To be alive is to be vulnerable.
He blinked, banishing the thought. A moment later, the low-grade anxiety that had plagued him for weeks seeped into his consciousness.
But he couldn’t completely forget those wondrous seconds as he held a trembling, gasping Sophie Gable in his arms. He couldn’t stop himself from wanting to experience it all over again.
CHAPTER NINE
Sophie turned her head when Thomas nuzzled her jaw. She met his mouth and they shared a questing, delicious kiss. Strange, how he could be so demanding at times . . . volatile in his manner; and yet so tender and prizing at others.
She heard a soft, furtive sound in the woods behind them and opened her eyelids heavily. The combination of her post-climactic state, the contrast of the warm summer day and the cool, comfortable shade, and Thomas’s languorous, exploratory kiss had a similar effect on her as a good glass of wine or two. When she heard the scraping of brush and tree limbs again, she started slightly in Thomas’s hold. He sealed their kiss.
“Look,” she whispered.
She noticed the wariness that crept into his expression and tightened his muscles. His sudden tension eased when he turned and saw what crept up on them. The little red fox remained suspicious, however, as it stared at them from where it stood at the very edge of the woods with glassy, beady eyes.
“Be careful,” Thomas said when she made to leave his arms and head toward the fox.
“It’s okay. I leave food out for him sometimes. He knows me,” Sophie assured as she briskly pulled up her dress and retied the straps. She rubbed Thomas’s forearm in an “it’s okay” gesture, but he still seemed doubtful about releasing her from the circle of his arms.
“He’s just a little guy,” Sophie told him with a smile and upraised brows.
“Little guys have been known to have big teeth . . . and become rabid.”
She shook her head and stepped slowly toward the fox. Thomas watched her with a scowl on his face as he scooped up his swimming trunks from the grass.
“Guy isn’t rabid. His brothers and sisters and mother were all killed by some kind of predator last summer while I was here, probably a coyote,” Sophie murmured as she approached the fox, which appeared to be wavering between staying put and running. “I used to see the lot of them occasionally in the yard, or in the woods, while I was walking. Then suddenly there was just little Guy here, all alone. I got into the habit of setting food out for him here behind the boathouse. I call him Guy . . . hey, Guy,” she crooned as she neared him. She started to reach for him. The fox flinched before baring white, sharp teeth.
“Sophie, step back,” Thomas growled.
“It’s okay,” she soothed both males with whom she shared the clearing.
She crouched slowly, assuming a less threatening posture with the wary animal. From her new angle, she was able to see how the fox didn’t put any weight on its left front foot. “Aww, here’s the problem,” she sighed regretfully. “Your paw has been injured, huh, little Guy?”
She rose cautiously and began to back away.
“Sophie?” Thomas asked sharply when she started toward the house.
She spun around and faced him in a distracted fashion. He’d put the swim trunks back on and stood watching her with a bewildered expression on his handsome face.
“Oh . . . I’m sorry, Thomas. I need to go to get him some food and something to dri
nk. See how skinny he is? He can’t hunt with his paw injured like that. I’ll feed him first, and then try to figure out a way to get him to let me take a look at his paw. Some jerk set a trap in the woods, I’m guessing. It’s illegal, but people will be idiots.”
“You make a habit of this sort of thing, I guess?”
She shrugged and gave him an apologetic grin when she noticed his expression of amazement had morphed into humor.
“I was about to take you up to bed, you know.”
“Oh . . . you were?” She fumbled, caught off guard by his forthrightness, not to mention the appeal of his proposition. “This won’t take me long, I promise,” she said as she started to turn. “Oh, and Thomas?”
“Yeah?” He was now exchanging suspicious glances with Guy.
“You probably should give Guy some space. Male territory and all that. This patch of grass is where he always fed last summer.”
Thomas’s eyebrows shot up. He gave a sharp bark of male laughter that made Guy inch back toward the woods.
“Thomas—” she hissed