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light washed out his complexion but only seemed to make his dark eyes darker.
More piercing.
A prickly shiver of awareness ran up her spine, and she rested her head on
the back of the chair behind her and closed her eyes. His voice poured through
her like lava through a mountain crevice, thick, slow, and hot.
She sighed quietly. On top of everything else the face, the body, the sharp
mind he had to have a great voice, too.
The tension seeping out of her, she let go of the meaning of the words and
just listened to the rhythm and tone. He was a good teacher. He varied the
speed of his delivery and his pitch to hold his audience's attention. He
fielded questions with rapid-fire answers and occasionally shot back questions
of his own. At this point she wasn't surprised to realize that his voice was
as curiously familiar to her as everything else about him.
Sighing at the mystery she couldn't quite unravel, she quit trying to place
the voice and just listened. Maybe the guy was a long-lost relative or
something?
Unbidden, an image of her father formed in her mind. Through her six-year-old
eyes she watched him watching her as she picked a seashell out of the surf on
their last vacation together, a few months before Levi had been born. She
scrunched her toes in the wet sand as she pelted him with questions.
"Why does the inside of a shell sound like the ocean? What happens to the
animals that live inside when the shells come to the beach? Do seashells have
babies the way Mommy's going to have a baby? How many seashells are there in
the ocean?"
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With his jeans cuffed up around his ankles and the summer breeze ruffling his
hair, Daddy strolled down the beach hand in hand with her and patiently
answered every question. She could feel the waves break over her toes, hear
the raucous call of gulls overhead. Feel her little fingers snug in his big,
warm palm.
The memory was startling in its clarity and gut wrenching in the sense of
loss it created, knowing that it was the last summer of her life that she'd
felt completely safe. Her last summer of innocence before she'd learned the
truth about the world, and the monsters that roamed it.
Rachel startled at a touch on her arm. Her eyes jolted open.
Nathan Cross squatted next to her chair, his dark eyes both amused and
alluring. "You know, when my students fall asleep in my lectures, I make them
come to class in their jammies for a week."
Rachel scrubbed her face with the back of one hand, sat upright, and
swallowed hard. Heat rushed up her neck as she pictured her skimpy cotton
nightgown. "I I wasn't asleep."
"Mm-hmm." He tucked her collar down where one corner had turned up. She
gritted her teeth against the trail of fire his fingertips laid across the
sensitive skin at the back of her neck. "What are you doing here?" he
finished, seemingly oblivious to her reaction to him. Except for that little
glint of satisfaction in his eyes.
Or was that her imagination?
She groped for an answer to his question.What was she doing here ? Hadn't she
wondered the same thing herself just a few minutes ago?
The answer came to her in a gush of feminine awareness, of coiling arousal in
her core, as her discomfiture raised a rare smile in him. His teeth flashed at
her, straight and white, and his earthy scent bloomed in her nostrils, seeped
into her blood, reminding her of the smell of the clean, wet sand she'd
scrunched between her toes that summer at the beach with her dad.
She knew why she'd come here because she couldn't stay away. She was drawn to
him in a way she'd never been drawn to a man before.
She'd had lovers. She'd even fancied herself "in love" a time or two.
Comparing the attraction she felt toward those men to what she felt for Nathan
was like comparing pastel to neon.
Not that she was in love with Nathan Cross. She couldn't even claim it was a
simple case of lust.
What she felt was much more primitive. An instinctive need to see him, to
hear him, to taste him prowled low in her belly whenever they were apart. It
rumbled and roared and gnawed at her bones like some wild, half-starved beast
until all she could think about was raking her fingers through his flowing
black hair and rubbing her body up against his until sparks flew between them.
"Hello." He waved a hand in front of her face. "Are you sure you're awake?"
She realized he was staring at her bemusedly, and even that mild expression
made her womb quiver like a bowstring.
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"I Yes, I'm awake." Sitting up straighter, she dragged a hand through her
hair and righted her clothes. Heat climbed her neck.
What the hell was wrong with her?
She wasn't some randy teenager. She had a case to work a case she'd devoted
her life to, and she was closer now to solving it than she had ever been
before. She didn't have time to moon after her star witness.
But she also had questions. Questions she couldn't ignore much longer, like
why all of her senses seemed heightened when she was around him. Even now she
smelled the fumes of the city bus unloading outside, heard the whisper of
water pipes beneath the floor. She could almost taste the spearmint gum the
coed who'd sat next to her during the lecture and left ten minutes ago had
been popping.
And most of all, she wanted to know why she didn't feel alone with her own
thoughts when he was near. He was there, not just beside her, but in her mind,
like a distant echo.
But how?
Ignoring him for a moment, she relaxed her shoulders and opened her mind to
the intrusion. It was a frightening sensation, like letting a dangerous
stranger into the house late at night. Her natural instinct was to fight it,
but she forced her breathing to stay steady, and gazed into his eyes, as shiny
and impenetrable as polished obsidian. In their reflection, images of herself
formed. Naked and flushed with passion, she was in Nathan's arms, her back to
his chest. Their skin glistened with sweat and her hair hung in limp curls
over her shoulders. His swung like a curtain before his eyes as his big body
curved protectively, commandingly, around her. With his palm in the small of
her back, he bent her forward. Her spine arched. Her face pulled taut in deep
pleasure as she threw a heavy gaze over her shoulder at him. Her tongue traced
her lips in anticipation.
In the image his hips pistoned into her buttocks while his hands spanned her
waist, holding her close.
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