“From the campers?”
He nods.
“That explains the driving skills.”
He gives me a look. “I enjoy driving.”
His paddle strokes become hypnotic—stroke, stroke. I watch the tree canopy move by overhead. It’s strangely relaxing. I have to remind myself I’m being kidnapped. “It means a lot that you trusted me enough to tell me.”
“I don’t trust you at all,” he says. “You’re a reporter. You want to show the world I’m a savage.”
“God, Kiro, I’mnotlike those reporters. That’s not at all my interest.”
“It makes no difference now.”
“It makes a difference to me. Telling your story the way I would? It isn’t about you as a savage. It’s about you as a human. That’s what I’m interested in. I don’t make people into objects. That’s the opposite of what I do.”
He watches my lips. My words mean nothing to him. Just more lies, like everyone who’s lied to him. He points out a tall peak. He tells me how to spot where a bear hibernates.
“I could use all of this information to get away.”
A rich brown lock of hair falls over his slash of a cheekbone as he looks down at me. There’s a brutality to his beauty that sometimes renders me breathless. Like now, riding below him like this, on a cushion of packs between his legs. “You won’t get away,” he says casually.
Shivers go over me. I’m angry, of course. Offended. But I’m a little turned on, and it’s this fact that scares me the most.
I was turned on in the dressing room by his caveman treatment. Now he’s gazing down at me, lord and master of the wilderness, and I’m feeling that same heat. What is happening to me?
“Well, you’re wrong,” I say, mouth dry. “I’m so out of here.”
He stops paddling and smoothes my hair. It’s a tender movement at first; he seems to like to touch my hair almost as much as he likes to stare at my lips. After a while, he clenches his fist around it, as though suddenly remembering he should probably be harsh when I say such things. He jerks it, making me turn my face up to him. “I suggest you don’t try.”
He’s all savage fierceness on a dizzying background of blue, blue sky.
He slides his other hand up my exposed throat, then cups my chin, keeping my head turned up to him. Blood thrums through my jugular, and I know he’s feeling it with his fingers.
It’s like we’re communicating on some primal level.
Like he’s figured out about my caveman kink.
It’s so fucking wrong. But we’re drifting under the blue, blue sky, and he has his massive hand on my throat, and he’s vowed to care for me and protect me with his life.
It’s strangely powerful that he said that.
Kiro doesn’t lie.
It’s kind of amazing considering how people have lied to him and let him down, but Kiro won’t let me down. It’s a strange thing to think about your kidnapper.
My pulse drums under his huge hand…his huge hand that I don’t want him to move.
I wanted the savage story.
Now I’m in it.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kiro
Ilet goof her hair, but she doesn’t snap her head forward right away.