It was the best, sweetest thing he could have said. But her body was too worked up, strung tight and aching. “I’m on fire, Kynan,” she whispered, angling her pelvis to rub against him. “I don’t want to wait.”
His tongue was an erotic stroke over her bottom lip. “I’ll give you an orgasm, if you want. Hell, I want that. I want to taste you everywhere,” he said, and she nearly came from his words alone. “But I’m not going to fuck you. This is a date, something we haven’t had. We’re working backward, and when we’re done with the date, and you’re done with your shift, we’re going to your place and I’m making love to you until dawn. Got it?”
Oh, yeah, she got it. Got it so well that when he dropped his hand between her legs and began to stroke, she shouted with an explosive release so hot she expected flames to erupt from her skin.
She clung to him, knowing that the world outside had gone insane and soon she’d be back to worrying about the future. But for this brief moment, she’d finally found happiness.
Fifteen
Serena woke with a killer headache, knifelike stabs of pain shooting through her skull. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was Josh, sitting in the dark, in a chair near her bed, face buried in his hands.
“Josh?”
His head snapped up and then he was at her bedside, kneeling next to her. “Serena. How do you feel?”
“What… what happened? Where am I?”
“The hotel room. I dimmed the lights so you could rest.” He carefully touched the backs of his fingers to her face. “You okay? Does your head hurt?”
“Like someone took a sledgehammer to it. I haven’t felt this way since…” She let her voice trail off, not wanting to tell him about her childhood misery. But this was weird. What was going on with her charm?
Groaning, she sat up, but Josh pushed her back and fluffed the pillow before letting her head rest on it. “You need to take it easy. You took a blow that would have brained a rhinobeast.”
“That’s not possible,” she said, though it was a stupid thing to say, because clearly, something had happened.
“Why not?”
“I just don’t remember, I guess.” It wasn’t a lie; she truly had no idea how she’d been injured.
“You don’t remember anything?” he asked, and she thought he sounded relieved.
Closing her eyes, she let herself drift to the last thing that stuck in her mind. “We were at Philae. There were noises.” An ache started between her eyes as a screeching sound rattled through her memories. “Demons attacked us.” Her heart pounded as though she were still there. Josh grasped her hand.
“I’m here. You’re safe now.”
But when she opened her eyes and saw the glint of fury in his gaze, she knew that she wasn’t safe at all. The memories flooded back, of Josh plowing through the creatures like a machete through tall grass, and how, of all of the dangerous things on the island, Josh had been the most deadly. She shivered and drew her hand away from his.
“Obviously, I’m not,” she snapped, unsure if she was talking about Josh or the fact that she’d been hurt twice now, and could be hurt again. Maybe even killed.
Crushing memories of her mother’s broken body on a cold slab in a hospital morgue squeezed away her breath. She’d snuck away from Val to see her mother one last time, her nine-year-old brain unable to process what death truly meant.
Until she’d seen her mother’s corpse.
Josh scrubbed a hand over his face, the hand that had just been holding her, caring for her. Abruptly, she felt bad for snapping at him when he was only trying to protect her.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured. “I’m not used to being injured. Guess I’m not a very good patient.”
“Ditto.” His hand continued to make long, tired passes over his eyes.
“Are you okay? You seem a little off.”
“Got some bad news from my brothers earlier. Nothing you should worry about.” He rose from the chair and started prowling around the room. “So, what do you remember after you got hurt?”
She sat up, wincing at the stabs of pain in her brain. “Not much. Everything went black.” She frowned. “Did you take me to a hospital?”
Josh wheeled around to stare at her. His eyes seemed to glow in the dark with an eerie luminescence. “No. Why?”
“I don’t know… I had these weird dreams. I was at some sort of scary hospital. It was dark, and there was this strange writing on the walls.” She shuddered. “And chains hanging from the ceiling.”
“That conk on the head messed with you,” he said. “But I brought you straight here. No hospitals.”
She shuddered again. Too much time spent in hospitals as a child had given her an intense hatred of them.
The smells, the sounds… everything about hospitals made her skin crawl. Little wonder that her dream had turned a hospital into a place of torture and horror. “It wasn’t all bad though. Right after that, I dreamed I was on a beach. Which is weird, because I’ve never really been a beach person.”
“I’ll have to remember that,” Josh muttered.