Linda Howard - Prey

He turned his back and gave her some privacy while she pulled off the sweatpants and worked his thermal underwear back up her legs and hips, though to be honest she was already so close to conking out she wouldn’t have cared if he’d looked; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t put them on her the first time. Lying back on the mattress, she almost dozed off while he was rewrapping her ankle. Maybe she did actually go to sleep, because the next thing she knew he was sliding close against her and pulling the sleeping bag over them, enveloping them in a warm cocoon.

She snuggled back against him, oddly content. Feeling him so close to her was deeply comforting, something she desperately needed right now when she felt so off balance. Eventually everything would settle into place and she’d get a grip on things, but that time wasn’t now. For now, being warm and having him there was enough.

There were so many important things to think about, but a thought, an idea, would rise to the surface of her consciousness and then drift away, her mind too tired to hold on to it. She could actually feel sleep coming, feel herself sinking closer and closer to that delicious edge of unconsciousness, until it enveloped her as surely as his arms were wrapped around her.

The next time she woke, Angie had the feeling that several hours had passed, that she had finally, at last, gotten enough sleep to make a difference to her exhausted body. Outwardly nothing had changed; it was still raining, the light was still dim and gray, and they were still nestled under the sleeping bag. Somehow she knew, though, that it was now late afternoon. Dare must have slept, too, because if he’d been awake again and moving around, he hadn’t disturbed her, and she had to think he would have. She wasn’t used to sleeping with anyone, which had contributed to her restlessness, and she thought the same could probably be said about him.

He was still asleep now, his body hard and warm against hers, totally relaxed. His arm was heavy around her, his breath hot against the back of her neck, his chest rising and falling in a slow, deep rhythm. Feeling him there like that made her want to turn into his arms, press her face against his chest, and just inhale the heated scent of his skin; for a moment, she was still just sleepy enough that she almost did it, almost took that step, then reality slapped her in the face and with a small jerk she stopped.

Which, of course, woke him up. He took a deep breath and slowly exhaled, his arm tightening around her in what she would almost call a hug, if they were on hugging terms. The ridiculousness of the situation made her smile. They’d faced a life-or-death situation together, they’d slept cuddled as close to each other as they could get, and they weren’t on hugging terms? She knew one thing for certain: She would never, ever again view him as the enemy. She couldn’t; he wasn’t. He maybe never had been, but circumstance and her own lack of self-confidence had kept her from seeing him as he was. She didn’t think he’d ever be an easy man to get to know, his grumpy state was likely permanent, but at the center of him was a solid streak of steely willpower that kept him going when lesser men would have given up.

“You okay?” he muttered, his rough voice guttural with sleep, but he didn’t seem really interested in the answer because he nestled his cheek against the back of her head and relaxed again, as if he were going back to sleep. A moment later, though, she knew he wasn’t, because the hard-on he’d warned her not to bitch about began pushing against her butt.

She thought about bitching anyway, just to jerk his chain, but sex was another one of those areas where she wasn’t as confident as she’d like to be. In her experience, it was more trouble than it was worth: In exchange for suffering the uncertainty of exposing her emotions, as well as her less-than-perfect body and her less-than-perfect judgment, to a man who might or might not appreciate any of them, she would get to experience a climax brought about by a hand. Climax-by-penis was a fairy tale, as far as she was concerned, so why not just bypass the middle man, so to speak, and take care of her climaxes herself? The process was a lot neater, less complicated, and easy on the emotions.

Not that she was going to have sex with Dare Callahan. She didn’t want to go there and she couldn’t imagine why he would, either, except as an automatic kind of thing. She felt about as sexy as roadkill, and probably looked not much better. She couldn’t even feel flattered by his hard-on, because it was just a reaction to waking up, and had nothing to do with her, personally. He’d have one even if she wasn’t there.

So her options were that she could lie there and kind of enjoy feeling an erection poking at her even if she wasn’t the cause of it, or she could sort of casually shift away as if she hadn’t even noticed, pretend she was just waking up herself.

“Hey, don’t mind me,” he growled. “I’m just the guy with the hard-on poking at you, not somebody you really need to answer.”

And just like that her good intentions fell away, because nobody else had ever been able to jerk her chain the way Dare Callahan did. “Oh, is that what that is?” she cooed. “I thought it was a tube of Chapstick.”

He made a smothered kind of sound that might have been amusement, if he’d been the type of man who laughed. His big hand closed on her shoulder and he gently tugged her onto her back as he shifted to the side and propped himself on his elbow. Before she had an inkling what he might do, he gripped her hand and pressed it to the thick, hard ridge in his jeans. “Chapstick, my ass,” he said. There was a faint curve to his mouth that said he really might have laughed.

Angie froze, her mind going blank with shock at what he’d done, at suddenly finding herself in such uncharted territory she had no idea which way to go, or how she’d even got there. She turned as red as any teenager and jerked her hand away, stammering, “Wh-what’re you doing?” God, had he thought she was flirting ? She didn’t know how to flirt. She sucked at it, so she never tried.

“Correcting a misconception,” he said, as if her question actually needed an answer. “Two, as a matter of fact.”

If she hadn’t been so at sea, she wouldn’t have responded, wouldn’t have let curiosity get the better of her. “Two?” she blurted, completely off balance and almost panicked by the lightning speed with which the situation had altered.

“The first one, you can figure out on your own.” He actually gave a real smile, one that crinkled the corners of those vivid blue eyes, and if she’d been standing her knees would have gotten wobbly. Oh, thank God he didn’t smile all that often, she thought fervently, because the effect was lethal. “The second one, I’ll tell you about later.”

“Why not now?” Damn it! What was wrong with her? Why didn’t she just leave well enough alone, keep her mouth shut, and let the subject drop? Dare Callahan had just put her hand on his penis and she needed to stop thinking about him, divert him from thinking about it, and in general pretend it had never happened. She waved her hand as if to erase the words. “Never mind. It isn’t important.”

“That’s a matter of opinion, but it can wait.” He yawned and sat up, rotated his neck from side to side, stretched his arms over his head and rolled his shoulders, grimacing as ligaments popped. Getting her here had to have been a terrible effort for him, she thought guiltily. She had thanked him, but there was no way any words could repay him for what he’d done.

“Do you need to make another trip outside?” he asked as he twisted his neck from side to side, which made more popping noises.