“I’m done pushing down the desire to kiss you senseless.” He moved his hand from her strap to cup her cheek, his thumb rubbing her bottom lip. “I’ve been doing that since I knocked you out and realized who you were.” He snorted. “Shoot. I’ve been forcing myself to not kiss you since I pretended to be your boyfriend for your sister’s wedding.”
“Oh.”
Oh? That’s all she could come up with? Apparently senseless was the correct term.
Well, if he was going to kiss her willy-nilly, she’d embrace that logic as her own. Wrapping her hands around both his backpack straps, she rose to her toes and put all the love blooming in her heart into her kiss. He smiled against her mouth, sending lightning to strike chaotically in her stomach. His hands cupped her cheeks and tipped her head for a better angle.
Boy howdy.
Could this man kiss or what?
“Okay.” He sucked in a breath and pulled away from her. “Maybe I need to change my original statement, because if we keep kissing whenever the desire hits, we aren’t ever going to leave this spot.”
“That’s the truth.” She bit her bottom lip and rocked back on her heels, letting his straps go.
“You can’t do that.”
Her forehead crinkled in confusion. “Do what?”
“Bite your lip like that.” He groaned and took a step away from her. “You do that, and I want to dive back in.”
She didn’t stifle her smile, her teeth unconsciously pulling on her lip.
“Seriously. Go.” He groaned again and pushed her into the clearing.
Her laugh floated up her chest and out. Joy saturated her cells, making her feel alive for the first time in months. Here she was, running for her life from gun-wielding maniacs, and yet she was happy. She’d take it, cherishing the feeling for as long as she could.
“Wonder what used to be out here?” Davis’s question jerked her back from her woolgathering.
She snickered at the word and scanned their surroundings. A long, skinny clearing edged a cliff that tapered down to a meadow. The descent where they’d emerged was too steep and high to climb down, so they’d work their way to the meadow. The tall willows told her whoever had chopped the trees down had done so several years, if not decades, before.
“Maybe it was an old mine.” She picked a game trail to follow through the thick, spindly willows. “I bet they had cleared it for exploratory purposes. It doesn’t seem wide enough and there aren’t any tailings for actual mining. Hopefully, this trail the animals left will lead us to water. I’m getting low.”
“Me too.”
She stepped over a crack in the earth. With earthquakes and thawing permafrost, a lot of the Alaskan ground constantly shifted. Made maintaining roads and houses a struggle.
“Might even find an old cabin or something we can camp in for the night,” Davis said from right behind her.
“That’d be nice.” She glanced at her watch, surprised it was already late in the evening.
The long summer days with endless light really messed with one’s sense of time. No wonder her feet weighed twenty pounds each. If they didn’t find a place to hole up soon, she might just collapse.
She jumped down from another crack, Davis’s thump chasing hers. The ground shifted beneath her feet. She stumbled backward, bumping into Davis, embarrassed that she was so tired she couldn’t even walk straight.
Chuckling, she turned to him. “Thanks for catch—”
The earth disappeared from under them. Her chuckle caught in her throat in a silent scream. She knocked her head against the ground as she fell. Stars exploded in front of her eyes before everything went black.