few years off my life.

Chapter 20

The shot-up door swung open to reveal the two men I’d seen stealing the cookies, both of them just as huge as I’d thought, and just as beefy, each carrying enough armor to free a third-world country from terrorism. Kellan could see all this as well thanks to the lantern that one of them wore on his head, the light in the center of his forehead like the eye of a cyclops.

I’m pretty sure my life passed before my eyes, but since I was also seeing gray spots and thought I might throw up, I really couldn’t be too sure of anything.

Kellan hadn’t revealed his gun. There wasn’t much point, with all those big bad-boy guns in our faces. He shoved me behind him, then managed to effortlessly hold me there despite my attempts otherwise.

Didn’t he know I cared about him every bit as much as he cared about me, even if I’d been a bit stingy with my feelings?

And I had been stingy. I hated that about myself, and I promised God and the saints, and anyone else who could read my thoughts, that I wasn’t going to hold back.

Not ever again.

“Who are you?” Kel demanded of the two men. He’d managed to get his jeans buttoned, but he still wore no shirt, no socks, no shoes-nothing to protect himself.

Who was this brave man standing between me and certain death, and why did he have to be brave now, when it was stupid to be so? “Kel-”

He somehow continued to keep me behind him in a way that prevented me from budging. But I could see, and what I did see was enough to turn my blood to ice.

The thugs wore old, ratty cargos, the khaki pants dirty and grimy, as if they’d never met a washing machine they liked. Their shirts had fared little better, both black T’s and as torn and disgusting as the pants. Their arms were littered with tattoos, markings that made no sense to me. The one with the light on his head wore long,