The car slowed. Sable unbuckled. The car stopped, and she was out of there.
She leaned into the open door and said, “Thanks! I guess I’ll see you when you get back?” But Rafe was already hopping out of the driver’s side.
She stood so fast she got a head rush. Or maybe it was the sight of him over the top of the car as he ambled around the bonnet. Swinging his keys around a finger. His chin lifted, breathing in the chill night air.
When his eyes met hers, the edge of his mouth kicked north and she found herself stuck.
He looked loose, as if something she’d said had eased his mind. While she felt all tight and clammy with You’re the best man I’ve ever known swimming about between her ears.
Remembering she was still standing with the car door open, she slammed it shut. And made to move towards the house.
“Sable,” Rafe said.
She gave him a quick glance but kept on walking. “You can head off. No werewolves here. They’d be too scared of my mother to come close.” Then she lost her footing and slipped on some damp leaves. He spun her towards him, an arm sliding behind her back, so that she wouldn’t fall.
And suddenly there she was. In his arms again. Her heart beat so loudly in her throat, surely he had to hear it.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” she said, trying to break the tension.
Only his hot gaze trailed slowly to her mouth. And he held her, in his big strong arms. It would take nothing at all to fist her hand in the front of his shirt, lift up onto her toes and kiss him.
It could be a goodbye kiss. A have-a-good-trip kiss.
Except he’d slide a hand into the hair at the back of her neck, the strands clinging to his fingers. His other arm slipping around her waist. And he’d kiss her right on back. Soft and sweet and slow, this time. A kiss full of longing and promise.
While she’d melt against him, her lips clinging to his, her body trembling.
Blooming slippery heat and swelling need. Till she could no longer feel the cold. Could no longer sense the night. Till she was drowning in him.
Some last thread of sanity had Sable curling her fingers into fists and looking down, her forehead making contact with his chest. There she breathed for a beat or two. For she would not put herself in a position fated to doom.
Once she could feel her feet again, she disentangled herself from his grip, and ducked through her mother’s broken front gate.
Waving over her shoulder, as if fearing even looking at Rafe again she’d jump into his arms, she said, “Thanks for the lift. And hearing me out. And the—” Don’t you dare thank him for the kiss. “Have a good time in Sydney!”
Then she all but jogged down the driveway and went to heave open the front door. Only to find it wouldn’t budge. For where there had been no lock, no handle, now there was both.
“Are you kidding me?” Sable muttered between gritted teeth.
Sable stomped down the steps, and—ignoring the dark shape standing not two metres away—she moved around the side of the house.
The ground beneath her boots squished, and slurped, sucking at her soles, while throwing up the occasional rock to attempt to twist her ankle. So long as she didn’t meet a spider web, a toad, a snake, she’d be okay.
One window, two, three, there. Sable slid her fingers under the thin frame of her bedroom window, the wood twisted and gnarled like arthritic fingers, groaning under her efforts, before lifting a good foot in one heave, then jamming. It had to be enough.
She tore off her huge coat and shoved it through the crack. Then she stuck her head inside, followed by her shoulders, then with a leap she pushed herself through the gap, only to find herself stuck.
For her backside had wedged. She was nearly ten years older than the last time she’d done this after all. And now she teetered like a human seesaw.
Feeling all the feels—frustrated, embarrassed, fragile—she closed her eyes and yelled into the darkness. Then she huffed out a breath and let herself hang, her hair falling over her face like a wavy curtain, her legs dangling out of the window.
“Here,” a deep voice murmured from behind her, close enough for her to squeak. “Let me help.”
And then Rafe’s hands were on Sable’s backside, square and firm, one on each butt cheek as he gave her a shove. She gripped the window frame under her hips and wriggled as she began to shift, incrementally at first, then—like water through a hole in a dam—in a big rush.
Sable slid over the small white desk under the window and landed in a heap on the rough rug on the floor.
“You okay?” the deep voice said, humour lighting the dark.
Sable lifted her head, peeled her hair out of her mouth and found Rafe heaving the window open as if it was nothing.
Then he leaned into the gap, his strong forearms resting on the sill. Long fingers gripping one wrist, the other hand dangling over the edge.
Her breath caught as she took a mental snapshot. Moonlight casting a glow around his shoulders, shadows bleeding into the shallows of the brawny tendons in his forearms, the divots outlining his work-roughened knuckles, the gap between his lips.
Looking part caveman, part Viking, part poet, he was still the most beautiful thing she’d ever photographed.
“Sable?” Mercy called from somewhere inside the house, snapping Sable out of her reverie. “That you screaming blue murder?”
“Ah, yep! In...my room!” she called, feeling as if she were in some kind of vortex between the present and the past as she flapped a hand at Rafe, urging him to disappear.
But he only grinned at her. Adding crinkles to the edges of his dark eyes, a flash of
