Something Wilder(58)

He reached back, pulling his soaked shirt off and using it to carefully clean her up. “Lily,” he said gently. “Breathe, honey. It’s okay. You’re safe.”

Giving in to the crash of emotions, she reached for him, pulling him down and over her. His torso landed on hers, solid and warm through her wet clothes, and she spread her hands across his bare back, stretching her fingers wide to cover as much of the broad expanse as she could. The strong bum-bum-bum of his heart pounded with reassuring vitality against her sternum. Lily wondered whether he could feel her heart, too. She wondered if he was remembering the first time they’d made love—Lily’s first time ever—and the way he’d collapsed on her afterward, just like this. That night his heart seemed like it was trying to drum its way out of his body and into hers.

It all could have ended back there in the river, and for what? Some money?

“What are we thinking?” she managed. “This is so dumb.”

Leo pulled back, passing his hand over her cheek, over her hair. “We’re thinking a shot at getting you your ranch back is worth a little wrestling with a river.”

In spite of herself, she coughed out a wry laugh. “For a second there, I really thought I was going to die.”

From the way he looked down at her, gaze moving over every one of her features, Lily could tell he’d thought the same thing. “I had to let you go once,” he told her. “You think I’m letting that happen again?”





Chapter Twenty


A LONG BEAT passed, Leo’s words echoing between them before he grimaced, pulling away.

“We should get you dry,” he murmured.

They climbed up onto the bank, and Leo immediately began to pull together sticks and twigs to build a fire. Lily wanted to help, but it felt like she’d been paralyzed. By his confession, by the near-death experience in the river, by the reality of their present circumstances. For a second time that day, adrenaline dumped a relieved deluge into her bloodstream, and she was suddenly shaking so hard she could barely take another step forward. She closed her eyes, clenching her jaw, trying to get her shit together when she felt Leo’s body move closer.

He held the sleeping bag from his bedroll between them, shielding her.

“Take off the rest of your clothes. They’ll need to dry overnight. You can wear my dry clothes.”

Lily stared at him over the top of the bag. “Leo, you don’t—”

“You’re shaking so hard you’re going to fall over. You know it’s going to get cold as soon as the sun drops.” He turned away, jaw tight. “I promise I won’t look.”

“I don’t care if you look.” Lily tugged her sopping shirt up and over her head, feeling weak and unsteady. Socks were peeled away to expose pale, waterlogged feet. After a brief hesitation and a glance up at him—he was still looking studiously away—she unlatched her bra and stepped out of her underwear.

“Okay,” she said quietly.

“Here.” With his eyes closed and face turned away, he moved to hand her the rolled-up bundle of his spare clothes. “Put those on.”

His neck was red, cheeks splotchy with heat. A vein in his neck pulsed.

“Okay,” she said again once she was dressed. “I’m decent.”

Leo stepped forward, draping the sleeping bag around her shoulders. And then he bent, picking up the pile of her wet clothing and his T-shirt, and moved several yards away to spread them across a flat stone still warm from the quickly setting sun. He pulled her tent and sleeping bag out of their straps, laying each out on warm rock surfaces. He lined up their hiking boots, dug into her bag, and showed her that although the beef jerky was wet, the phones, gun, and notebook—packed wisely in the middle of everything—were still safely dry inside the Ziploc bag.

“Thank God,” she said quietly.

“Yeah.”

Lily watched as he unselfconsciously stripped his pants and socks off and placed them beside everything else. She should have been more surprised by the sight of his skin, or by the fact that she was suddenly looking at so much of it. His broad shoulders, tapered waist, thick thighs were all bared to her; smooth and defined. Leo was more muscular in this grown-up body. But his body was still his, and looking at him now—especially with the panic wearing off—made a yawning ache grow inside her.

He left his boxers on as he gingerly stepped barefoot around their makeshift camp, going back to collecting branches, twigs, dried grass.

Once her legs were working again, she moved to his pack—the dry one—and pulled his tent free.

“We’ll have to share this, I guess,” she said.

“I’ll set it up.” Leo grinned at her from where he was crouching over the kindling, holding the flint. “Your job is to sit there and watch me.”

Heat flooded her cheeks and she tried to figure out if he was teasing her for getting mad at him last night or implying that it was a hardship somehow to have him doing a rugged mountain-man routine in nothing but a pair of wet black boxer briefs.

And then she decided she didn’t care. Lily settled down on a rock, allowing herself this tiny window to enjoy watching him. Carefully, he started a fire, surrounding it with a small ring of stones. Once it was going and he was satisfied it wouldn’t fizzle out, he sat across from her, holding his hands out to warm them.