“You need to be in here with me!”
His lips quirk.
“For body heat. Come on—you need to be in here. It’s dangerous for you to be exposed to the air after being in that water.”
And I want him with me. I want to huddle together. To hold him. To care for him the way he cared for me.
He kneels in front of me. “I’m not like you.”
I don’t know what he means. Is it a warning? A sad fact? He smoothes my hair, gets some tangles out, and then he sets his fingers on my chin, light as butterflies under the towering pines.
How can a man so fierce be so tender?
It’s all just so surreal, us out here alone in this utterly wild place. And then a horrible thought comes to me. “My phone!”
He pulls away. This expression I can read—it’s unhappiness. He hates my phone. But it’s my only lifeline to…everything. Precisely why he hates it, I suppose.
“It’s in my jacket pocket. I have to…” I start to peel out of the sleeping bag. The chilly air stings.
He grabs my shoulders and forces me back down. “No.”
“I need it, I just need it. I need to know it works, that’s all.” Emotion seizes me, like a fist around my chest at the thought of losing it, this one link I have to my life. “If I could just see that it works…that’s all. If it got wet, I could set it out to drain. I just need to know.” Fuck, am I going to start crying about my phone?
“You no longer need your phone.”
“My life is on it. Pictures. My family. My whole…” Tears heat my eyes. I feel like an idiot, but it represents everything. Not just my past, but not giving up getting away from him. Not giving up who I am.
He holds the ends of the sleeping bag tight around me. “I’ll do it.”
“You will?”
His brow is furrowed. It seems his need to keep me from crying is stronger than his hatred of my phone. He stands. “In the pocket?”
“Yes.”
He retrieves the wet jacket.
“Carefully.”
He unzips the pocket and pulls out the baggies. One piece of my phone in each.
“Is there water?”
He holds them up. There’s a tiny bit of water in the bottom of one. “I should throw it in the fire.”
“Please. No.”
He regards it darkly. Of course he would’ve heard me talking to my editor. How could he not have? This is a man who knows everything that happens all around him. Fuck, he probably heard it every time I snapped a picture.
I wouldn’t blame him if he stomped on it and threw it into the fire. Considering what he went through with that pack of rabid reporters.
My phone is the thing I would use to destroy him. He knows it.
“Please?”
It’s such a sight, him naked with mud smeared on him like war paint. Hair tangled with it. His muscles huge, cock half-hard, or maybe that’s just the size of it. He’s brutally gorgeous—that’s the only way to put it. Holding this phone of mine, a greater foe than the wasps.
“At least don’t tip it anymore.”