“Sorceress or… Wait, what?”
“I asked sorceress or thief,” he repeated nonchalantly. “You do play Dungeons and Dragons, don’t you?”
I paused for a moment, mouth open, throughly astounded. I couldn’t imagine what my face might’ve looked like.
“I used to, yeah. But how—”
“I saw you wearing your d20 shirt the other night, before you turned in.”
Oh.
My whole body flushed red with heat. Rather than resist, I welcomed it gratefully. He’d been watching me! Noticing me…
“Still, how would you know—”
“Like I said, I saw your shirt,” he said simply. “And I know you weren’t just wearing it to be some geek-chic fangirl, like other people.” He shook his head with a smirk. “Oh no, definitely not. You look like you play.”
Somehow I forced another laugh. “And you look like you don’t!”
“I know, I know,” he conceded. His smi
rk widened into a grin, one so devilishly beautiful it gave me goosebumps. “Everybody says that, of course. But just like them, you’d be wrong to judge.”
Shane, who’d gone left instead of right, was finally making his way back around. Jeremy elbowed me confidentially before he was in earshot.
“Warrior by the way,” he said, jerking a thumb at himself. He looked at me and shrugged. “Sometimes a paladin.”
I couldn’t believe it! He actually did play! And yet…
Yet I never would’ve guessed it. He was just too damned good looking! Too pretty.
And you’re not pretty?
I wanted to argue with the voice in my head. Tell it that no matter how pretty or ugly I thought myself, guys who looked like this couldn’t possibly recognize a twenty-sided die from a big red marble. But it was already too late. Shane was standing before us again, his beard partially iced over with glittering frost crystals.
“So what’s our next move?” he asked, blowing into his hands.
For a while there was silence, broken only by the sound of the wind. Luckily the storm was tucked safely outside, beyond the sanctity of the old hotel’s big walls.
“Night’s coming,” said Jeremy. He scratched at his sexy goatee. “It’s gonna get even colder. Our only choice is to bunker down. Wait for morning. Hope the storm blows itself out.”
Shane sighed. “And if it doesn’t?”
My stomach growled. I was famished! I didn’t even know it until just now. Standing there, I realized something else — I was thirsty, too. We’d been walking all day, sweating and freezing and exerting ourselves. But we hadn’t once stopped to drink anything. There was really nothing to drink, other than to stuff snow in our mouths.
“If it doesn’t,” said Jeremy, pointing to the fireplace with pure alpha confidence, “then we get that thing going and burn everything we can get our hands on.”
Eleven
MORGAN
I’d never dated a bad boy. Hell, I’d never even flirted with one.
And yet here I was in the dead of night, sandwiched between two of them. Snuggled contentedly between their lean, hard bodies — two of the strongest and most beautiful men I’d ever seen in my life — in an effort to keep from freezing, to stay alive.
Jeremy had been right about the bed. It was hard as a block of ice, and just about as comfortable. Still, it wasn’t the floor, and we had a whole nest of soft down sleeping bags between us and the frozen surface. Not to mention the four additional sleeping bags we’d zipped together, to create a cocoon of warmth and heat that felt orgasmically good after being so cold for so long.
“They’re a little moth-eaten but they’re warm,” Jeremy had told us. “And if we all slept together…”